Installations by Everyday Workshop for Wolff Olins
In the post-Mad Men world, success requires more than a big idea and a Madison Avenue campaign. Having come of age in the more innocent 1960s and faced the technological revolution head on, brand consultancy Wolff Olins knows this better than most. Its latest report, 'Game Changers', outlines the five characteristics today's businesses need to adopt in order to make strides. The title refers to those corporations - Apple, PayPal and Nike, to name a few - that invested in the five game-changing behaviours with outstanding results.
Helping their clients become game-changers is Wolff Olins' core business, so the London office recently underwent a vibrant makeover to reflect that. It hired the young ad and art-direction agency Everyday Workshop to create a number of in-house installations that, abstractly, convey the five key attributes to 21st-century success: 'purposeful', 'useful', 'experimental', 'boundaryless' and 'value-creative'.
The Day-Glo graphics - overseen by Everyday founder (and former Wallpaper* Bespoke art director) Andrew Wren - are definitively 21st century. One wall displays a 2D mural of overlapping spheres that literally burst out of the picture and hover over the office. This is meant to convey 'boundaryless-ness', the need for companies to shift from being insular to being 'constellations' (like Amazon, for example) that collaborate with would-be competitors for wider success.
'Experimental' is represented by a mural of multi-faceted pyramids overlooking lengths of neon tubing, laid in paths along the floor. Evolution, this is meant to communicate, depends on trial and error and acceptance of failure.
The new graphics make the five tenets impossible to avoid. Are they experimental? Absolutely? Are they purposeful? Useful? Boundaryless? Value-creative? Let's just say they carry the message that these are people who practice what they preach. And that, these days, is a game-changer.
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Based in London, Ellen Himelfarb travels widely for her reports on architecture and design. Her words appear in The Times, The Telegraph, The World of Interiors, and The Globe and Mail in her native Canada. She has worked with Wallpaper* since 2006.
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