Little Troop

0:01 Greetings. Hi everyone. I'm No. >> Hi everyone. I'm Jeremy and we're Little Troop. We're a design studio based here in New York in Brooklyn. >> a big big thank you to It's Nice for having us today. We are so honored and it's very cool to be here. A bit of background to us. For those who don't know Little Troop, we're both designers. So, we're both Australian and also happen to be married with two kids. Those aren't our kids. They are us. , but we will be getting to our kids in a second though as we talk through the behind the scenes process of a project that , it's nice that have asked us to cover. , Jeremy and I met in 2012 back in Melbourne and within a year had moved to New York together on a total whim, but have stayed here ever since. We both initially bounced around different studios and agencies. My focus was more in graphic design and Jez's was more in digital.

1:00 Then by 2019 I'd made the jump to freelance. And Jez had watched me sleep in one too many mornings before he decided to quit his 9 to5 and join me too. We sort of realized that he could do all the digital things that my projects needed and rather than answering to his boss at work, he could instead just answer to me, his real boss, , from the couch. So, Little Troop was born. , and in basics, we're a design studio that really does a bit of everything. Branding, digital art direction, packaging, motion, illustration, even copyrightiting sometimes. This may or may not be an accurate depiction of us. >> so little Troop wasn't just started for the sleepins, cuz those went out the window pretty quickly. , but it really came from wanting to create work that had soul and was memorable and felt one of a kind and that maybe brought in some humor and let us have fun while we were doing it. And ultimately, Little Troop has become driven by three key things. Craft, culture, and imagination. So, by craft, we mean putting importance on the details with intention and finesse and in ways that might feel unexpected. By culture, we mean designing through a lens informed by what's going on in the world rather than in a vacuum. And by imagination, we mean creating work that pushes past mediocrity, that has a character and feels inherently original. >> , another common thread that we've found connects all of our work is striking this balance of what might feel fresh to an audience, but at the same time inherently familiar. To do this, we often look to decades past for inspiration. Taking the best bits of what's worked brilliantly in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, and feels familiar to an audience, but has perhaps been lost or forgotten. And working out ways to reimagine it or recontextualize it or mash it up with to the point where it feels really new and hopefully exciting and special.

3:14 And then also tapping into our inner kid. Taking that power that kids have to create things intuitively with a sense of play and looseness has really been a big one for us. It hasn't really ever been that difficult. Jeremy and I have always sort of felt like we are big kids at heart, but sort of embracing that sense of play and looseness has really become a bit of our secret source and seems to have helped manifest some of our most creative work. And so our kids have helped with this, especially for a project we recently completed for the Museum of Modern Art, who commissioned us to design the identity and campaign for their first ever 5-day family festival.

4:04 The festival was called Another World and it focused on blending the themes of nature and creativity and inspiring kids to think about the natural world in new ways through a mix of interactive art installations, screenings, and workshops across the five levels of the museum. The ultimate goal was to get more families into the museum during the dark depths of New York winter. So, it needed to feel exciting for both the parents buying the tickets and the kids experiencing the festival at the same time. Momma's brief was pretty loose and only had a few call outs. It needed to sell in the theme of the festival and obviously stay on brand to Momma using their color palette and type face. So dream brief for us and in some ways one could say it was also dream timing given that we had a toddler around to help with creative direction.

5:01 This is Luca and we'd spent the last 3 years essentially in his world and had sort of inadvertently become spectators of a human's peak imagination at play. It was sort of like we'd been subconsciously training for this project and it really wasn't hard to find inspiration as it was around us quite literally. But in the end, the timing was actually our biggest hurdle.

5:29 , when the email from MMO hit in October last year, I happened to be 8 months pregnant, expecting our second baby, Hugo. Not ideal, but were we going to let a small detail like an incoming completely dependent human that required 247 attention deter us from a project with one of the most iconic art institutions in the world? Against all historical social progress made for women and maternity leave, we said yes to the project and Hugo's deadline essentially became Oh, Hugo's due date essentially became our deadline.

6:09 So we very quickly jumped into concepts. Momma had mentioned exploring the idea of characters which we really loved and so we started drawing and pretty quickly came up with this set of characters that used simple shapes and repetition and flat color. We wanted them to feel like they could be from another world but also restrained enough to feel at home in a museum.

6:33 We didn't really have time to overengineer the process or overthink anything and had to really quickly sketch up what we felt was right for the brief. So, we ended up designing really intuitively, sort of like a kid would. And we also channeled a bit of what would Luca do? Our living room rug is now lava. His dinners come in food face form. He can make portals to anywhere from a cardboard box. And so we drew on this idea of looking at the natural world and how it can take on new lives through kids' eyes.

7:12 We also explored more typographic directions using materials that kids use like paint and crayon and markers and play-doh to reference nature, creativity, and letter forms all at once a bit more abstractly. , but ultimately Momma picked the characters and of all the concepts, it was what we'd sketched up quickest and sort of second guess least and also had the most fun creating. , the festival artist and activities were a real mix of nature meets creativity and included everything from building cardboard cities and becoming a flower with model magic to inventing new life forms using AR. So, we designed the final mly crew of characters as a visual mashup of ecology personified, a mix of plants and animallike creatures that kids would recognize just enough to understand but that were offbeat enough to inspire their own creative interpretations.

8:07 Flowerike plant life with weave stems and everchanging leaves were mixed in with purple baby frogs with parents that emerge from portals to create a little well that ultimately felt equal parts Mario and Miffy inspired with a touch of the Muppets. , we sort of loved how in the Mushroom Kingdom, everyday plants and animals were transformed into these otherworldly characters with the simple addition of eyes and flipping in colors that felt fun. The simplicity and reductive graphic nature of Luca's Dick Bruner collection served as a perfect reference point to align with Momma's own minimal identity and the undefinable nature of the Muppets characters felt sort of relevant to is it a mushroom, a turtle, a frog? , unfortunately this character looked a little too much like Bert though for the MoMA team and was the one character who got a few edits. The campaign was extensive and included out of home digital print signage, cafe placemats and retail merchandise and bringing in a sense of playfulness and sort of endless possibility to inspire kids was really at the heart of what we were doing.

9:24 But we also knew that ultimately the identity of success would hinge on whether it appealed to parents.

9:30 So we designed everything with this sort of graphic simplicity that lent almost austere in moments bringing in sharp geometry, shocked faces overly cute smiles and an overall graphic treatment that felt understated in tone rather than anything overly stylized or childish. Meanwhile, , our little man ended up arriving Earthside a little earlier than expected. , Hugo came into the world at the very early hour of 5:00 a.m. One Thursday morning. , and here's Jeremy in the hospital at 9:00 a.m.

10:07 On his laptop, finishing up and sending off some files due that day. Yes, that is my foot in the hospital bed a few hours after giving birth. So while Noam was recovering from that, I focused on the important tasks at hand that any good father should take on with a newborn. Animation for out of home, web, and social roll out. Thankfully, Momma loved our initial simple animation concepts and agreed that subtlety was going to work better for both parents and kids than anything overly complex or high energy.

10:46 So we l So we lent into simplicity and use small motion moves that would bring the festival copy to life, making the characters pop up and grow and animating the eyes to blink and dart around the headlines. For the on-site collateral, we had a lot of fun and designed entry wristbands in different colorways for different days of the week and oversized badges for staff designed to signal help with them being able to choose whichever character they identified with. And a printed festival guide that included the event programming and visitor info that we tried to make fun enough to palm off to a toddler in need of some stimulation. >> here's our friend Rise in the museum sitting down to inspect it. We were also asked to design wayfinding signage that we colorcoded to mirror the printed program and placemats for the museum's cafeteria that we designed to be colored in as a way for kids to create their own version of the characters. Then for retail merchandise, we designed tote bags which Luca helped road test. I just go to shopping and look. >> Good job, Lou.

12:10 >> I got all the things. Look, >> you got all the things. >> Yep. >> And then probably our favorite thing we were asked to make was a set of clear vinyl stickers that ended up covering our laptops and also the floors of the museum. The event ended up selling out all five days, which was a big relief. It was a total honor to see it all come to life in such a thoughtfully crafted event. And although clearly not impressive enough for this guy, Luca, who's arguably our harshest critic, seemed to be thankfully quite taken with the whole thing. By chance, some of our best friends, Tined, were headlining the festival with this incredible interactive AR art installation designed to converge the digital and physical natural worlds. So being able to see our work alongside theirs on the sixth floor of MoMA was extremely fun.

13:12 But the whole experience sort of culminated when we were watching Luca color in the cafeteria placemats. Something we'd created again very quickly, very intuitively, really without any time for second guessing. And it was suddenly right there in front of us in the middle of MoMA, which was a bit surreal.

13:28 And we sort of just realized that for this project, the power was really just in sitting down like a kid would and just sort of drawing the plant however we wanted, in the purest way. , and it was ultimately a really nice reminder of the power in finding that inner kid and channeling the confidence and imagination of possibly the world's most underrated reference point, a three-year-old. That's it for us. Thank you.