New York Times Food Festival

I had the great pleasure to work with BASE Design on their identity system for the 2022 New York Times Food Festival. My role involved developing the motion system for the identity, as well as creating a template for the internal NYT motion team to use for the event’s environmental and promotional needs.

In their project breakdown, the BASE team describes the identity as a “visual framework that arranges text into connected bubbles. These flow together like warm fondue, and also stretch and spring like the melted cheese in animated versions, on top of gooey red graphics that bob and reshape like vinegar floating in oil.”

I really love the system that BASE came up with, and wanted to preserve the intention of their work. This meant maintaining the geometric ratios of their shapes, which was actually a little complicated.

Rather than seeing the shape as a singular object to be animated, I needed to consider it as a series of merged circles and rectangles.

Of particular importance were the two circles in the middle — or, really, the two inner curves of those circles. It was all about those two inner circles.

As the top and bottom “pills” got closer together and farther apart, those curves needed to stay half-circles and not squash or stretch, which would look ugly and break the geometry of the system.

In the world of branding, breaking the system is a major no-no.

So, I needed to build a motion system that would allow me to move the top and bottom pills up and down, while scaling the interior circles evenly to match.

This involved a whole bunch of complicated math and coding, but when it was done, I had one slider that would control all of the animation and work perfectly, no matter what other factors were involved.

One exception — when the pills got too far apart, the stretchy cheese would eventually stretch too far and then break. Luckily I knew that the pills wouldn’t need to move too far.

In addition to that, the motion template would need to be customized in a few ways. For one, in order to hold type of different sizes, the top and bottom pill shapes would need to be adjustable both in height and width. Also, the interior circles (known collectively as “the cheese”) would need to be able to move to the right and left to suit the design. And to correct the cheese ‘breaking’ if the top and bottom pills got too far apart, I built a slider that could widen and/or narrow the cheese if necessary.