Rivian
2022
Rivian is a future-first company dedicated to creating vehicles that are made for the planet, not at its expense. They needed an internal, stylish, visual design system to match their overall design ethos — one that is anchored in nature, quietly confident, and always down to explore. We called shotgun.
EV-focused, UI Design
Central to this project was UI design, a comprehensive visual system focused on Rivian’s style book for the ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance System) and Central Display screens, and an Unreal Engine scene that depicted one of our designed environments for the car.
Rivian envisaged something beautiful and iconic, a dynamic and interactive experience that would eventually be unique to each user and stand apart from the more realistic approaches associated with other EV manufacturers.
The Unreal Engine Room
What we discovered early on was that this would be an exercise in translation.
Our 2D stylings comprised of hand-drawn illustration explorations would also need to appear as 3D for other use cases in the Rivian visual experience.
Using Unreal Engine, a popular real-time graphics platform, we took our stylized, graphical look — with clean outlines and “toon shading” — and re-contextualize it for the 3D world.
What came from our 2D-to-3D transfer was something new — a 2.5D hybrid that helped visualize the spatial representation of our elements in Rivian’s system.
But we still had to map it out in real-time to demonstrate how everything would move and how elements related to one another. So we used traditional 2D animation as our inspiration again before applying it in Unreal.
In 2D animation, layers are placed on top of one another and moved at different speeds to create parallax.
Our approach was similar: starting with 2D sprite sheets, we were able to place layers to scale in the environment around our car model. This created a very natural sense of parallax while holding true to our graphical look.
The Map to Success
Communication and collaboration kept the wheels in motion for this one. We worked closely with Rivian to ensure they were included in every step of the evolution of their visual system — sharing discoveries with them along the way.
In the end, we were able to produce a visual look that stands out from the crowded field, a look that feels individualized and hand-crafted.
BUCK
Executive Creative Director
Kevin Walker
Group Creative Director
Jenny Ko
Executive Producer
Justin Harris
Creative Director
Gosha Kuznetsov
Philip Sierzega
Producer
Ed Smith
Head of 3D / 3D Supervisor
Marc Steinberg
Art Director
Ana Gomez Bernaus
Brand Strategy Director
Marla Moore
Brand Strategist
Kevin Pires
Lead Creative Technologist
Daniel Vettorazi
Thomas Robertson
Design
Colin Graham
Gunnar Pettersson
Marcus Collins
Rich Kelly
Modeling
Eric Xu
2D Animation
Adelir Boeira
Carlos Sandoval
Creative Technologist
Joseph Caddell
