Anchor
Harbor knows all about the tangled, multifaceted, often frustrating world of film and TV production. To revolutionise project management and workflow reviews, they built a proprietary platform, called Anchor. It’s designed to be a one-stop shop, where your entire creative efforts are collated, live and secure.
Harbor approached WMT to create a standalone brand that subtly referenced its origins, with one caveat: don’t make it nautical. After identifying the emotive benefit to the customer, we developed Anchor's brand strategy and tone of voice before creating the brand identity and website, as well as the design for the platform itself.
PROJECT
Brand Strategy
TOV & Comms
Brand Identity
Website
Platform Design
The Brief
Harbor engaged WMT to give the Anchor brand and platform a complete refresh. With a target audience encompassing everyone from film studio heads to post-production assistants, they sought a brand that resonated with both the head and the heart, the technical and the emotional. And they needed a platform which answered its users' call for simplicity, elegance and dynamism.
The Thinking
Our research and discussions with the creative minds at the Harbor, uncovered this brand truth: Film is the most direct expression of collective creative joy, and nothing should get in its way. An all-embracing space that balances the flow of mixed emotions and workstreams.
Filmmaking is inspirational, aspirational and liberating. Anchor may be a digital tool for the technical world of film and advertising, but they are all about positive, human, creative experiences. People supporting people. Anchor open up the conditions necessary for pure creativity, where multiple disciplines can realise their vision - big or small - from a single, extensive and secure source of truth.
We call this Expansive Clarity.
The Solution
The strategic position of Expansive Clarity called for brand imagery that lived up to the core values we developed for the brand: Unlimited Scaleability, Unimpeded Collaboration and the Ultimate Expressions of Art. We used collage to create a brand world of pure creativity, collation and collaboration, all key tenets of the Anchor brand.
Whilst the brief was to create an identity that could live on its own in the spacious world we created, we also needed a nod to the parent brand, Harbor. To do this we replicated the distinctive A shape from the Harbor logo, using Dazzed Bold – a cinematic sans-serif typeface – and adding a loading animation in the A to reference the agility and speed of the Anchor platform.
We paired this logo and hero typeface with Domaine Text, ‘a sharp, elegant serif with curvaceous Latin detailing’ to give contrast and balance alongside the weight and power of Dazzed.
The Platform
Anchor users are a mix of film studios, executives, editors, post-production assistants and creatives, but all require a sophisticated, efficient tool for managing production media and video rendering in the world of high-end TV, film and advertising.
We designed two platforms: a full-featured desktop version and a simpler IOS app for mobile and tablet.
Despite the sometimes complicated and powerful nature of the platform, the UX needed to be simple and easy to use. The UI was designed to maximise desktop screen space and enable seamless navigation between multiple projects (potentially 1,000+) and departments.
The platform design also needed to accommodate some key Anchor features, such as the ability to draw/annotate directly onto frames of video, and AI tagging (search for particular things, which are then marked on the timeline in all frames that have it).
CLIENT TESTIMONIAL
“There are very few agencies that make you feel immediately understood, both creatively and strategically, the way We Mean This does. They bring clarity to complexity, heart to brand building, and an extraordinary level of care to every interaction. Working with them feels less like hiring an agency and more like gaining true creative partners. They are ambitious, insightful, collaborative, and genuinely invested in building meaningful, stand-out work.”
– Gabriella Elder, Vice President, Marketing, Publicis Productions and Harbor Picture Company.