We had no guest speaker this week so instead we were asked to blog about one of 3 companies. I choose Troika, a TV-Station graphic design company.
Troika Design Group are an american company that create’s tv graphics (Station Idents) for Satellite/Cable and Aerial TV.
They start off by looking at how other companies do TV branding and then they look at the project at hand visually.
Troika have recently designed the new look branding/network packages for US Stations, Fox, ABC. Oxygen, Starz, ESPN, Sportscentre, TruTV, – ABC, Fox and ESPN are very well known TV stations around the world as well as in America so they are a serious design group to have these stations as clients.
Troika are located in Hollywood, they have about 25 employees – they have designers, animaters, producers, creative directors and editors. Each type of employee is grouped together in same rooms seperate from the other groups so they can work together and share ideas – It’s all about teamwork working together on projects. They work together with their own staff but also rely on freelancers from the creative community. All projects have an executive producer, a producer and a co-ordinator assigned to them. They work with the client to make sure the project is being handled in an organised fashion. Working in Troika is alot of fun but at same time they are a very professional, well managed company.
We see a tour of the Troika buildings, its 3 buildings joined together, one used to be a restaurant and the other used to be a doctors studio, now Trokia own it all and the 3 buildings are interlinked. Everyone works in a creative environment with the grouping of each type of employee into their own rooms. Every computer workstation can be accessed by each employee to share ideas. The employee’s do alot of storyboarding with projects and they pin these to the walls around where they work so other employee’s can take a look and see how projects evolve.
Troika have a demo reel where they show the outside world/clients all their work, it keeps everyone upto-date with what Troika are working on. Here is one of their demo reels.
Clients pay Troika for a process in trying to understand what their needs are, what they want to communicate with their audience. Troika go through steps with their clients to help gain an understanding of what the project involves. They manage their projects by turning them into segments that are manageable. After this they go into the design phase (conceptual) and the Production Phase. Both the creative team and the client gets to understand the project much better by dividing everything into their own segments. This makes the end result of a project much more achieveable and delivers a better product.
Troika like to maintain a creative culture within the company – they have a meeting every few weeks were artists may learn from animators etc, they run class’s for the various applications they use so everyone in the company can get a good creative undertanding at how all the applications work – knowing what each team member can achieve.
In Troika its great to watch individuals come together and work as a team, all brainstorming out ideas. There is alot of energy and freedom around the work environment where employee’s are allowed to play their own music while they work but not too loud to interfer with other employee’s. The atmosphere within the company is casual but becomes serious in a conference room when it needs’s to be serious. They feel that this creative, casual and fun environment brings out the best in a persons creativity rather than making the workplace all sterile and strict. Everyone helps each other within the company and because of this each employee improves their creative quality’s and is able to do stuff that they could not have imagined a year ago.
Troika’s main business is tv network rebrands and network launchs. Many of these projects can take as long as a year to develop. They get through these projects using a collabrative environment where they all get together and start off by brainstorming ideas. During production week’s they may require extra people and free up others to get the work done. The creative directors all have very different skillsets from very different backgrounds, they all reach out to each other to solve problems, they challenge and advice each other to get the best possible result out of the projects they are working on. The designers work this way too, they are all seated together where they share ideas even if they are not all working on the same project. The animators are also seated together in a couple of different areas, this idea of people working collabratively is totally fostered in Troika, it bring’s out the best in their employee’s through creativity and teamwork.
Recently the CW was a rebranding of 2 former tvnetworks and Troika won the pitch to develop their branding and network tv idents. This was a very large project and involved everyone in Troika. They had a ‘warroom’ where they put up their ideas, suggestions, storyboards all over the walls of the room, they could move ideas interactively and bring the client into the room, the client could point at ideas on the wall and say what they liked and what they didnt like moving different ideas from category to category. The size of the projects support this mutual support and involvement from everyone in the company as well as the client themselves.
What is Network Branding?
Branding is the connection made between the TV Channel and its audience. Your asking the audience to invite you into their home. They recently rebranded the Fox Network in USA and they also did Fox’s three previous brandings. They have had a great partnership with Fox and this is really important, a big trust level is there. ‘So Fox’ was the new platform that Troika worked on for Fox.
So Fox defines all of Fox’s branding and TV Shows. They last rebanding was very 3D intensive with millions of effects and particle effects stacked on top of each other.
For the latest branding for Fox, Troika wanted to keep it close and personal, showing close up shots of the tv shows stars/characters. This is a very different approach to the previous branding, the closeup shots have alot of lighting and contast to make it visually striking and unique. This images are stuck on white backgrounds with strong font colours for the text. These graphics are used in all of Fox’s Tv Programme adverts and ‘opening nights’ where Fox introduce the programming for the night. At Troika they treat each project very differently to create a very unique look for each of their clients.
Projects at Troika are getting bigger and bigger and their Starz project is a good example of one of their year long projects coming up with brand themes. Starz is a delivery network for movies, Troika wanted to make it a much more emotional brand to connect it with it’s audience. Troika started off by thinking visually using conceptual moodboards. It took 6 months to establish the direction and look the client was after.
They reworked the Starz Logo which is now much simpler to use in media, the Logo is based on light and the beauty that light brings everyday. They spent alot of time trying to show this light, how to make it unique. They used shapes and lens flairs to represent forms of light making the light look natural.
Oxygen was a fun project which started as a tight deadline of a few weeks to get the pitch together. This also started off with moodboards and clipping ideas to the walls around the building. They initially had 3 concepts, Oxygen is a network for women. There was alot of product design involved, working with 3D animators to help come up with the objects used in the design. It used objects that would represent women as a collection of graphics that helped bring the branding together.
Techniques
Troika find out who is best suited to work on each project, making sure that person use’s the best of their abilitys. Troika solves each project from a unique point of view, that is what marketing branding is all about. It is important that their studio has a team of wide ranging diverse talents offering different techniques and skillsets, these can be blended and merged together. They try to avoid repetition in projectsStoryboards and ideas are mixed around untill the correct sequence of events in a theme evolves. Working outside of the box is something that happens alot in Troika. Broadcast design brings a wide set of skills, learning how music and sound works together with the graphic design, typography, colour. There is also a large understanding of live action, animation, character movement is very important. Alot of employee’s have a good command of many different techniques. This helps in working with another employee in the company who is an expert of a specific area.
In Troika applications used include the Full Adobe software range including After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator. They have Maya, Cinema 4D, Keynote etc. Everything is uptodate, everyone has the applications they need to get the job done.
Tv Broadcasting is something that constantly evolves and changes everyday. Troika meet up with clients to check out their facilities, to see what software they have and Troika take the clients technical requirements into consideration when designing. The technology of TV is changing all the time and designs have to change all the time to reflect this. Troika also build styleguides which can be tedious to setup, it is a summary of the entire project from concept, writing, typefaces, colours. Its a method other companies use to look at projects that Troika have completed and style them they way Troika intended.
Shooting Live Action
This involves having a real life human element to their identities especially on bigger campaigns with big talent shoots. It can be small shoot setup at the office to greenscreens, location/environmental shoots.
Troika have a large range of books in their building which helps them with choosing colours, fonts, graphics, photography, references etc. For inspiration they have alot of books and objects to help with their creativity when coming up with concepts for projects.
My Thoughts
TV Idents is something I have always been interested in. This started back in the early 90s when I had Sky back in it’s very early days. Back then Sky’s branding was very exciting and made you want the channel compared to the very dull branding on RTE, ITV and BBC back in those days. Other European channels that we had at the time included MTV Europe, Filmnet, RTL Veronica all had very strong branding with fantastic graphic design, some use of 3D and soundtracks to go along with the montages. I wanted to know how these were put together but at the time there was no Internet! Now many years later things have changed alot, branding has become really good across all channels with BBC, RTE, Canal+ and especially the american TV networks all showcasting fantastic often award winning design/branding/logos. The Video on Troika was a fantastic insight into what Life might be like in a cool, open-plan, casual design studio. Altho it looks like there would be some very stressfull days, I love the way their building does not look all corporate and business like. I think this more casual approach to a graphic design business would inspire more creativity amongst the staff rather than having that ‘accountants office look and feel’. I really liked the idea that storyboards/wireframes and mock-ups are stuck on walls for all to see in a large room where the creative director and client can go through stuff at early stages with a mix and match approach leading to a much better design in the end.
