Inside Wolff Olins’ global brand refresh of LG Electronics
Animated characters designed to bring life to the brand with fun dance moves feature in LG’s new identity, alongside an expressive face logo and a sector-defying serif typeface.
LG Electronics has unveiled its full brand identity designed by Wolff Olins which nods to its Korean heritage, following “a teaser” launch earlier this year (April 2023).
Wolff Olins was brought in to reinvent the whole digital, physical and social experience and better align it with LG’s character, according to Wolff Olins senior creative director Tom Carey. Instead of being perceived as “a traditional family brand that parents would buy their fridge from”, Carey says that LG wanted to “shift perceptions” and “put people first, not tech”.
This led to a redefining of LG’s values and philosophy, which now stands on three core pillars: uncompromising customer experience, human-centred innovation and warmth to power a smile. Carey reveals that designing a brand “full of personality” that could communicate with “the many audiences LG have to design for” was the biggest challenge”.
The studio commissioned South Korea-born illustrator Jungmin Ryu to create two new characters for the brand – Joy and Ryder – in a bid to showcase the brand’s “most expressive and fun side”, explains Carey. He describes Ryu’s style as “playful and optimistic”, adding that her attention to detail, “like the old Goldstar symbol on the character’s ring” – referring to one of two companies, along with Lucky Chemical, that merged to form Lucky-Goldstar in 1983 – and the clothing tags, was “amazing”.
London-based animation studio Animade was brought in to develop a set of dances moves for each character as well as the motion design that allows Joy to “fly around Time Square on a hoverboard as part of an anamorphic billboard” for the launch, says Carey.
The characters will also be used as social stickers alongside bespoke finger heart and hand heart gestures, which is “a nod to Korean culture”, according to Carey. He adds that we can expect to see more characters incorporated into the brand soon.
The soft launch revealed a newly animated and expressive logo, a custom serif font for the tagline and a refreshed red hue. The logo – designed to take on eight motion behaviours, from winking to spinning – looks to bring “personality, quirk and warmth” to the brand and even moves along to music, say Carey.
Type foundry F37 worked with the studio on the new custom serif tagline, which seeks to “bring something different to the traditional sans serif world of tech brands”, he explains, while the new and brighter red was chosen to add energy to LG.
Wolff Olins also created a promotional video showcasing the new identity, featuring audio developed by music production company Zelig Sound.
A very nice rebrand of LG from Wolff Olins! Loving the ‘face’ concept of the LG icon! In fact, now I think about it, the icon does looks like a face in a way. And the soundtrack in the video of the LG rebrand by Zelig is really good! Very unique to my ears.