Clinique: Foundation FilmsThe Foundation

Client

CliniqueGlobal Creative Operations

Host

Nick SterlingtonVP, Global Creative Operations

Recorded

On ZoomFrom the West Coast

Runtime

5:06A countdown of five

Home

The FoundationClinique's creative hub

When

February 2022The first of the Foundation Films

Brand guidelines videos are the ones nobody finishes. We took a Zoom recording and turned it into one people actually watch to the end.

The Foundation is Clinique‘s creative hub: the logo, Clinique Green, the typefaces, the templates and the guidelines, in one place for every team and partner that makes something with the brand. Nick Sterlington, Clinique’s VP of Global Creative Operations, built it. In early 2022 he asked us to help launch it to Clinique teams around the world with a short series of films, and his came first. Five things every team needs to know, five minutes, and one host with more energy than most morning shows.

Foundation Films•Nick Sterlington•5:06•2022

A webcam, set free

Nick was on the West Coast, so his film had to be recorded over Zoom. Most guidelines videos would leave it there: a talking head in a home office and a slide deck. We did the opposite. We cut Nick out of his room and sent him wherever the script needed him: floating above the clouds, on a tropical beach, on stage under concert lights for a drum roll, and at the center of a hypnotic spiral when the list really needs your attention. Same webcam, a different world every few seconds.

Rewind to the 90s

The Foundation is brand new, so we sold it with nostalgia. Beige computers glow on a teal set with The Foundation on screen. A hand jabs at a green-screen terminal while Nick walks through installing the new fonts. A wall of floppy disks introduces the email signature, and a Memphis-style burst promises single sign-on is coming soon. All of it is a wink at how hard it used to be to find the right file, and how easy The Foundation makes it now.

Nick, in Bitmoji

Every host needs a sidekick, so Nick got a cartoon one. His Bitmoji opens the countdown in a cowboy hat with a speech bubble, To keep our brand equity tight!, bursts in with a DUDE. when the new PowerPoint template arrives, and signs the film off with a YAASSS. In between, a group chat does the selling for us: The Foundation is SOOO useful. I know, right? I just downloaded the new logo!

Making the dry stuff move

Under the fun, the film has a job: five pieces of brand housekeeping, each one given its own piece of motion. Clinique has had about ten logos over its life, so the old ones explode into a desktop full of stray files and get dragged straight to the Trash. The brand’s own Helvetica arrives as a giant letter with its anchor points showing, then rolls through every weight, with the new secondary face, Nitti, beside it. Clinique Green, developed with Pantone so print, paint, plastic and screens finally match, gets its swatch book and its numbers. The new PowerPoint template plays slide by slide on a laptop, in a room with a You Go Girl! poster on the wall. Then the email signature, and the same punchline every time.

And the ending is pure Nick. Five things, one clear ask to get it all done by the end of the month, a hint that new guidelines are coming any day now, and then: “Oh my God, I forgot it was garbage day.” He leaves to take the trash out, and his Bitmoji finishes the film for him.

The rest of the series

Nick’s film set the tone for three more. Jenn McManus, Executive Director of Global 360 Design, took the deeper dive into Clinique’s Spring 2022 design updates: Helvetica set bigger and braver, Nitti kept for claims and science, every size on a four-point grid, and headlines layered into the photography so the model or the product cuts through the type. Then the lab codes, the rules behind Clinique’s photography, planned as one long talk and cut into two short films that play back to back, because two bite-size films hold attention better than one long one. Every film got the same toolkit as Nick’s: kinetic type, animated specimens, annotated layouts and presenters lifted out of Zoom onto clean white.

For more of our Clinique work, see the Unique Sizzle Reel, the Clinique Lab reel and the Innovation Sizzle Reel.

ServicesMotion Graphics·Editing·Creative Direction·Branded Content