Default

Work

Monument – Studio Mega

Monument is a private resort and adventure community located in Eden Valley, Utah combining luxury hospitality with world-class terrain. We partnered with the Monument team to create a brand identity system and digital experience that celebrates the spirit of endless adventure.

Paying homage to Monument's land once being a sheep ranch, we created an icon that resembles a livestock brand. From our icon, we devised an adaptive monogram system that curates bespoke marks that help visualize Monument's plethora of outdoor experiences.

Inspired by the illustrations from vintage outdoor field manuals and nature guides, our illustrations are rooted in the rich history of Monument's land and passion for the outdoors. Like fireside stories and old tales, our illustrations exaggerate the history of Eden Valley to elevate the intrigue of the Monument experience.

We created an identity system that's rooted in Utah's Old West, exudes rugged luxury, and represents how the Monument community isn’t afraid to get their hands a little dirty.

We developed a custom digital experience for the resort that showcases the unique outdoor experiences Monument offers, supports membership and sales and provide a platform for current members to stay in the know on all activities, season updates and new features at the resort.

Monument

Aimed at a generation of irreverent optimists, Starry burst on the scene in early 2023 looking to become a challenger in the lemon-lime category. We worked with the Starry team at PepsiCo to build out the brand’s visual language into something energetic, offbeat, and not afraid to embrace the weird.

We then translated this visual language into a custom digital experience that could embrace the unconventional attitude of the brand and build a framework for how they show up on the rest of their digital channels.

Inspired by everything from Y2K to sport and comic cultures the brand captures the nostalgia for good feelings of the past and combines it with the excitement for the future. With crisp color, a suite of 3D objects, an expressive type system, and more, we worked with the Starry team to develop a visual system and photo direction that feels bold and fresh with a touch of whimsy to appeal to their younger generation of consumers.

Alongside their web presence we also helped the team extend this system to a variety of out of home experiences at launch, including activation during NBA All-Star Weekend.

Starry

IZZE is a sparkling beverage brand combining the bold flavor of juice with the exciting fizz of sparkling water. As part of their new expression, the IZZE team came to us looking to create a master suite of brand assets and develop how the updated brand is expressed, particularly in a digital space.

All about positive vibes, we created worlds in which we could capture authentic and joyful expression, the moments of uplift that you feel once you pop open an IZZE.

Vibrant swaths of color in combination with playful pops of bubbly graphics to create an energetic, uplifting experience throughout the brand, while charming and uplifting moments of motion push the idea of defying gravity and create a deeper, more airy space.

The result is a joyful expression that creates an engaging experience—one that hits on clear and concise product communication while embracing the new upbeat and playful brand qualities.

Sludge Studio Photography + Creative Production

Lisa Webster Executive Production Partner

Campfire Creative Post Production Partner

IZZE

Miko is a STEM robot toy with a quirky personality that educates and builds lasting friendships with kids. Like a best buddy, it understands and responds to a kid’s world, instilling feelings of companionship to build confidence and encouraging creative interactions that are individual to every kid.

While the toy was already popular in India, the Miko team and Mega collaborated to create a refreshed visual system and campaign in preparation for their first U.S. product launch.

The brand amplifies the expressive nature of Miko’s behaviors, told through a system of shape graphics that emulate its iconic, rounded form factor while also drawing inspiration from familiar shapes found within a kid’s environment. This system was used as collage and framing elements combined with photography to communicate nutritive growth and childhood play.

When positioning the brand, we made sure that Miko was perceived as a character to both parents and kids alike. We defined its personality by observing other familiar characters within kid's lives, taking inspiration from Wall-E and BB-8 to create a character that is 'smart', 'curious' and sometimes 'goofy'. Miko’s personality was our power to create meaningful connections with our audience.

Now that we had a personality and a brand, we needed to create a campaign strategy that showcased the beneficial experiences that Miko, kids, and parents can share beyond the school walls.

Miko

START.GG, formerly known as SMASH.GG, is a tournament platform that empowers esports communities to create, discover and engage in meaningful ways. Microsoft approached Studio Mega to design an identity that reflects the ever-growing and diversifying industry. We developed a dynamic, adaptive visual system that allows them to frame up unforgettable moments and represent every unique personality that makes up START.GG.

Made up of two opposing brackets, we created an icon that celebrates the high-stake competition of esports communities. We crafted a custom logotype based off the icon to create a cohesive logo that can flex across all branded applications.

You all provided lots of options/guidance, and the stakeholders from the various teams were all enthusiastic and positive about your responsiveness to feedback, your attention to detail and your quality of overall work. We can’t wait to share the new start.gg with the world!

START.GG

Neon Zebra is a non-alcoholic cocktail mixer created to remove the complexity of making your favorite classics and let you get back to making the most of your time together. Together with Pepsi, we brought to this new, boutique brand to life in a digital space by creating a distinct visual world to immerse users and layer vibe into function.

Knowing there were would be future flavors down the line, we developed a site architecture to easily expand as their offerings grow. A choose-your-own-adventure structure gives consumers the opportunity to move through each product story, letting them choose how they rediscover their favorites and create a unique journey to match their tastes.

Smooth scrolling parallax married with high impact assets create a digital space full of feeling and helps us say more with less.

More than just functional—simple, charming interactions and moments of delight are built in to keep users exploring and encouraging them to share their Neon Zebra experience with friends.

Neon Zebra

Microsoft Start is a personalized news feed that serves up the content you care about right to your devices. To launch this new product, Microsoft's Web Experience Collective (WXC), asked us to help refine their identity and expand the visual system to create the marketing and experiences that created continuity and spoke to the Start experience for customers.

A scalable identity system for an infinitely scalable product

Beyond helping refine the identity mark that was developed by the WXC team, we helped create a more scalable system in which to deliver it with a set of visual guidelines, tools and marketing templates that could highlight the many diverse experiences to be had with Start.

The result of our work with Microsoft was a scalable system that reflected the dynamic nature of the product experience and could adapt to any content, messaging and environment.

Microsoft Start

COR is an at-home spectroscopy system designed to track the subtle changes of your blood's composition in correlation to your lifestyle choices. We worked to create an informative online experience that educated our audience on how COR allows you to be on the offense of your health, and help visualize the relationship between personal habits and blood health through custom content.

Expanding off the identity work WEST created, we helped push the COR visual language into an educational and scalable digital system. By leveraging datasets and app UI elements, we developed a component system to visualize the relationship between lifestyle choices and blood health.

The flexible component system we built allows COR to effortlessly create and adjust content blocks to adapt to their evolving platform.

To help convey the variety of lifestyle factors that affect your blood's health, we art-directed and photographed custom content that visualizes the correlation of a person's routine and the COR system.

PERIOD. is a global non-profit organization whose goal is to end period poverty. The team works to accomplish this via three central pillars: providing necessary services like collecting and donating period products to those in need; educating the public on the realities and struggles of those experiencing period poverty; and advocating for legislative change by connecting and lobbying directly with policy makers globally.

We are proud to be creative strategic partners with the dedicated team at PERIOD. Recently we helped to refresh their visual identity and create a new digital experience for the organization, developing a new digital home that better served their strategic communication and fundraising goals as well as becoming a hub for content and resources for their global chapter network.

Awareness of the organization has grown exponentially in the past two years, with their rapid expansion to more than 1,000 global chapters. The new site needed to better communicate the mission as well as keep its global network informed on new efforts, policy updates and resources. To do that we created a guided, educational sequence upon entry to quickly introduce people to PERIOD — while at the same time streamlining the navigation for those more familiar that are coming back to the site to quickly access resources.

Given the amount of resources and information, we created a flexible system of nested menus designed for easy use and quick access.

Period Action Day is an event hosted by PERIOD to highlight the work of activists within the Menstrual Movement. This year they went virtual, so we helped them create an event microsite, as well as content to build energy on social towards the October 10th day-of.

Period

Samsung Next is an innovation group within Samsung dedicated to helping product builders and founders reach a global audience through investment and expertise. They approached us to help them tell their story through a completely revamped online experience that highlighted their global team and partners while emphasizing more human stories and editorial content.

The audience that Samsung Next serves is vast as is their global team, but their existing site didn’t allow for them to tell the human stories that brought what they did to life. They needed a site that reflected their ethos and spirit, while providing their team the guidelines and flexibility that allowed them to create and share custom generated stories and content.

Before we dove into site design, we helped create a more unique and humanized identity system that both fit in with the larger Samsung brand, while having just enough unique personality to be both distinct and scalable as their site grew over time.

We helped them develop a number of blogs and editorial sites to help them share their stories with the world. Samsung Next Component and Samsung Next Dispatch were two such sites that provided specialty insight and case studies aimed at helping builders and entrepreneurs get their product off the ground.

To give Samsung Next the most versatility while giving their global team the ability to create edit and share their stories we developed, along with our development partner 14four, a customized CMS (content management system) that provided thousands of unique templated features.

A project like this wouldn’t be possible without the close partnership and dedication of both our internal partners at Samsung Next, as well as our development partners at 14four.

Samsung Next

KEX began as a social hotel/hostel in a once-dead neighborhood in Reykjavik, born out of a passionate group of people and their desire to bring adventure, community, and a touch of irreverence to the hospitality industry. Looking to expand and evolve their brand for a US market, they came to us after selecting Portland to be their first outpost.

Starting with our foundational strategy and extending through both physical, printed, and digital touchpoints, we infused the new identity with many of the same things that makes KEX Iceland so strong—a sense of community and place, a love of collaboration, and an expectation of the unexpected.

Together with KEX teams from both Reykjavik and Portland, we worked to develop and build a scalable identity system that can evolve with KEX as they grow and expand beyond their Icelandic roots, moving the brand from a local treasure to an international fixture without sacrificing what they stand for.

With the framework of the original brand as a starting point, we worked to bring the same anchor to local history to the newest KEX identity. The evolved mark was created with American type references from several different eras – and then composed into a mark that feels distinct to a place and its history.

Taking cues from the interior design work of Halfdan Pederson and the bones of the building’s historic structure—over a hundred years old and one of the first mixed-use developments in Portland—we introduced a warm and rich textural palette that reflects the materiality and personality of the space.

Everything from our typeface choices to our photography treatment is an homage to the eclectic character of our city—capturing the people, places, and things that make our city and turning them into the textural backdrop of the brand itself.

A large part of the KEX experience is about possibilities — possibilities for creating moments that are fresh and exciting, that go off script and keep curiosity and adventure alive. We instilled this wherever possible throughout our brand collateral finding new and surprising ways to present more traditional hotel and hostel materials, whether through the use of an easy-going tone of voice or non-traditional formats and materials.

When crafting the online presence for KEX Portland, our goal was for it to feel just as rich and tangible as the space itself. The site is designed to be highly functional, and yet unconventional at the same time.

One of the more expressive elements of the site is the landing page, which we designed as an interactive experience that encourages the user to explore and discover at their own pace and direction. The result is something that captures and communicates the unique feeling and texture of the KEX experience.


Check it out for yourself at kexhotels.com

We knew from the beginning that conversions were super important, so we needed to make sure bookings were always just a click away. Our solution was a fun little sticky button thats always there and expands with a playful wink.

No nonsense functionality was a priority from the beginning. Our ever-present navigation drawer ensures people can explore without getting lost.

Mobile was always a priority given that a lot of travelers in the target audience would be booking on the fly. So the design challenge was to make sure the experience on mobile was just as functional – and expressive – as desktop.

It pushes the envelope on design and functionality and is a fresh approach that we think really captures the essence of the space and brand online.

Creative Partners:
Interior Design: Hálfdan (Dani) Pedersen
Photos of interior: Mikael Lundblad
Web development: 14four

KEX Social Hotel

Mike Kelley was one of the most influential and fearless artists of our time. Kelley’s work, spanning across a broad range of genres and style, was irreverent and subversive, yet deeply insightful. His projects challenged the American class structure, reinterpreted pop culture and sparked youthful rebellion.

In 2007 Kelley created the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts with a goal of providing financial support and endowments for innovative art projects. Today, MKFA continues to expand on his philanthropic vision through its annual Artists Project Grant initiative, while also fostering a deep understanding of Kelley’s life and creative achievements through educational initiatives.

The Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts approached Mega to refresh their identity and create a multifaceted digital destination that would provide an appropriate stage for Kelley’s dynamic work and legacy, while also serving as a platform for the Foundation and its philanthropic efforts.

Visitors to the MKFA site are a diverse group of enthusiasts, scholars, artists, and Foundation staff. More than just a showcase for the artist’s work, the site also serves as a functional arm of the Foundation itself, where students can learn about available grants, and where awardees of its MKFA Artists Project Grant Initiative are highlighted.

The digital experience is a dynamic platform that serves a wide range of users.

Adaptability and simplicity were emphasized during the creation of the MKFA identity system. The mark and the visual language needed to flex to serve a variety of communications, while remaining restrained enough that it could compliment the artist’s work without competing with it.

The toolkit utilizes a modular type system that allows for application across multiple digital and physical touchpoints, while bringing a bit of Mike Kelley’s irreverent vision into the mix in the form of an off-beat color palette and accent patterns.

Special thanks to Vanholtz.co: Web development.