The Jupiter Drawing Room (Cape Town) has been brought on board by Virgin to develop a conceptual approach and way forward for the for the global brand’s expression. The work was awarded after a four way pitch against three other international agencies. The Jupiter Drawing Room (Cape Town)’s design team has been much awarded. However, Virgin management stressed that the agency had not won the work purely on its credentials, but also on the innovative and highly collaborative approach to the brief that it proposed.

The work will span several months, culminating in new visual guidelines being developed by Jupiter, which the brand and their agencies world-wide can reference and implement across all of the Virgin companies.

For several months in the lead up to the brand guidelines being created, Virgin creative partners and employees from around the world will be participating in a crowd sourcing exercise where they contribute their submissions on their understanding of the brand, and how it manifests itself across touchpoints.

Kicking this process off, a handpicked team of global Virgin creatives flew into Cape Town to participate in a weekend-long creative boot camp, facilitated by Jupiter and Interactive Africa, organizers of Design Indaba. During this weekend they participated in a number of break-off sessions and workshops aimed at creating a collaborative vision for the identity for the brand.

As part of this process, five sensory experts were brought in to inspire and lead the creative process. The sensory experts are:

• Andrew Shoben (UK), creator of The Clockwork Forest and sound artist
• Sissel Tolaas (Berlin), founder of The Re_Search Lab for research on smell
• Joel Gethin Lewis (UK), creator of ’24 Hour Music’ and ‘Hello Cube’, who led the workshop on sight
• Marije Vogelzang (Netherlands), developer of experimental restaurants and creator of food rituals
• Willem Boshoff (SA), artist and druid who led the presentation on touch

To view a video of the bootcamp, click here.

Following the boot camp, Jupiter will spend the next few months working off the content and insights created by the ongoing collaborative process to develop the new approach for the Virgin brand across all markets and sub brands. The result will be a ‘living’ visual guideline, which will live online and which is constantly curated.

ENDS

Notes:

The Jupiter Drawing Room (Cape Town)’s design team has won multiple accolades, including in the last two years being ranked by D&AD as one of the top ten design agencies in the world; the second best performing agency at the One Show Design Awards; the most awarded design agency at the Loeries; and AdReview’s Design Agency of the Year.