“Working Together, Apart”: Reinventing Relationships Between Teams and Clients

Sagi Haviv explains how the rebranding of discovery+ and Panda Global logos helped his team to reinvent their working methods

In March 2020, when the pandemic hit, like everyone else, we were nervous about impact on our business. There were two main worries: one, that clients might be skittish about initiating or continuing design projects when the world was in crisis.

This worry very quickly lifted when we discovered that many companies were eager to use the downtime of the pandemic to continue and even to accelerate their engagement with us.

The second concern was more existential: working collaboratively and in person—both within our office and with our clients—has been at the core of our practice for decades.

Ever since Ivan Chermayeff and Tom Geismar founded our firm in 1957, the physical space of the office has been a place where strategic and artistic exchange, open discussions (sometimes arguments), and design critique happens.

This is how we know to create.

Facing the Challenges

Just as essential has been the close—even personal—relationship with our clients. The interviews, feedback and especially the presentation of identity design options in person have been essential steps for building trust that we’ve never compromised on.

We travel around the world just for two hours to present our designs to a CEO or a Board of Directors. That’s because looking at logos—which work through familiarity—for the first time can be a challenging exercise for any client. Being together in person in the same room, talking through strategy and explaining the reasons for our design decisions, is irreplaceable, we thought.

If we had to plan for this physical separation in advance, it might have been completely overwhelming, but we had no time to worry. Projects kept coming in, and we simply had to make it work.

It was no surprise that among all the clients we worked with in 2020, the companies that moved the most aggressively during the pandemic were those moving content online—both legacy brands and newcomers.

The Project: discovery+

The Discovery corporate group—with its origins in the early 80s and now encompassing gigantic brands like Oprah Winfrey’s OWN, the Food Network, Animal Planet, HGTV, Travel Channel, and Eurosport—wanted to move quickly into the streaming space with a new direct-to-consumer service, discovery+.

They needed a mark to help discovery+ become known as the overarching brand for its many familiar programs, as well as to propel the launch of the new service.

More than anything else, they needed to make an impact in this surging, highly competitive market, and signal to the world that they could compete as a digital brand.

The Project: Panda Global

On a completely different end of the entertainment field is the competitive esports team, Panda Global. Esports is now a massive commercial interest with in-person tournaments gathering audiences of thousands, social media feeds, live-game streams, and other online communications.

During the pandemic, the founders Alan Bunney and David Wu saw an opportunity to retool their branding in order to prepare for their next phase of expansion, which would bring this digital brand into more everyday life: vitamins, hardware, merchandise, even furniture.

More broadly, they wanted to use the downtime to grow up as a company and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with more established brands.

The Creative Process

The pandemic accelerated the branding process for both discovery+ and Panda Global—but they had opposite needs. The established client wanted to look like a digital brand. And the young digital client wanted to look like an established brand.

So how could we—with our team now dispersed around the globe between New York, Texas, China and South Korea—follow our creative process and deliver?

The fact that instead of being together, we were now staring at screens all day caused us headaches, as it did for everyone else, but we discovered that it also forced us to work with each team member more intimately. Because every meeting now had to be scheduled (there was no longer an opportunity to simply walk into someone’s cubicle), it took away spontaneity but increased the focus.

In our effort to quickly organize on Zoom, we established all-staff meetings (which we had never done in-person) that turned out to be more horizontal and participative. In these staff meetings, everyone would share their screens, present their work, and defend it, which has been a powerful incentive. I personally found that when sketching at home, I have been completely engulfed and undistracted.

This mode of work brought about an intensification of the creative process.

The Interaction With The Clients

The same intensity emerged with our clients. We had immediate access to important stakeholders for our interview process, and we could spontaneously get feedback — everyone is at home and seems more available!

However, we were still worried about that key moment when the client looks at our design solutions for the first time. Would they be able to connect to the work via Zoom?

To help Discovery break into the digital jungle, we designed a strong solid D combined with a circle, creating an independent new symbol — a pared-down reference to the historic Discovery identity, rendered with candy-colored dimensionality.

The boldness and vibrancy of the mark assures that it will be noticed in the crowded field, and the flamboyant rendition signals digital.

For the new Panda Global identity, we designed a geometric, modular, and charismatic symbol—the face of a panda in a double-outlined hexagon, with rectangular ears that run parallel to its rectangular eyes.

The original, abstract rendition is cool enough to appeal to a broad fanbase of gamers, but most importantly, appears strong and serious enough for a young company with big aspirations.

Reinventing The Presentation

Both designs met our standards, and we were proud to present them to the respective clients and make the case. Here too, just as we had to be nimble and reinvent our relationship with our team, our creative process, and our client interactions, we also had to go even further with our presentations. 

As much as we work to perfect our keynotes in ordinary times, under these circumstances, every detail meant even more: each application, the introduction of each concept, the story-telling, structure, rhythm, transitions—we even accounted for the color shifts over Zoom.

Our presentation to David Zaslav, the CEO of Discovery, opened with a competitive board showing the impact of the new symbol compared to the other streaming brands.

In an industry that’s often highly matrixed and deliberative in its decision-making, we were surprised that he approved it immediately.

It was then launched with lightening speed on December 1.

One day later, Panda Global launched its new identity exclusively on social media channels amid a barrage of online events and announcements.

The result was an overwhelmingly positive response from an audience that can sometimes be grumpy about a new logo.

Everything we had to learn and invent throughout the pandemic will stay with us and transform our practice. We are more nimble, we have more options and more ways to be connected, and we are less tied to geography or to physicality.

However, we also look forward to spending time around the coffee machine and to taking the elevator together when leaving the office at the end of the day.

Article written by Sagi Haviv (@sagi), a New York-based graphic designer and a partner in the design firm Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv. Among the over 60 identity programs he has designed are the logos for the US Open Tennis Championships, Discovery+, Harvard University Press, Conservation International, and LA Reid’s Hitco Entertainment. A go-to expert on the process of effective logo design, Sagi contributes regularly to Bloomberg Businessweek, PBS, Fast Company, and NBC’s Meet The Press.

He speaks about logo design around the world, including for TEDx, the AIGA, the HOW Design Conference, the Brand New Conference, Princeton University, the Onassis Foundation, the American Advertising Federation, and Columbia Business School, amongst many others. Sagi has served as Jury Chair for the Clio Awards and the Art Directors Club and Jury President for the D&AD Awards.

At Domestika he teaches the course Logo Design: From Concept to Presentation. You can follow Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv on Instagram.

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