BOSTON CONSULTING GROUP
3D Design system
In early 2021, the Brand and Creative Strategy team at BCG approached us at someform Studio with an exhilarating proposition: not only to delve into 3D imagery for BCG’s brand identity but also to revolutionize the utilization of our design systems for clients. The result of this exploration led to the first of its kind unique branding visuals that can create themselves.
Upon encountering our automation-driven 3D project #rachaelisnotreal (the world’s first fully automated 3D design influencer), BCG's creative team recognized an opportunity to enlist our expertise in a design endeavor that would potentially yield a groundbreaking application for BCG’s corporate branding. This partnership embodied the ideal collaboration we had been anticipating—a client who shares our visionary outlook on the future of AI and automation and is prepared to embrace such an innovative approach to design.
Together we set out to create an automated design system implemented into a sophisticated tool running on Unreal Engine 5. This tool generates unique, fully rendered, high resolution 3D commercial brand visuals within mere seconds.
Concept
But every journey starts with the first step, therefore we began our process with the development of a unique visual language. Starting with creating concepts, defining a visual style, aligning creative content and production of the final creative assets. All this aligned with BCG-specific purpose, principles, values as well as multiple areas of expertise. In the process of collaboration it was highly important for us to make sure that the BCG 3D world reflects their business as best as possible.
We developed a design language that speaks to the diversity of topics the company engages with, offers the flexibility to adapt to a variety of different usages, and holds the potential to scale at large for the future of the brand. In an extensive initial development phase, someform created three elaborate design systems that use abstract objects, each with their own meaning, to build large sculptures that represent BCGs expertise in a meaningful way.
For “Climate & Sustainability” we created sculptures that reflect on the fragility of our ecosystem and symbolize the challenge of balancing all factors in order to bring a sustainable positive change.
For “Digital & AI” we took inspiration from the beauty of programming languages and created floating stacks that appear from chaotic arrangements; symbolizing the complexity of the digital space and how BCG finds order within it, building the best solutions for their clients.
For “BCG Core Brand” we created minimalistic curated arrangements of just a few objects, selected from a chaotic cloud of options, to visualize the intellectual solutions that BCG offers to their clients, picking and combining the right pieces to find the right answer to the most important questions.
BCG Image Generator
And we didn’t stop there: This elaborate new image world became the foundation of a complex highly sophisticated automated design system that would enable our client to generate their own imagery on demand: The BCG Image Generator.
Each image generated is unique and created dynamically based on the design principles that were defined earlier in the process. The tool offers a variety of options for the user to choose from; such as selecting the design system, format, background colour and custom options per system. On top of that the user can still alter the camera and crop after the generation of the sculpture, thereby gaining a wide amount of control to achieve the desired image. Once the desired result is achieved, the image can be rendered with the built-in pathtracer at high resolutions and saved out as a PNG file for further use in our client’s marketing needs.
The final product of this design development process, the BCG Image Generator, is a standalone software based on Unreal Engine 5 that generates abstract 3D compositions within the defined design system with the click of a button. Currently the software supports three systems, each having its own custom design behavior. While the standard rendering process would take multiple hours per image, the “BCG Image Generator” produces unique, fully rendered, high resolution images in under a minute.
Future iterations of the tool could include expanded features, such as new visual objects, new behaviours, new compositions, color palettes, formats and a system for generating animations on the fly.
Standalone Application
GENERATED IMAGERY
Conceptual Deep Dive
The conceptual deep dive of this project elaborates further on the three concepts that have been created for BCG prior to the development of the software and give an insight into the conceptual thinking behind each of them.
During this inital design development phase, we created multiple assets, including a few animations. These assets were rendered using a traditional path tracer workflow and served as the visual benchmark for the generative application.
BCG Core Brand
The main visual system is the BCG Core Brand. This concept emphasizes the narrative of finding order in chaos - choosing the right components in a multitude of options to prepare a custom solution every time, which represents the core mission of BCG. It leverages all 3D objects combined, reflecting multiple areas of expertise, including Digital & AI and Climate & Sustainability.
The system comprises of two compositional approaches: The solution - a delicate combination of only a handful selected objects, packed together tightly to form an almost typographic statement; and the so-called cloud compositions - unorganized loose clusters of floating objects.
Digital Transformation
The foundational visual rule of the “Digital system” is the idea of stacking abstract three-dimensional objects in a loose floating array. The compositions as such interpret the BCG core theme of “transformation” by illustrating how a more chaotic loose bundle of objects is being organized into a sorted stack. Aesthetically it’s a reflection on the linear arrangement of programming languages,
which iterate through a stack of commands to achieve the desired result. We emphasized this connection further by implementing specific rules in the stack, e.g. controlled object repetition, brackets always appear in open and closed pairs “<>” and more. The generation of the stacks happens fully procedural and the amount of chaos in the stacks can be dialed in by the user manually.
Climate & Sustainability
“Climate & Sustainability” is all about finding the balance between societal impact and the delicate aspects of our natural world. Therefore the core design approach of this system consisted in finding balance points between abstract objects in order to construct a well-balanced but delicate sculpture. The variety of abstract objects used within “Climate & Sustainability”
represent both natural and human factors. The automated system is fully dynamic and balance points are evaluated at runtime based on the chosen objects. An alternative variation of the system emulates a circular visual arrangement that represents the circle of life, the circular economy and a holistic approach to sustainability.
Outlook
With the ever-growing demand for marketing material and the growing popularity of a variety of different platforms, each with their own specific needs in terms of formats and resolutions, it is essential to find a solution that can cater to all those requirements dynamically, without having to go through the labor-intensive manual process of creating every single image by hand.
An automated design system is exactly that solution: A custom-built software that uses modern rendering technology and the power of automation to create high resolution images within seconds, thereby giving our client the ability to create their own image content whenever needed.
My focus has always been on the design and conceptualization of visual systems, ideas and concepts. Once a design system is created and the rules which are the foundation of each composition are defined, those rules can be automated. Thereby we empower our clients to use the design systems created as a whole, rather than having to rely on just a few images. The true power of this solution lies in its scalability - once the groundwork of the software has been established, we can continuously expand its capabilites to build a dynamic generative application that can define and shape the visual appearance of a brand for years to come.
Credits
Client
BCG Global Brand and Design Team
Client Creative Director
Jan Dudzik
Design & Direction
someform Studio
Creative Team
Matthias Winckelmann, Helge Kiehl, Dominik Grejc, Santi Zoraidez, Chris Hoffmann, Julius Steinhauser, Bartosz Kaminski, Yannik Wenk
Producer
Lars Wagner