Sticky media
Challenge
Cosmic Jam is a technology company producing vertical media and entertainment for a mobile-first audience. Their flagship app, DramaPops, is their founding success story paving the runway required to expand their portfolio and entertainment vertical under Codeway. For Sprint Department, our challenge was to equip Cosmic Jam with a brand identity that was as deep as it was wide. Crafting a macro brand toolkit that could not only house their existing portfolio, but facilitate the launch of nine additional media genres poised for production in the next 18-36 months.
Strategy
We joined an already active namestorm that quickly identified the frontrunner name ‘Cosmic Jam’. Echoing their internal strategy ‘sticky media’ inspired by the book by Chip and Dan Heath ‘Make it Stick’, paired with their ambitious goal to build a universe of entertainment.
Cosmic Jam write, cast, shoot, script, produce and publish their own media built for the vertical screen and micro-drama category. They also hire and nurture local and global talent. So, communicating such a career opportunity and upskilling trajectory was key.
Cosmic Jam, although an autonomous team, are supercharged by the power of Codeway's AI research, data infrastructure, and growth engine. The brand identity needed to signal the already-established credibility in the market at the masterbrand level. While becoming more genre-specific and playful at the bottom of the funnel and when attracting top talent.
Identity
We designed Cosmic Jam’s custom wordmark to be ‘badge-worthy’. The team had to want to wear it just as much as share it. The letterforms allowed us to build a chunky geometric space-inspired aesthetic that looked at home on a bag or a billboard.
On day one of the sprint, during our Director Workshop, there was a unanimous decision to approach layout and typography like classic film posters. So naturally, the condensed grotesque variable font Special Gothic won early doors.
The nine genres of media within Cosmic Jam are podcasts, games, comics, kids, news, AI novels, audio drama, content creation and DramaPops. All colour, logic and design systems had to work independently and collectively.
Defining the material texture of the brand property and objects was an iterative process and crucial to the idea and became a dedicated 5-day sprint.
The challenge was finding the balance between ‘too spacey’ and ‘too jammy’ and blending those terms with texture and colour. Chrome metal, jelly, glass, stardust, candy cane, porcelain and crystalised sugar all had their moment, until we found the right look and feel.
The winning moodboard reference for the material of the Midjourney prompt and image library was a glittered jelly shoe your sister would have worn in 2003.
By adding the rimlight to the model, we were able to signal the genre-specific colours and environments, while maintaining a cohesive brand-wide visual language.
“Finding the balance of ‘cosmic’ and ‘jam’ within the material texture to consistently generate objects with nine unique rimlights was an exciting but challenging problem to solve.”
—Joshua Andrew, Co-founder @ Sprint Dept
Outcome
The Cosmic Jam team has launched 70+ original series in 18 months, produced across several countries with multiple worldwide hits.
In short, they’re locked in. They know their process and their audience. We believe the team is now well-equipt with a robust brand identity to show up consistently as they expand their portfolio and establish new genres within their category.
A big thank you to Burkay Çağıltı, Behram and the team for knowing what they want and communicating the vision at speed—we’re excited for the merch.
