Citizen Watch
Brand / Art Direction
Citizen Watch commissioned a refresh of their brand to commemorate upcoming brand anniversaries and watch collections. Working closely with the U.S. office and receiving feedback from the headquarters in Japan, the team came up with a new working brand system. To finalize, I put together a brand toolkit to be used across advertising in their global offices and partnered retailers.
The revamped brand is built on the principle that “Light is Life.” This plays off of the fact that the sun is essential to life, and Citizen is known for their eco-conscious watches, which are powered by light instead of battery. Circle crops are intentionally used throughout the brand system to mimic both the shape of a watch face and the sun, and strategically provide white space for important CTAs and other copy. All photography was chosen for its richness in texture and lighting, reflecting a similar abundance of life.
These principles were stretched across an adaptive system that is meant to cover any assortment of placements needed, print or digital.
Some pages from the brand book:
Citizen has an extensive number of collections, each with differing characteristics the brand must represent while still being cohesive. Eco-drive and automatic, masculine and feminine, luxurious and affordable. And above this still, there is the physical watches to take into account for their various colors.
I carefully selected photography to evoke the natural world, and color corrected to suit the cool and warm toned metals. RGB and CMYK versions of each placement were required to be built out for the global offices to build from.
We met with the U.S. office frequently for photography and design approvals, and the final toolkit was sent to Japan for final reviews before they began localization to full-ship the refresh for all DOOH and OOH placements.
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