Hewlett-Packard
Creative Director - SYPartners
Client: Hewlett-Packard
2000 - 2003
While at SYPartners, I was deeply involved in the brand transformation of HP after its historic merger with Compaq. At the time, SYPartners was the brand agency of record, and this was a multi-year engagement that focused on an entirely new brand positioning and re-design of HP’s existing visual language. Working with HP’s internal brand and communications team, our role was to design, codify and lead a new visual language for HP. Working closely with several vendors and design partners, our team focused on key consumer touchpoints that we believed would have the greatest impact on both customers and HP’s business: the retail experience, product packaging, photography, consumer and business collateral materials, tradeshows, and brand guidelines.
Retail Strategy
We saw the retail environment as an excellent opportunity to help educate consumers about the new HP, shifting their mindsets away from HP being a feature-based, single-product company to an experiential-based company that makes technology easy and fun. So we developed a retail framework intended to inspire, build confidence and enable people to do the things they want to do better, making technology work for them instead of the other way around.
Packaging and Photography
Key to making HP feel more human and approachable was to modernize its approach to photography. Moving away from complicated imagery of people posing with products or in staged settings, we chose to focus on photos that best depicted the feeling one gets from using the product. Lifestyle photography was intentional and shot in a natural environment, often with real customers. Similarly, product photography was honest and deliberate, shot from a single-point perspective emphasizing the product itself, detail, or on-screen feature. Additionally, we developed an approach whereby images of people (consumers and customers) could be “paired” with one or more product images to tell a story, providing regional flexibility and cost savings. To populate HP’s internal image library, we hired several photographers to shoot consumers and enterprise customers in their natural environments and helped the internal HP brand team purge less relevant images.
Drag. Drop. Datasheet!
With HP products being sold in nearly every country worldwide, we found that local retail-level consistency needed to be improved, so we built a set of drag-and-drop datasheet templates to enable local product managers and in-store personnel to create and print product datasheets quickly. The templates could accommodate almost any need—from single to multi-product comparisons to performance charts— and worked in any order or configuration due to a component-based design system. Additionally, we deployed a similar approach to consumer and enterprise collateral pieces, where more comprehensive template files could be downloaded by local agencies and used as a starting point in conjunction with brand guidelines.
