Device Audit + Refresh

The Situation

Device Brand Studios made the shift to CG product rendering in late 2019. This gave DBS infinite flexibility around device product photography.

Amazon asks that we insist on the highest standards, and not rest on “what’s working”. This audit was designed to see if we could raise the creative bar across all CGI produced by Device Brand Studios. We would do this by finding new ways to tell meaningful stories about Amazon devices, specifically through on-white imagery, contextual lifestyle photography and animation.

How Do Devices Move?

I dove into the world of product marketing and animation to receive a better understanding for how our competitors bring hardware to life. I discovered not only do most products have a motion language, but that a handful of industry-leading creative studios are responsible for the bold product animation languages out in the world. In order to raise Amazon’s product imagery standards, I sought the middle ground between bold motion created by our competitors, and our current in-house device rendering.

To start, we turned to the customer.

Deep Dive into Competition

Customer Feedback

Customers were shown current Amazon renderings as well as a handful of our competitors product renders and animation.

Customers strongly prefer animation that focuses on devices and their features
“Flavor” animations, technical demonstrations like audio visualization, and animated utterances perform significantly lower than device-centric animation
Animation is perceived the best when it tells a clear story about a specific feature of the device (materials, buttons, functionality, etc)

Styling with AI

I meticulously selected favorable marketing imagery of our competitors and then fed those images into various private MidJourney channels.

We then prompted MidJourney to include our Amazon devices + desired lifestyle environments in rounds of image generation. Our approach ensured that our designs reflected successful competitor marketing design as a foundation before exploring further possibilities.

Creative Expression

After exploring our competitors product imagery, and using AI to visualize Amazon products in new ways, I lead a small team of motion designers through rounds of never-before-seen device animation. Below are three device form factors that have received a creative refresh.

Speaker

Until now, Amazon devices had either lived in “on-white” or in photo-real contextual lifestyle environments. This expression explored metaphorically extending the sound features into the photo studio environment.

Multimodal

In this expression, I followed the customer’s requests to focus on the features; light and color are used to enhance features and also draw attention to the balance of privacy paired with personal product experiences.

Tablet

Amazon’s newest tablets have been increasingly elevated to compete with tablet technology seen in our competitor’s hardware. This direction leverages high-end cinematography to sell the similar elegance found in competitors product imagery.

The Result

Our deep exploration of competitor brand imagery and subsequent creative exploration created a primitive motion guideline for Device Brand Studio art directors to reference when engaging with vendors.