Going green with gouache

Thermo Fisher Scientific was looking to revamp its Greener Products campaign, and approached Bonfire to help with a refreshed look and feel. We created a custom campaign look centered around hand-painted gouache circles that felt unique, recognizable, and still squarely within the company brand. 

Problem / solved

1. Designing the idea, defining the execution

• Our task was to create and define the visual system, while another team would implement the asset execution. 
• Therefore, our end product was a campaign visuals guide that clearly explained the logic with clear examples to demonstrate the system.

2. Find a look that screams “sustainability” while still feeling Thermo Fisher Scientific

• The Thermo Fisher Scientific Greener Product creative needed to be recognizable, both on its own and when used in combination with other campaign creative. 
• To accomplish this, we designed the campaign look around hand-painted gouache circles. This approach fit right into the Thermo Fisher Scientific brand, while also bringing in a distinctive and instantly recognizable look through the texture, color, and element of chance.

3. Whip up sustainability-specific icons

• The Greener Products campaign has five “pillars,” or practical ways they accomplish their large-scale goals. We developed an icon for each pillar and designated a paint swatch for each. 
• We largely created the new Greener Products icons by combining pieces of icons already in the brand. This way, we could build off ideas already established in the brand and could ensure that the new icons would match the rest of the brand icon library.

4. Make a mark that works at any scale

• In addition to the primary “Greener by Design” campaign mark, this campaign also needed options for how to indicate a product as a "greener product,” even at much smaller scales. 
• We created a scalable mark system centered around the green leaf icon, and provided variations all the way down to a green-leaf-icon-only indicator that could be used for search results or product packaging.

5. Organize the campaign visuals into tiers

• This campaign had three tiers: overarching (the main campaign visuals), secondary (the five pillars), and tertiary (product level or external campaigns).  
• We created and defined a system that dictates what visual elements should be used on each tier. For example, the overarching tier leads with the red “globe” visual, while the pillars use a specific swatch color in combination with the pillar icon.