Google Arts & Culture / Music, Makers & Machines

Brand Studio helped Google Arts & Culture launch the Electronic Music collection in a way that combines a distinctive visual identity, engaging social content and product magic to attract a new, music-focused audience. Music, Makers & Machines showcases the best of electronic music, it’s creators and curators, and the machines that made it. In doing so, include and support our industry partners, our creators and the broader ecosystem.

Art Direction

A bold, dynamic, and flexible identity that invites music fans to celebrate the diversity of talent that created electronic music. The identity highlights the makers who made the music as much as the machines they invented to do it.

The colour palette is a throwback to when screens emitted a green glow (eg. Fairlight CMI) and increasing the intensity of those hues we create a modern and bold visual language that speaks to the millennial music fans, KOFs and the general public.

The mono form of this typeface has a lovely, brutish quality. Its overall proportions are narrow with tight spacing; most monos are wide with loose spacing. Sohne Mono has the modern form of Akzidenz Grotesk and Helvetica, which is instantly modern whilst able to provide an analogue feel that pays respect to the history of machines.

Instagram Stories

As part of the project, we created a series of six stories celebrating how makers and machines across the world have shaped everyday music and culture.

The stories are brought to life through Instagram Stories, as a social campaign and through content on the Google Arts & Culture platform.

Sound design for each of the six episodes was created by @yurisuzukilondon. All of the sounds created by Yuri were made with historic synthesisers and machines.