Open Innovation Labs | Wall Graphic

As always, there are many new projects going on at Red Hat all the time. A huge one for Red Hat is opening a new Open Innovation Labs space in Boston. It's a brand new facility where our customers' developers come to workshop their ideas with Red Hat experts. They learn, collaborate, build, and leave with a finished idea, application, or attitude they can take back to their own IT enterprise.

Emma Eble (Multimedia Designer) and I took the opportunity to contribute to this project head on. Most of the physical space for the lab had already been established, but some wall graphics were still needed to accommodate the space and help promote open collaboration. As with the start of any Red Hat project, in our role as designers we had many conversations with the Open Innovation Labs team about their expectations and ideas. We sought their help in getting to the essence of what the space is meant to represent.

The two areas I've circled on the map are the spaces we focused on.

As we started to design, we did tons of whiteboarding and team collaboration to narrow down all of the ideas flying around in our heads. We wanted to create work that related to the Open Innovation Labs team's mission and vision statement while keeping true to the Red Hat brand. This was our first pass of ideas:

Concept 1: The art of the possible

Concept 2: Building and exploring

Concept 3: Open Innovation Labs grid

The Open Innovation Labs team gave us positive feedback about all three, but they were most interested in concepts 1 and 3. They believed concept 1 revealed the endless possibilities of what attendees could unlock during an Open Innovation Labs engagement and concept 3 wove together a story by creating a series of individual visual metaphors within an organized grid system.

We were challenged to incorporate both designs within the two walls, which became an easy natural progression for the design. The possibilities would be on the first wall, and as you walked by the second wall, the graphic would articulate a more organized story. With an official direction, we were able to start exploring colors and make the design come to life.

We tried many different possibilities:

In every presentation to the Open Innovation Labs team, we made sure to put the elements within the actual wall layouts so the team could visually understand how things were actually going to appear.

First wall:

Second wall:

After this presentation, we reconnected with Red Hat's Global Workforce Solutions (GWS) architectural team working on the physical space to get a refresh of the space to consider any new elements that might have come about. The Open Innovation Labs team considered all of those elements and chose the blue-yellow color option, which was a bold, fun approach to the wall graphic.

With the color decided, the graphic went through some final revisions, including removing the "Achieve the art of the possible," to not detract from the branded Red Hat Open Innovation Labs, and to avoid the possibility of that tagline not being relevant to the lab space if used out of context.

This is the final art:

First wall:

Second wall:

The graphic was formatted for the lab space, and is now placed in the Boston office and in the London Open Innovation Labs office as well.

The completion of the wall graphic inspired a brand overhaul for Open Innovation Labs. With the creation of logos and new animation videos, the brand quickly evolved and will be a recognizable asset for the many customers who participate in a Red Hat Open Innovation Labs engagement.