Building for
the future
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VOID
Entering the
We asked illustrator Paul Leon to imagine a futuristic world for us. Our challenge was to bring it into reality. Here’s what happened…
Meet Paul
Our space-age, AI-powered futuristic vision starts with a pencil. Paul Leon’s pencil. He picked it up at age four and hasn’t stopped drawing since. Paul is a creative director with a history in toy design, film branding, and now…a futuristic collaboration with us at Checkpoint.
“I did a talk at a university about how creativity works. I showed a picture of the 1966 Star Trek communicator, “says Paul. “Then I showed them the Motorola flip phone. Those ideas started in sci-fi. So that inspired me because I thought, actually, that's the future. Could I design things for the future? And I've been lucky enough to do stuff like that."
Inside the brief
This project was based on the challenge of taking something solely digital and seeing if our creative teams could turn it into a physical label product. The artistic medium we chose was digital illustration, and after a bit of internet sleuthing, we came across Paul's work.
“The whole idea was that it was something entirely different to anything that we would ever work with and give our own internal teams a real challenge in being able to pick out the elements from the design, and turn them into something real,” says Simon Dickinson, Senior Marketing Manager at Checkpoint ALS.
The results
Behold — a vision from the future! Paul created an original illustration based on how the creative labeling process might look in a few years.
Back to the future: the creative journey
Meanwhile, in Brazil... Meet Tecnoblu!
The Tecnoblu team used every element of Paul's design as inspiration, from the color palette to the artist in the image and the world he's sitting in. They spent time ruminating on how the future meets the modern day and how they could use AI and augmented reality to bring Paul's world to life in new, more tangible ways.
Our team imagined Paul’s ¡Excelsior! through the five elements of earth, air, fire, water, and metal. Then, they amped it up by sprinkling over digital aspects and future visions for technology and sensations.
Their concept pitch deck was loaded with eight mood boards, each exploring a color palette and its textures and ideas. Each mood board comes with labels and design concepts for futuristic companies in our ¡Excelsior! world.
¡Excelsior!
brand concept by Paul Leon
“The brief we gave Paul was fairly open.”
Paul’s previous work and obvious sci-fi influences spoke to us from the outset, and (as huge Blade Runner fans), we were more than happy to go with it. How far could we push it?
“The illustration that I came up with was how I saw myself, how I see creativity happening. And it was almost like, I decided to treat it like a sci-fi graphic novel,” says Paul. “I took a photograph of myself in-situ. And I sort of did some sketches based on that. Surprisingly, they liked the direction we were going in!”
Once we had Paul’s finished creation, we passed it to Tecnoblu, our creative team in Brazil.
Their brief was simple enough: “Go nuts!”
They used his design to imagine themselves in a futuristic world and created an entirely new universe for these branded labels.
“The team focused on the five elements that they saw in this world of air, water, fire, earth, and metal, which you can see reflected in the final labels,” says Simon.
“They used AI to create new images of people within this space to influence the look, feel, and design of the labels they created.”
In the near future, reality and fantasy will be closer than ever...
“The final piece is a cyberpunk-inspired illustration,” says Paul. “They wanted logos on everything to illustrate how their production techniques can work.”
He says, “It’s to show how their labels can be created, and they're going to create sort of a range of samples with the illustrations, which is kind of mind blowing.”
“When we received the final piece from Paul, it was great to see because it was everything that I imagined it would be."
Watch the video
“It was everything that we imagined it would be, I could see myself in that world that he had created.”
You won’t be surprised to learn that Paul’s creative process started with sci-fi books and graphic novels. From there, he moved on to rough sketches and then moved to his iPad.
“That gives you the ability to roughly sketch things out really quickly, and then do another overlay on another layer and then sketch over that layer,” he says.
Many layers later, Paul created a graphic novel-style sketch based on himself and his creative process. When he was happy with his work, he brought it to us. And we lost our minds over it.
The finished illustration showed how Paul had taken our brief and applied it to what we do via the designer creating clothing on these augmented reality screens. It established a tangible world for our creative team to explore.
Needless to say, Paul nailed the brief so hard that our feedback was minimal. Paul says, “We knew the style we were aiming for, and that's the style that the illustration ended up with in terms of color and shading and things like that. And I just think that worked really well with what they were looking to reproduce.”
One of the newest members of the Checkpoint family, the team at Tecnoblu plays a crucial role in our global production map, not only due to their location in South America but also because of their immense capabilities.
Did you know Brazil ranks as the 5th largest textile producer and 4th largest apparel producer globally? With one of the most complete and vertically integrated supply chains in the Western Hemisphere, it's no wonder the team there has all the skills needed to take design concepts and turn them into unique finished products.
Tecnoblu has been creating labels since 1994, and with these nearly 30 years of experience behind them, we knew we were in safe hands giving them the Excelsior project to work on. Using only the highest quality raw materials and state-of-the-art technology and machinery to craft their samples, combined with their passion and ingenuity, how could this project fail?!
After our initial discussion and brainstorming sessions, the Tecnoblu design team took our inspiration and feedback away and began creating mood boards to help put their thoughts down on paper. It wasn't long before they were back in touch with a whole new world to walk us through...
“We love collaboration and we love any opportunity to do it.”
To collaborate in such a way and to create this capsule really shows off our strengths in being able to work — not only with external factors — but how we work internally, and how we turn something digital into something physical.
Better yet, this is another project that doesn’t have an end. We’ll continue to use Paul's work to create new and exciting futuristic concepts through our creative teams worldwide.
The image from Paul is so rich, there's no way we're stopping here- this is just the beginning!
Want to collaborate with us?
You said 'yes,' didn't you? We hoped you would. Contact us today and give us your grand vision — nothing is off the table.
As you can see, our teams live for a creative challenge and have the technical knowledge and imaginative gumption to bring almost any idea to life. Better yet, we have the resources to take you from concept to roll out and far into the future.
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Want the skinny on Paul’s creative journey without getting down into it? No problem! Paul started by going through his sci-fi book collection, scouring graphic novels to pin down the look he wanted to create. He did rough sketches, then moved onto his iPad to create his digital illustration…which we absolutely loved.
We sent Paul’s ¡Excelsior! illustration to our design team in Brazil, who immediately got to work. They used the five elements of earth, air, fire, water, and metal as themes, then filled the gaps in Paul’s futuristic world using AI and augmented reality images.
Our Brazil team used every facet of Paul’s illustration to bring color, texture, and clarity to his vision of the future. Now we’re planning to send ¡Excelsior! to another of our overseas creative teams to see what they can come up with. This is the project that keeps on giving!
TL;DR: The creative journey
keep scrolling for the full lowdown...
The result
the video
the process
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