Not Even Us
Privacy and security are at the core of WhatsApp. Building on a multi-year collaboration with Meta, we were invited once again to evolve this challenge, bringing continuity to the visual expression of the brand and expanding on a promise we have helped shape and develop over time.
The challenge was to turn encryption into a visual language without relying on raw, technically literal depictions, building expressions that could scale and still be universally associated with protection. The task was to build a system capable of communicating privacy clearly and consistently, answering questions like: what should an encrypted image look like? How can a line of text lose its meaning without losing its form? And what’s the visual equivalent of a voice message under encryption?
The response combined brand guidelines and continuous experimentation. Different ways of distorting, fragmenting, and reorganizing media were tested until we arrived at a visual grammar consistent across text, image, audio, and video. Beyond static expressions, the project also explored motion to embody the act of encryption and decryption — making visible the process of locking and unlocking data.
This system was formalized into an encryption framework: a set of guidelines and working files that define everything from acceptable levels of randomness in meaningless character sequences to rules ensuring consistent representations of protected content across different scales. The result is a visual infrastructure that makes trust tangible in what remains invisible to the user. In the end, teams around the world were equipped with tools to create, expand, and apply this language consistently across multiple mediums and markets, supporting applications ranging from digital campaigns to large-scale visual installations and live-action advertising.
Credits
Client
WhatsApp from Meta
Brand Design Lead: Aleksey Leybin
Creative Director: Jan Jaworski
Design Creative Director: Ada Mayer
Producer: Amy Yvonne Yu
Studio
Executive Creative Director: Gianluca Fallone
Director: POLAR
EP: Santiago Moncalvo, Paula Moura
Producer: MarÃa Roldan
Design: Gianluca Fallone, Bruno Ribeiro, Ralph Mayer, Ronaldo Vidal, Asis, Joao Lavieri, Gonzalo De Bonis
Motion Design: Ronaldo Arthur Vidal, Rônatan Bica, Murilo Almeida, Jaume Mestre, Bruno Persico, Jeroen Krielaars, Gabrielle Castanho.
Case Study
Creative Direction: Ronaldo Vidal
Design: Ronaldo Vidal, Rônatan Bica, Gianluca Fallone
Motion Design: Rônatan Bica, Murilo Almeida
Music & Sound Design: Facu Capece
Campaign Photography: WEST BBDO
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