Paradigms – The Brand Experience Summit 2024: a report

This year’s Paradigms event took place in Rome from September 24 to 25, 2024 – and of course we were there. As a design agency, it is very important for us to keep up to date with the latest changes and trends in the brand world. The “Brand Experience Summit” also gives us the opportunity to meet other experts from the industry with whom we can network and exchange ideas. We returned from the Italian capital with some wonderful experiences and inspiration. Below we show what Paradigms is all about and which presentations and projects particularly inspired us.

The Brand Experience Summit – summit meeting of brand designers

Paradigms has existed since 2022 and entered its third round this year. The two-day event brings together creative minds from all over the world to define and discuss the future of brands. Established and up-and-coming brand designers present their products and visions – and inspire their interested industry colleagues in the audience. In addition to exciting presentations on stage, the event offers the opportunity to get to know a wide variety of people from the design world in a relaxed atmosphere with delicious drinks and food and to be positively influenced by their experiences and views.

Rome – the perfect place for designers and other aesthetes

Design is aesthetics – and Rome, with its fascinating architecture, is certainly one of the most suitable cities to dedicate yourself to the topic of brand design. The Acquario Romano, now often referred to as the Casa dell’Architettura, provided the perfect setting for Paradigms. In this setting, whose beauty alone is immensely inspiring, it was easy to immerse ourselves in the creative cosmos of visual and content branding. We enjoyed every moment on site and gathered so many impressions that we could write a whole book about them. It is impossible to summarize all the impressions. Therefore, in this article we will focus on four presentations that particularly stuck in our minds.

Emma Baines – Global Head of Creative at Tony’s Chocolonely

Talk: Tony’s Chocolonely unwrapped: A year of bold moves and global success

Bold moves have brought global success to the Dutch brand Tony’s Chocolonely. The manufacturer stands for delicious and, above all, fair chocolate. It wants to enable cocoa farmers to earn a living wage and is not afraid to draw public attention to the fact that the chocolates of some well-known brands are produced under inhumane conditions. In fact, child labor and exploitation are a sad reality on many cocoa plantations.

The campaign by Tony’s Chocolonely is as cheeky as it is effective: the brand deliberately imitates the designs of the criticized brands and adds provocative slogans such as “… looks familiar, tastes similar, but pays fair prices to all farmers”. Unsurprisingly, not every “criticized” brand was prepared to take this lying down – Mondelez sued Tony’s Chocolonely, accusing it of plagiarism. Although the mighty Milka Group won the case, the real winner of the dispute was and is Tony’s Chocolonely.

The legal dispute generated even more attention for the unfair working conditions on cocoa plantations than the creative campaign had already done, and increased the Dutch brand’s worldwide recognition and popularity enormously. It was met with great approval – both verbally on social media and in the form of skyrocketing sales figures for its products. Tony’s Cocolonely has been tremendously successful on this risky, sometimes rocky road.

What we learn from this: Sometimes brands have to dare to be different and disruptive. If this difference is also linked to a meaningful message, there is a good chance that consumers will recognize this.

Incidentally, Tony’s Cocolonely itself used the lawsuit to take a successful swipe at Mondelez: with the hashtag #PayFarmersNotLawyers, the brand makes reference to it and at the same time underlines its position once again.

Leo Porto & Felipe Rocha – Founders & Creative Directors at PORTO ROCHA

Talk: PORTO ROCHA: Our first five years

New York-based agency PORTO ROCHA combines strategy and design to create things that evolve with the world we live in. Working closely with people and companies, the team, led by Brazilian founders Leo Porto and Felipe Rocha, creates modern branding with the aim of bringing about meaningful change.

Large-scale projects that appeal to a broad audience are just as much a part of the portfolio as socially and/or culturally motivated initiatives. PORTO ROCHA has created brands, products, books, websites, campaigns and experiences for clients ranging from global technology and retail companies to independent artists and cultural institutions. Among other projects, the design firm is responsible for the branding of the Perelman Performing Arts Center (“PAC NYC”) at the historic World Trade Center.

What makes the PORTO ROCHA agency so special, if you like, is the tenacity and precision of its work. There is no giving up. There is always questioning, continuing, tinkering until the ideal solution is found. Sometimes this means going back to the basics, sometimes it means daring to try something new. PORTO ROCHA is always ready for both.

In their presentation, Leo and Felipe focused primarily on the topics of oversaturation and disruption, which play a huge role in the current brand world and therefore also shape their own work. Anyone who wants to stand out in today’s enormous quantity of products cannot avoid taking an extremely disruptive approach. One example of this is the Liquid Death water in a can.

You have to throw old design traditions overboard and develop new rules of the game. But that doesn’t mean that you just need to be “different” and you’ll automatically be successful. We have already described in various articles that there is often a very fine line between “positively innovative” and “no longer recognizable as the product in question”.

In addition, one should not draw the conclusion that designs need to be more and more embellished in order to stand out. In fact, the exact opposite is usually the case: consumer attention is increasingly diminishing – accordingly, it is also important to reduce everything to the essentials when it comes to design. One example of this is the “Run” campaign that PORTO ROCHA created for Nike.

Originally, the world-famous sporting goods manufacturer simply aimed to get people to run and move more with its products. PORTO ROCHA picked out this aspect and combined the slogan “Run” with the famous Nike logo. Simply replacing the brand name with ‘Run’ was enough – the campaign was a complete success.

Giorgia Lupi – Designer, Partner at Pentagram

Talk: Speak Data

Giorgia Lupi is an award-winning information designer who combines data and storytelling in innovative ways to create unique brand representations. Her work reflects her belief that data can make us more human by boosting our intelligence, our engagement and also our joy. Giorgia designs compelling data-driven visual narratives for print, digital and environmental media to create new insights into and a better understanding of people, ideas and organizations.

Among her most impressive and moving works is the diary she wrote while suffering from Long Covid. Giorgia noted numerous details, from symptoms and their intensity to measures such as visits to the doctor and medication taken. The special feature of this diary is the graphic design, which gives the supposedly hard, rational facts an unexpected “softness” and emotionality. In December 2023, Giorgia Lupi published the records as a ‘Data Storytelling Experience’ in the New York Times.

Designers are often allergic to data. Many see it only as numbers and tables that have nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with creativity. With her work, Giorgia shows that data can be something very lively and valuable if you engage with it more intensively and give it color – in the truest sense of the word. She reveals new ways of processing data visually, making processes that are sometimes difficult to understand much clearer and therefore more accessible.

We learn from this that one of the most important tasks of design is to bring order and structure where these qualities are lacking. Sometimes complex things can be made simpler simply by organizing and preparing their individual parts differently. Designers have to find solutions to present information – for example brand values on packaging or in an advertising message – in such a way that it is easy to understand. Again, the Nike Run campaign by PORTO ROCHA is an excellent example of this.

Amy Bebbington – Global Head of Brand at Mozilla

Talk: JKR – Reimagining a brand that can stretch from grassroots to government

As Global Head of Brand at Mozilla, Amy Bebbington brings nearly 20 years of experience defining, launching and reimagining brands, products and services for some of the world’s most influential companies. She understands how to combine strategy and creativity in a way that results in impactful innovation.

The internet has changed dramatically over the last few decades. While it was once a virtual space of discovery and joy, it is now increasingly a place of worry and fear, keyword data breaches. Mozilla wants to stimulate a return to the “good old days” and “reclaim” the Internet. With its rebranding, the US company is sending out a successful signal in this direction.

Known primarily for its Firefox web browser, the open source software company wants to use the new brand design to highlight its expanded range of services, channels and resources for an “open, accessible and supportive internet” and visually unify them for this purpose.

The fresh design system was created by branding agency Jones Knowles Ritchie (JKR) who supported Amy Bebbington in the relaunch. It focuses on the community and is intended to appeal to and connect everyone equally, from grassroots programmers to “normal” users who want to take control of their digital lives (again) to government officials who are campaigning for better internet safety laws – hence the slogan “from grassroots to government”.

Pixel pattern-derived fonts animated with flashing text cursors; classic RGB green on simple black and white backgrounds; the Mozilla-M logo brought to life to reveal the iconic Tyrannosaurus Rex symbol that once served as the company’s mascot: with the new brand structure, Mozilla is going back to its roots – its own and the internet’s – without looking old-fashioned. Every detail of the branding is, so to speak, a “root” with a modern touch.

In her exciting presentation, Amy impressively showed us how the past – i.e. the “old” – can be used as inspiration to create something new that appeals to a wide audience. The spectacular rebranding of Mozilla is the result of an absolutely well-rounded concept – and also forms the conclusion of our report on the great Paradigms 2024 event.