The Grid Escape Room
The Brief
Lolipop, the creators of the Bunyadi naked restaurant, asked us to brand and design the UI for their immersive cocktail experience "The Grid". The project required us to create visual identities for two opposing entities. One for a seemingly harmless corporation that was definitely evil, the other for a bootstrap hacker group. We did this in just over two weeks.
We started with mood boards to try and build out two opposing directions. Drawing from my wealth of useless knowledge in the realms of science fiction. We took several directions the client and got a good steer on a preferred direction. Best feedback i've ever had – "This is way too blade runner Jake...".
What we did
We focussed on a few key moments throughout the experience. Exploring how styles might adapt with the players progression through the escape room. Initial interactions with Neosight would feel sterile, overly friendly and corporate. As they go deeper into the Evil AI's control room, things would get darker and more complicated.
At certain moments The Grid would make contact with players, and the UI would start to glitch. Then messages would be sent via terminal window like pop-ups. Prototypes were then created in Framer, combining looping videos with interactive UI. I used random number generators to create looping animations. Which would move unpredictably and make the AI feel more alive.
The Grid opened in October 2018 at a secret location in Southwark.
