Enterprise brand experience

Mastercard

The Priceless Wall

A ten screen wall in a corporate lobby, running all day in front of the same people. I designed the collages, the visual language and every transition animation. Underneath sits one rule: each segment opens and closes on the same frame, so the running order can change forever and the design never has to.

Role Product & Visual Designer
Team Team project
Surface Ten screen lobby wall
Toolkit Premiere Pro, Photoshop, Illustrator
Collage design Motion design Storyboarding Large format layout Content systems Brand governance Digital signage
Watch the wall ↓ ← Back
The finished wall at full build: a mosaic of photographs interleaved with orange and yellow colour blocks around a central mastercard priceless moments lockup
One frame of the finished wall: ten screens, and not a stock photograph in it.
The wall

A morning in the lobby

Here it is running. Everything after this explains how it is built.

The Priceless Wall, silent, running at double speed.

Watch the two circles. They open into windows, the windows fill with people, the people leave, and the circles close again. The mark is not stamped on this wall. It is the mechanism.

Ten. Five screens across, two down, and a cross of black bezel running straight through the middle of everything.

A lobby wall is the hardest brief in signage because of who watches it: the same few hundred people, every morning, for years. And it is not a designer who keeps it alive, it is whoever inherits the login that quarter.

So it fails in one of two directions: it gets boring, or it gets edited until it stops looking like the brand. Which meant the deliverable was never a video. It was a set of rules for making videos that cannot go wrong.

The shape of the problem. The centre of the composition is a bezel join, not a pixel, so the mark has to be drawn to survive a black line through its waist.
  1. 01

    It never stops

    Open hours, every day. Anything with a visible seam gets found within a week.

  2. 02

    The audience repeats

    Employees and visitors on the same route daily. Variety has to be structural, not a longer edit.

    Where the system earns its keep
  3. 03

    The editors are not designers

    Content changes through a CMS form. Whatever they can reach has to be safe to reach.

The idea

One frame everything agrees on

Pick a single frame. Insist that every transition begins on it and every transition ends on it. Do that, and the order of the show stops mattering.

It is the least interesting image in the project and the most important one, because it is the joint. Two segments that both start and end here are interchangeable by construction. There is no seam to hide, because there is nothing to line up.

The handshake frame: the Mastercard mark centred on a black ten screen wall, with the bezel lines crossing through it
The handshake frame. The cross through the mark is the screen edges, not artwork.

Anatomy of a segment

A segment is three parts, and only the middle one is anybody else’s business.

Locked

Intro transition

Short video

Opens on the handshake frame and hands off into the layout.

Editable

Content

Live content

Images, videos and feeds, swapped by the client at will.

Locked

Outro transition

Short video

Collects the layout back up and lands on the handshake frame.

The black tiles at either end are the handshake frame. Nothing in the middle is allowed to move them.

Locked choreography guarding an open middle. That ratio is the whole governance model, drawn as a timeline instead of written as a policy.

How do you give a client complete control of the content and none of the design?
Segment types

Two ways to hold a photograph

Content needs a container. I drew two, and picked shapes that were already Mastercard’s rather than inventing a third language.

The Bubbles segment type: around ten circular portrait photographs of mixed sizes spread across a blue night city skyline, with dark weather and social media panels holding the right edge
Bubbles Circles of varying size on a panoramic backdrop, with optional sidebars for local weather, a social feed or video.
The Boxes segment type: a mosaic of rectangular photographs interleaved with solid orange and yellow colour blocks, with a black centre column carrying the mastercard priceless moments lockup
Boxes Rectangles of varying size and orientation, interleaved with brand colour blocks. A video can sit in a box like any photo.

The circle was not a style choice. The mark is two circles, so a wall full of them reads as the brand from a hundred feet with no logo in sight. The boxes exist for the opposite reason: they are the only shape that tiles a wall this wide without leaving awkward air.

Same segment, different personality

An iteration is the same concept with a different layout and content mix. Three of each, off two levers.

The same Bubbles layout composited over a blue Dubai skyline and waterfront instead of the previous city
Lever one: change the city underneath. Same circles, same feeds, and the wall has a new mood. This one is Dubai.

Lever two: what goes inside a frame. A film in a circle and a film across five screens are not the same design problem.

The Bubbles layout with a wide cinematic video still spanning the centre screens: a man in a suit sitting on a rooftop ledge, with circular portraits to the left and the feed panels to the right
Cinema scaleThe film takes the centre panels and the circles get out of its way.
The same layout with a narrower HD scale video panel and the circular portraits rearranged around it
HD scaleThe film behaves like one more tile, and the circles keep their positions.

None of it needs a new design system, which is the point: variety was made structural, so nobody would ever have to commission more of it.

The running order

Six segments, alternating type. Locked in, open middle, locked out, then the next one.

  1. Bubbles 1 Segment 1
  2. Boxes 1 Segment 2
  3. Bubbles 2 Segment 3
  4. Boxes 2 Segment 4
  5. Bubbles 3 Segment 5
  6. Boxes 3 Segment 6

Run the set, then back to segment one

  • Handshake frame
  • Locked transition
  • Editable content

Nothing in that order is load bearing. Drop one, repeat one, add a type that does not exist yet: the handshake frame absorbs all of it. That is the payoff for spending the first week on a black frame with a logo on it.

The storyboard

The mark comes apart, holds the content, and puts itself back together

The Bubbles segment, beat by beat. Watch what the two circles do.

Drag a frame sideways to pan across the wall.

  1. ClosedThe mark, centred on black
  2. OpensThe circles become frames
  3. HoldsThe frames fill with content
  4. ClosedAnd the mark is back

The same four states, every segment, forever

  1. 00 Start point
    The ten screen wall showing the Mastercard mark, two overlapping circles in red and orange, centred on black, with the thin screen bezel lines crossing straight through the middle of it

    The handshake frame

    The mark, centred, on black. Every intro opens here and every outro lands here. That is the whole trick.

  2. 01 Welcome, in
    Storyboard frame: the words Welcome to mastercard in grey on the left of a black wall, the Mastercard mark on the right, mid fade

    Copy drifts in, the mark makes room

    Copy fades up and drifts toward the mark, which slides right to make room. Nothing enters from off screen. The frame rearranges itself.

  3. 02 Welcome, out
    Storyboard frame: the Welcome to mastercard copy fading out while the left circle of the mark has become a circular photograph of a lit city skyline at night, expanding across the black wall

    The left circle becomes a window

    The left circle fades to a photograph and expands. The logo is not cut away from, it is opened. A different city sits behind it each cycle.

  4. 03 Frames draw in
    Storyboard frame: a wide night time city skyline filling the ten screen wall, with four thin white circle outlines of different sizes drawn onto the left, no content inside them yet

    Empty circles, on purpose

    Circular frames draw themselves onto the photograph, then stay empty for a beat. The pause is deliberate: long enough to actually look at what is behind them.

  5. 04 Dynamic content
    Storyboard frame: the same skyline with four circular portrait photographs filled in on the left, and two dark panels on the right showing a weather forecast row and a social media feed

    the CMS takes the wheel

    The wall stops being a video and becomes a live layout. Photos land in the circles, feeds hold the right edge, and everything here is editable without a designer in the room.

  6. 05 Frames draw out
    Storyboard frame: the city skyline with the portraits and feeds gone, leaving two large overlapping translucent circle outlines in the centre of the wall where the mark sits

    Two rings, coming home

    Everything leaves and the frames draw out in reverse, until two circles are left standing. Those two circles are the mark, reassembling out of the furniture it held the content in.

  7. 06 Return to start
    The wall back at its start point: the Mastercard mark alone on black, bezel lines crossing it

    Back to the handshake

    Black returns under the rings and the mark is solid again. Frame 00 a second time, deliberately, so the next segment can be anything at all.

Priceless moments

The other segment: a wall built out of small good days

Same three part structure, different job. Where Bubbles is one place and a few faces, this is dozens at once.

Drag a frame sideways to pan across the wall.

  1. 01 Transition in
    Storyboard frame: a black wall with a small Mastercard mark, the mastercard wordmark and the words priceless moments stacked in the centre column, everything else empty

    The mark steps aside

    The mark shrinks, picks up a wordmark, and settles into the centre column. It is a caption now, not a subject, and the other nine screens are free.

  2. 02 Collage builds
    Storyboard frame: a black wall part way through building a mosaic, with a cluster of photographs and orange colour blocks on the left, a few on the right, and the priceless moments lockup in the centre

    Tiles arrive one at a time

    Photographs fade in tile by tile. Colour blocks fill the gaps, so the wall never looks like it is waiting on an image. That is the whole reason the blocks exist.

  3. 03 Full wall
    Storyboard frame: the fully built mosaic filling all ten screens with photographs and orange colour blocks on both sides of the central priceless moments lockup

    Every tile populated

    Edge to edge on both sides of the lockup. The centre can carry a video instead, which is the difference between a mood board and a broadcast.

Closing reverses the build: images fade out one by one to black and the mark, which is the handshake frame again.

The photographs were the last thing to change

The storyboard argued the system with stand in photography, the warm generic kind every pitch reaches for.

What went up instead was a year of the company’s own people. Treating the imagery as content rather than design is the dullest rule in the system, and the reason the wall stopped being decoration and became a company looking at itself.

The storyboard version of the full collage, built from generic stand in lifestyle photography
Proposed: stand in imagery.
The shipped version of the same collage, built from the client’s own photography
Shipped: the company’s own photographs.

Layouts stayed a studio job. Every photograph was theirs to change. The shape of a tile came back to us. The least glamorous rule in the system, and the one that kept protecting the wall once it was live.

Handover

What they can change, and what they cannot

A signage system is only as good as the worst day someone updates it. So the line was drawn explicitly, not left to taste.

Theirs

  • Every photograph and video in the editable middle
  • Which live feeds appear, and how much room they take
  • The backdrop behind the mark, a different scene each cycle
  • The running order, and whether a given segment runs at all
  • The centre of the collage, photograph or video

Locked

  • The handshake frame, and the rule that every transition touches it
  • All intro and outro choreography
  • The grid layouts, sizes and positions of every frame
  • The circle and box vocabulary, and the colour blocks between them
  • Mark placement, scale and clearance across a bezel cross
  • The held pause before content arrives

Together the two columns are the actual product: a client who can change everything they want to and nothing they would regret. Nobody gets talked out of a bad idea, because the bad idea is not reachable.

Outcome

Design the joint, not the show

It shipped, and the wall went live. It ran the lobby with a team keeping it going without us. The design that mattered was never a single frame: it was the decision that every frame had to return to one place.

The brief looked like motion work. It was a systems brief wearing a motion brief’s clothes.

10 screens, five across and two down
2 segment types, extensible by design
3 iterations drawn of each
1 frame every segment returns to

What I owned

A team project. What follows is what I owned end to end.

  • Every Priceless collage: tile grids, photo selection, and the colour block system that keeps the wall complete while it loads
  • The visual design of both segment types and every iteration: circle and box vocabulary, frame sizes, and mark placement across a bezel cross
  • All of the animation, cut in Premiere Pro: the welcome drift, the frames drawing in and out, the rings reassembling
  • Layout artwork and photo prep in Photoshop and Illustrator, composed across all ten panels
  • Storyboarding the beats and their timings

Key takeaways

  • Interchangeability beats length. A handful of reorderable segments outlast one long film, and cost far less to keep alive.
  • Put the brand in the mechanism. A mark that becomes the content frame gets remembered. A mark in the corner gets ignored.
  • Design the empty state of attention. Holding a frame empty so people could look was the most argued and most correct decision in the project.
  • Governance is a design deliverable. Deciding what the client cannot reach protected the work better than any style guide.

Deliverables: Priceless collage layouts · two segment types, three iterations each · storyboard with timings · transition animation · large format layout grids · CMS content model · handover documentation

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