Purple Creative used its experience designing for the drinks sector to create stunning visual identities for Castrol oil.
Whatever way you spin it, motor oil isn't very exciting, and it's hard to come up with a visual identity for a range of different lubricants when they're all very similar translucent brown liquids.
So when it needed a set of visual identities for its eight hero global Strategic Brand lubricants, including those used in the aviation, energy, manufacturing and space industries, Castrol turned to Purple Creative, an agency that's made its name working with the drinks sector, to devise a fluid new look.
Purple created a unique and evocative look for each different lubricant
Over an 18-month project, Purple Creative has brought to life the idea of Castrol being 'liquid engineers', with a set of 'Fluid in Action' CG imagery that presents Castrol's eight products as a wider unified family, yet allowing each of the eight lubricants to express itself differently, and demonstrate its individual properties and strengths.
Tight swarming lines are used to express Syntilo's high-speed performance
And while each of the Strategic Brand lubricants look pretty much identical out of the tin, Purple was able to inject a little more personality into each one, using CG to render up fluid visualisations that capture the main feature of each lubricant. So for example, for Molub-alloy, used for the heaviest loads such as steel works, mining and cement works, Purple devised a fluid made of graphic blocks bound together to form a solid chainmail armoured structure, in order to show its strength.
Purple also designed a set of images showing Castrol's products in action
Purple also created an image library for each Strategic Brand, showing the 'Fluid in Action' graphics functioning in their usual industry environment or a close-up showing the technical detail of the precision lubricant.
The end results are one of the most memorable pieces of Castrol creative since the company's iconic Castrol GTX 'Liquid engineering' TV ads from the 1980s (which did indeed manage to make a translucent brown liquid look, if not exciting, then at least really interesting).
Says Gary Westlake, founding partner and creative director at Purple, "Many different B2B industries around the world, from car automotive plants to the Mars Rover, wouldn’t move without Castrol’s products. Their lubricants allow amazing things to happen, so we wanted to bring them to life in a memorable and powerful way, and hopefully the visual identities reflect the many precise functions each Strategic Brand achieves for Castrol."
Get the Creative Bloq Newsletter
Daily design news, reviews, how-tos and more, as picked by the editors.
Jim McCauley is a writer, performer and cat-wrangler who started writing professionally way back in 1995 on PC Format magazine, and has been covering technology-related subjects ever since, whether it's hardware, software or videogames. A chance call in 2005 led to Jim taking charge of Computer Arts' website and developing an interest in the world of graphic design, and eventually led to a move over to the freshly-launched Creative Bloq in 2012. Jim now works as a freelance writer for sites including Creative Bloq, T3 and PetsRadar, specialising in design, technology, wellness and cats, while doing the occasional pantomime and street performance in Bath and designing posters for a local drama group on the side.
Tottenham Hotspur FC's nostalgic rebrand was a "labour of love"
