Clear The Deck
A Kick Off Campaign Proposal for Chevron's Well Intervention Team
A Kick Off Campaign Proposal for Chevron's Well Intervention Team
The client came to us with CLEAR THE DECK.
A good line, actually. It already had the economy of something you might hear on site rather than something dreamt up in a meeting room.
There was one catch. The turnaround was tight.
This was for a Kick Off, so the job was to get something into the world quickly, but without treating the deadline as an excuse to make something disposable. We started with the words the client already had and built outward from there.
Our proposal was PREPARE. EXECUTE. CLEAR.
Not a replacement for CLEAR THE DECK, but a rhythm around it.
Something that could give the campaign structure and, hopefully, somewhere to go after the Kick Off was finished.
A Language That Already Belonged
The visual direction came from looking at the environment rather than looking for a fashionable reference and forcing it in. Chevron gave us the familiar ingredients. Red, blue, geometry, movement.
Then motorsport entered the conversation. Not because we fancied making an oil and gas campaign look like a racing team.
The interesting bit about motorsport is how well an identity travels. Across the car, crew, gloves, tools, technical markings, apparel and signage, everything belongs to the same world without everything looking the same.
That was useful.
We borrowed the logic rather than the look. Colour became a signal. Stripes became directional. Graphics could move from screen to object without losing themselves. The result still felt close enough to Chevron to belong, but with enough character for the Well Intervention Team to own it.
*Stylescape taking inspiration from large forms, motorsports, to create movement a sense of urgency within PREPARE - EXECUTE - CLEAR as part of Clear The Deck Campaign
The Kick Off Was Only The Beginning
Once we had the visual language, it became obvious that CLEAR THE DECK could have a life beyond one event. So we started looking at it less as a Kick Off identity and more as the beginning of a safety system.
Zero Distractions. Ready for Operations. Secure Hazards Before Work.
Different messages, same world. And then the system started finding its way into objects: tags, stickers, tally books, drawstring packs, campaign tokens.
Nothing particularly extravagant. That was never really the point.
The useful thing was that each new piece did not need another new idea. It could simply pick up the language that was already there.
Closer To Work
One of the explorations we liked most was taking CLEAR THE DECK into a custom KONG safety glove.
That felt like a natural next question.
If this is meant to be a safety campaign, why should it only live on campaign material? A glove is already part of the working day. It is worn, handled, marked and eventually worn out. There is an honesty to that which interested us.
So rather than treating the glove as another thing to put a logo on, we looked at it as a possible field-use extension of the campaign.
The closer CLEAR THE DECK could get to the actual work, the more meaningful the system became
Built To Keeping Moving
What followed was not one pristine rollout where everything appeared at once.
The work developed in phases. Different departments came into the ecosystem with different requirements, at different moments. Some pieces arrived early, others later.
That, in a way, became the real test of the design. Could something developed months later still feel related to what came before?
Could another department pick up the campaign without starting from scratch?
Could the system stretch without slowly becoming something else?
That is where system thinking becomes useful. Not as a fancy phrase in a deck, but as a practical way of giving an idea longevity.
The application changes. The department changes. The timing changes.The thought should still hold.
SCN: Wainot Project
This is the bit that probably says the most about how we work.
SCN: Wainot rarely looks at the first deliverable as the whole job. We tend to look around it and ask what else needs to exist for the idea to keep doing its job.
SCN works through the thinking, the narrative and the visual language. Wainot worries about how that thinking survives materials, suppliers, sampling and production.
The two have to meet somewhere. Otherwise you end up with either a clever idea nobody can make, or a perfectly made thing nobody really needed.
CLEAR THE DECK began with the client. PREPARE. EXECUTE. CLEAR. was our way of giving that starting point a structure.
What followed was a system that could move through different departments, different objects and, potentially, right into the field.
The room to explore that wider creative direction came through
Hyperseal’s support of SCN, much in the same spirit as their support of Tangerine Film Studio through Libang Libu.
Sometimes the most useful support is simply giving an idea a little room to become more than the first brief asked for.
And that, really, is what happened here.
