Buck Designs 21st Birthday Book For Employees
For their 21st birthday, email marketing platform Mailchimp, brought in global creative company Buck to produce a birthday gift. Inspired by Dr. Seuss’ Oh, the Places You’ll Go!, Wherever The Road Takes Us is made for Mailchimp employees, designed to chart and celebrate the brand’s achievements over the years. Wherever The Road is strongly linked to Mailchimp’s existing brand style, established by COLLINS in 2018, with a few key changes. The principal illustration, produced by Lourenço Provdência, employs a sketchiness that will “appeal to both adults and kids alike, without going too juvenile or dry, says Mailchimp’s Christian Widlic.
The story of Wherever The Road follows Freddie (Mailchimp’s mascot) and friends down a wandering road in Cavendish yellow (its brand color); the visual of the roping road becomes a guiding theme across the book. While Buck knew that Freddie would play a part in the story, it took longer to design the other characters that would feel authentic to the Mailchimp brand. The answer came from the “shape system” already in play “in the digital brand and social spaces within the brand,” explains Buck creative director Thomas Schmid. Each character is based on a unique form, developed to be “without gender, so they could be inclusive, and the plurality of workers could see themselves in them,” Provdência comments.
Buck’s type artist Noel Núñez-Caba took inspiration from typographic design posters to explore how type could converse with illustrations to tell a story. The script, full of Seuss rhythms and beats, has been set in Mailchimp’s brand typeface, Means, to prioritize readability. The final work is printed with a textured yellow cover and foil-stamped, with a spot gloss added to the Cavendish winding roads on interior pages “to help it pop,” says Buck creative director Shannon Jager. A limited run of 500, Wherever The Road have been hand numbered and signed by Freddie before being distributed to Mailchimp employees.
