Client:
RTC
RTC is Romania’s market leader in office products distribution as well as business and corporate lifestyle.
Since 1994, RTC have been publishing a product catalogue yearly, to showcase its diverse range. As a long lasting tradition, every edition always has its distinct visual identity, that bleeds into all aspect of the company’s Marcom endeavours for the respective year.
In 2015, the brief was to create something new with regards to RTC’s previous concepts. After a long evaluation period. The conclusion was that mascots would serve as a proper vehicle to communicate RTC’s slogan - o zi buna la birou (a good day at the office).
When tasked with developing the mascots, the first thing I wanted to do was make them undisputedly unique to RTC, since mascots in the office products segment, aren’t all that uncommon.
When tasked with developing the mascots, the first thing I wanted to do was make them undisputedly unique to RTC, since mascots in the office products segment, aren’t all that uncommon.
Enter, Er, Te and Ce or Ar, Ti, Ci. Once figured out I wanted to give them distinct personality, in their adventures in using office products.
The initial idea was to make them the funny man, the straight man and the lazy/carefree man.
The catalogue identity system RTC’s developed works with the catalogue cover as a center piece, followed by 10 chapter artworks undelining product categories. This meant that in whichever way the mascots were to be used, situations had to be created to accommodate every chapter. This is a fortunate condition, because it always forces you to develop visuals that can be tied under a common idea. Being one of the main differences between graphic and concept.
However, we changed gears from this approach. Mainly because it was too focused on the mascots. when introducing a new idea for such a conservative audience as B2B it’s best you take it slow and steady.
So I changed focus to farmiliar elements: the producs and explicit human representation. For this to work I had to drop the mascot’s personalities, since they acted like more generic assistants, the human being the main actor.
The challenge was in balacing out the mascot’s importance, the human office assistant’s importance, the product’s importance, and the range diversity’s importance. When you have these many elements competing for attention and realestate, it can be very difficult to make a coherent composition. Still with enough patience and experimentation everything always works out.
The mascots’ final look went on to be the first visual element in RTC’s history that will persist for at least two years in a row.
At the beginning of 2016, RTC started a series of online presence initiatives, first of which was the online interactive version of the catalogue.
When designing the icon sets I made sure to explore distinct visual styles so we could experiment with a wide range of options.
The interface was a simple solution, but a solution that needed care in handeling.
The animation short that created for the launch of the new catalogue was animated traditionally with 2D frame by frame animation.
I chose this technique as opposed to 2D puppetry, to give it a more natural feel. I chose it instead of 3D animation due to time contraints.
One key aspect that should be ever-growing in the corporate environment is ease-of-use. The best way to complement this is by generating multimedia content.
