awork – Virtual Testimonials for Real Teamwork

How do you make a software brand that helps teams organize themselves feel more personal? Certainly not with staged office photos or stock material. The solution is Lisa, Carla, Philip and Daniel — our fictional creative team made up of detailed 3D characters.

Each testimonial represents a typical awork user, such as “The Founder” or “The Creative.” To define the characters’ appearance, clothing style, accessories, colors and materials, we first worked with sketches before translating them into 3D.

When characters are placed on a website, proportions have to be considered carefully. Long limbs can quickly take up too much space in a layout. We chose a natural body shape that makes the computer-generated figures feel real.

The highlight is the ultra-realistic clothing worn by the characters. Each garment was created in detail using specialized software. Similar to tailoring, 2D fabric pieces are “stitched together” in 3D space and draped over the models. This creates folds and creases that give Lisa, Philip & Co. even more authenticity.

The finishing touch is in the details — buttons, seams, zippers, earrings, a smartwatch, headphones and even grey-melange cotton socks. Wonderful!

For the brand redesign, we contributed not only 3D characters, but also developed a dynamic broadcast design for awork. To ensure consistent branding, we adapted the new look for motion and defined how the individual design elements behave in animation. Naturally, this works across all common formats.

And of course, we couldn’t resist animating awork’s redesigned logo. The final logo animation beautifully underlines awork’s friendly “joy of work” idea. In other words: if we have to work anyway, let’s have a little fun while we’re at it. High five!