Permitted vs. forbidden.

At the time, the enterprise arm of Verizon needed an explainer video to promote their DDoS Shield service—and the organization had just undergone a massive rebrand. Much effort was put into reigning in the wild west of ever-creeping design elements that felt cartoony or less than professional—marketing drew a hard line—stripping away everything but the bare essentials.

In development were obvious needs—primarily illustration guidelines. However, that was months (if not years) away, and we needed to visualize a very abstract concept: the distributed denial of service attack, and how Verizon can thwart one. Photos and words alone wouldn’t work, plus we had to find a way within what was allowed vs. what wasn’t under brand.

If you can’t solve the problem, you’re not thinking creatively.

To find a way to make it work, we started with what we could use under the current brand guidelines—type, four brand colors, and simple shapes for layouts.

To diverge from traditional illustrations, we wondered if we could represent the different actors in our store with lines, circles (being the periods in type), squares, and (perhaps pushing it a bit) triangles. This led us to a whiteboard session where we defined the meaning of each shape (dots for data packets, squares for circles, triangles for bad actors) and every color (like green is good).

Our ultimate discovery? You can communicate what a shape represents simply by the way it moves. Fast, aggressive moves were a great way to indicate danger.

Constructing the full story.

From there, it was as simple as sketching out a storyboard with those elements and seeing how well it held together. Coupled with detailed sound design to sell the animation, we found a way to do something that, on the surface, didn’t seem to make the cut.