OMEN FOR HP
DEMOCRATISING THE GAME. CREATING THE ICONIC.
An entire industry had built its identity around a player that no longer existed. OMEN was the opportunity to be the first to notice, and the first to do something about it.
32% of PC gamers are female. The 45 to 65 age group is the fastest growing segment of players. More 13 to 15-year-old girls watch and participate in esports than boys of the same age. The average gamer is 35 years old. Yet in 2019 the PC gaming market looked like a teenage boy's sketchbook of aggression, every brand competing to be louder, more extreme, more aggressively masculine than the last. The industry had confused its loudest customers with its most representative ones, and built an entire visual language around that mistake.
OMEN was HP's premium gaming brand, technically exceptional and aesthetically indistinguishable from the rest. The brief was to change that.
I led a new design language that governed product, brand and communications simultaneously. Not sequentially, not separately, but as a single integrated act of creation. Brand thinking shaped industrial design. Product innovation fed directly back into brand identity. A coherence that category competitors, who briefed design, brand and marketing to different agencies with different research and different agendas, simply could not match.
The centrepiece was The Possible, a reimagining of the original Voodoo diamond into something that could be whatever the player needed it to be. Simple enough to own at 50 pixels in an image search. Sophisticated enough to be integrated into the hardware itself through ultra-thin LED screens, creating personalisation and human-machine interactions that no competitor had considered.
In a market defined by excess, OMEN became the brand that understood restraint was the most radical choice available.
AN INFINITELY ADAPTABLE IDENTITY REFLECTING THE CHARACTER OF THE PLAYER AND THE GAME.
IN THESE E-SPORTS EXAMPLES, COMMS CHAMPIONS THE PLAYERS AS THE NEW ATHLETES.
"The new diamond Omen logo and branding are extraordinarily strong and uniquely identifiable from the competition.
The diamond preserves the shape of the old logo, while making it seem cleaner and more refined - the theme of the whole system. The systems look better aesthetically and are more customizable and user-upgradeable—all while still delivering exceptional value.
I am genuinely impressed with what I’m seeing from HP in the new Omen line of desktops."
FORBES
MAY 2020
BRAND THAT MOVES BEYOND SIMPLE ADORNMENT.
BRAND, PRODUCT AND EXPERIENCE DEVELOPED IN UNISON.
