Sound Advice & Advanced Transmissions Union

Sound design is, by its nature, a tricky service to showcase on web. Client visuals tend to dominate and sound, which should be the point, ends up side-lined. When the Sound Advice & Advanced Transmissions Union (SAATU) invited us to create a brand identity and website to reflect their distinctively creative approach, we saw an opportunity to challenge category norms.

To foreground SAATU’s amazing work we looked for a brand system that could push back client visuals whilst keeping them as a presence. We found a solution in the idea of the barcode and put it to work in two key areas. As the basis of an identity, its default, even brutal, character creates essential brand space between SAATU and the more luxurious expressions of its fashion industry clients. Used as mask over video, the barcodes act a series of screens, modulating the distraction of client visuals and allowing SAATU’s audial contribution to come forward.

Individual barcode patterns are generative designs, a product of informational factors particular to each project – name, location, time, etc. Seen together as a grid of covers, the barcodes cohere as a visual brand world, one that showcases SAATU’s work to strategic advantage.