Through collaboration, Buck’s rebrand has “a tonne of fingerprints on it”

Closing the evening at February’s Nicer Tuesdays was Ben Langsfeld, Buck’s group creative director. Ben’s been at the company since 2003, and recalled the studio’s humble beginnings “in a small little office in Korea Town, in LA.” Today, Buck is 250 people across three cities and continues to grow.

In light of this, the studio recently underwent a rebrand which formed the basis of Ben’s talk. “It was a massive effort across all of our studios,” Ben said of the monumental task that he had the opportunity to lead, “which was awesome.” What was so interesting about the project, however, wasn’t what Buck made, but how the studio made it. The creative director proceeded to talk us through the process of distilling many peoples’ identities and work into one cohesive visual language. It’s an attitude commonplace to working at Buck, where “everything we do has a tonne of fingerprints on it, and we like it that way,” he added.

The identity, of course, went through several iterations and it was an immensely collaborative process. The result is a flexible system which can fade into the background when used in a deck for a client, or, take centre stage. Alternatively, it can morph into something more experimental if Buck wants to make more of a statement about its ethos as a studio.