Shopify

2021

In the lead-up to their Annual Summit in 2021, Shopify asked us to create an illustration system based on their brand guidelines. We then animated almost two dozen of those illos in a sweet cinemagraph style to help tell the Shopify story in a brand film as the Iceman on the cake.

Ice to see you.

Shopify had a very specific story they wanted to bring to life. Otzi, “The Iceman,” was a trader who lived in the Alps a cool 5,000 years ago. Shopify used his story to draw a parallel with their mission and the importance of trading to humankind and our development as a species.

To develop the illustration system, Shopify provided us with some brand assets — cool, noisy gradients that served as a jumping off point. We built in a stylistic range that allowed for abstracted shapes & gradients as well as representational work.

One of the challenges of this job was crafting the visuals to a film without a final script. So we created a modular system and twenty cinemagraph loops to build some flexibility into the storytelling and allow it to work well in different edits. The end result was hot enough to thaw Otzi out. He’s now on the loose. And he does have his scrotum, despite previous reporting to the contrary.