Never Walk Straight.
Design Strategy
Working across this many formats for one brand meant the connective thread couldn’t be a visual style. It had to be a way of thinking. Every deliverable, whether it’s a bar built to survive a hundred different venues or a chrome octopus discovering a vodka bottle, is solving the same problem: how does Zigzag show up somewhere new without losing what makes it Zigzag?
A System Built to Travel
Offline activations meant a new venue, a new size constraint, a new event brief every time, and no design that only worked once was worth the effort. The bar and menu system was built modular from the start: locked once, then reused endlessly instead of redesigned each time. It’s since run at concerts, bars, and brand events across the country, freeing the events team to focus on what’s new about each event instead of rebuilding the basics, and building brand recall simply through repetition, in rooms the brand couldn’t otherwise control.
Rube Goldberg, Three Ways
A three-video campaign built entirely in Blender (physics, sculpting, and animation from scratch) led start to finish: concept, storyboard, animation, sound design, edited and colour-graded in DaVinci Resolve, with After Effects motion graphics in the final episode. Each film builds a Rube Goldberg machine that only makes sense in Zigzag’s world, taking two to three weeks each from concept to final output. They were some of my most technically ambitious work of that year and, tellingly, the least engaged-with; a reminder that craft and traction don’t always arrive together.
Spotted
Spotted is Zigzag’s campaign built on its own tagline: the brand “spotting” people who ‘Never Walk Straight’. Tattoo artists, punk and liberty-spike hairstylists, Yoga instructors, each paired with a bartender crafting a cocktail inspired by their work. Led by a fellow designer and the brand’s content strategist, the campaign ran as a series across each theme. Working alongside it, I created AI-generated content, exotic animals that appeared discovering the bottle between episodes, built using Google Veo 3, Higgsfield, and Seedance, extending the “unconventional, never walk straight” world into the gaps between the main series.
Outcome
The bar and menu system has run at hundreds of activations since it was built. Every Zigzag event since, without exception. The Rube Goldberg series and Spotted content ran as paid ads and social content.
Reflection
Every brand takes real trial and error to understand. The Rube Goldberg films were some of the most ambitious work I made all year, and also the least watched, which taught me that craft and engagement don’t automatically follow each other.