Luminate

Luminate is entertainment’s preeminent data and insights company, unleashing access to the most essential, objective, and trustworthy information across music, film and television. 

Exemplifying transparency, clarity, and fair access to information, Luminate’s analysis, insights, and relationships generate the most comprehensive, representative, and relevant findings that empower informed decision-making and guide entertainment’s thriving future.

Formerly P-MRC Data, Luminate came to Focus Lab during a rename, reorganization, and rapid growth. The previous brand portfolio lacked meaning and was scattered across legacy and adjacent brands, and the future identity needed to be more direct. More memorable and future-facing. 

We sought to clarify Luminate’s differentiators, and inspire both internal and external audiences.

During the strategy phase of the project, we identified Luminate’s ideal brand attributes: Dynamic, Certain, and Clever. Their voice and tone would be Expertly Edgy, Cooly Confident, and Affably Authoritative. 

Luminate's position in entertainment allowed us to speak with a bit of edge, completely distinguishing Luminate from their competitors. We worked to create a visual identity that hit the same notes. 

The Luminate logo starts with what we nicknamed the L Frame. Representative of a simple X,Y axis, it uses the first letter of the brand name as a visual mechanism for its core offering: the opportunity to find objective, meaningful data that leads to better decisions for folks in the entertainment industry.

The logo’s presentation is unconventional and unmistakable. With bold, condensed type, the logo carries a level of authority and confidence that others simply can't. The thickness of the letters, dynamic trajectory, and uppercase formatting feels like a masthead from a subculture magazine.

This L frame opens up a number of possibilities for a dynamic brand system. We use it to frame content, build layouts, house imagery, and to inform visual language. More on this to come. 

Off-white and black ground a highly saturated, high contrast palette. It’s a palette whose tans, olives, pinks, oranges, and yellows feel contemporary and fashionable. An outfit perfect for the entertainment industry. 

Our type system harkens back to the logotype with FK Screamer serving as a big, bold accent. Its numerals, punctuation marks, signs and symbols, made it an obvious choice. 

Aktiv Grotesk is as certain as it gets. Its creators wrote that it, “takes an authoritative but neutral position, supporting any message without overpowering it.” Perfect for punchy headlines from a company who deals in objective data. 

Untitled Serif balances the two out nicely in a nice, readable body copy. Put them all together and you get a type system that comes across as editorial. 

For visual language, we sought out what data actually looks like. It’s dynamic, colorful, on the move, ever-changing. If you boil it down to its essence though, data visualization is a series of dots and lines. So naturally, we explored this within our brand palette.

We created an entire library of these patterns, in all of the brand colors, and at various scales and crops. 

By playing with scale and cropping, these abstractions become a patternwork of sorts. It served us best when applied in a color-blocked manner. 

The L Frame from the logo serves to separate content and highlight certain bits of information. 

We brought in photography and treated it with a bitmap filter and gradient mapped color to bring it inline with other brand elements. 

All of these ingredients come together in application a little something like this:

As far as testimonials go, David from Luminate may have given us one of the greatest of all time. 

“The line between artist and art is ethereal. You are a team of exceptionally skilled artists, but your superpower is the way you open your process to allow others in. You invited us to contribute as you created. Like a troop of improvisational art school MBA's, you fed off suggestions while guiding the efforts. You also made it so much more fun than it had any right to be.”

- David Simon, SVP of Marketing, Luminate

Wow. This is just a short snippet from the review that had the team and I floating for months.