OCVIBE
Branded Placemaking for the Curious Class
Experiential Branding
2023-2025
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— OCVIBE is a $5 billion, 100-acre sports and entertainment district designed to be the epicenter of everyday inspiration in Orange County. I served as the central creative stakeholder, leading the development of the brand and experiential content strategy for an incredibly complex house of brands steeped in technology.
BRAND EXPRESSION
Everything began with
—a word
that hinted at movement, possibility, and perspective. It was the seed of an identity that needed to flex across dozens of environments and platforms, revealing something new depending on where you encountered it.
My role was to transform the logo into a living system capable of adapting to new contexts within the district. I built from that spark outward, defining the principles, structure, and expressive framework that allowed the brand to scale, experiment, and remain coherent.
RESPONSIBILITIES
BRAND LEADERSHIP, CREATIVE DIRECTION, CONTENT STRATEGY, PLACEMAKING, BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
The word "Epicenter" became a way of seeing, giving the visual system a single strategic point of origin to help others understand the brand's personality. Every decision, from stylization to motion to layout, is traced back to this vision. The result was a brand that didn’t rely on decoration to feel expressive, but on strategy to give every visual moment purpose.
Reverberation and reveals became core visual treatments that I wove through the design system to mirror how the district behaves in real life—crowds cheering, music pulsing, moments colliding. Not only did these open the door for exploration, it gave traditional marketing a sense of movement that easily translated to animation.
The system needed to feel future-forward without sacrificing longevity, and expressive without becoming too stylistic. Right Grotesk by Pangram offered that balance with 99 styles ranging from ultra-condensed to ultra-wide, it gave the brand enormous range while preserving consistency, enabling layouts and motion to flex endlessly while remaining unmistakably cohesive.
We used color as a strategic tool to create a system that worked forwards or backwards and allowed for endless variation. Two primary palettes transitioned seamlessly from oranges to blues with the time of day or messaging, while each secondary color was paired with an analogous partner to differentiate where you were in the district at any given time.
The shape language became the brand’s expressive engine. Brutalist in spirit—with bold geometry, thick strokes, sharp angles, and moments of softness—the system moved fluidly between 2D and 3D. Whether static or in motion, these forms reinforced a single idea: OCVIBE is a place with many layers, where exploration is rewarded and no two encounters are the same.
Patterns lived on a spectrum from simple to expressive. Anchored by an underlying grid and built from the shape library, they scaled effortlessly across formats and colorways—often appearing as transitions that rippled through the brand, revealing new moments of discovery along the way.
Built on a strict grid and a tightly defined style system, icons borrowed cues from the shape language to ensure cohesion across the visual system. In motion, abstract shape overlays activated each icon. The set balanced instant recognition with a quiet sophistication, shaped by the same visual DNA as the rest of the brand.
From the start, the brand was built to move. Animations carried the energy of the district, shifting and flowing across digital walls, screens, and interactive surfaces. Each choice reinforced the narrative of discovery: fluid transitions, subtle gestures that spark curiosity, and prismatic movements that let viewers see in new ways.
My vision was to blend 2D and 3D to create a brand strong enough to hold its shape but fluid enough to reflect whoever's looking. The refractive glass treatments transform the logo into an optical experience—depth, transparency, and refraction invite you to look closer. This transmorphic approach created a constraint-based framework for future personalization.
Here's the thing about transmorphic brands: they're hard to explain. So we made a video. Years of collaborative strategy and design crystallized into one story that could make the system click for anyone—internal teams, partners, vendors. We started by writing the brand narrative, storyboarding beats that introduced OCVIBE
before diving into the system's facets. The challenge? Showing that a transmorphic system this expansive isn't about showing it all at once—it's about understanding the combinatorial possibilities. We even selected music to match the district's energy, answering: what does OCVIBE sound like? It sounds like sunshine in your pocket.
IN SHORT
Building this brand involved more than a good design system. It was as much an education task as a design task to help everyone become a visionary brand steward.
Content Strategy
Campaigns
Digital Design
EXPERIENTIAL
