Microsoft · Windows 8 Launch
Windows 8 reimagined the PC around touch, tiles and a single idea: Windows Everywhere. We launched it as one of the biggest campaigns in Microsoft's history — a 1.8-billion-dollar rollout across 42 countries, from a Times Square takeover to the covers of Vogue and The New Yorker.
In October 2012, Microsoft bet the company on a new kind of Windows. Windows 8 threw out the Start button and rebuilt the desktop around a touch-first Metro interface, with Live Tiles that turned static icons into a screen that was alive with your life.
The ambition was one operating system across desktops, tablets and phones. Our job was to launch that idea to the world at a scale that matched it, so that the same design language felt at home in a subway station, on a magazine cover and in someone's hands.
Overview
The role
Associate Creative Director on Microsoft's global Windows 8 launch at Crispin Porter + Bogusky. Broadcast, launch films and the campaign world for the Windows Everywhere platform.
Define
Windows had always been the thing you worked on. Windows 8 wanted to be the thing you lived on, on any screen you picked up. That meant the launch couldn't feel like enterprise software. It had to feel like culture: fast, colorful, set to music, and everywhere you already were.
The idea
Windows Everywhere. One design language for productivity and play, across every device and every screen in the culture.
Create
We built the launch around the interface itself — the snap, color and motion of Live Tiles — and set it to upbeat indie music so it moved like a music video, not a manual. Then we put it everywhere Windows Everywhere implied: a takeover of Times Square, cover takeovers on Condé Nast titles including Vogue and The New Yorker, and a run of films that carried the sign-in, the screens and the countdown to launch in one consistent visual system.
The result
Windows 8 arrived in 42 countries at once, backed by a 1.8-billion-dollar push that reached from the biggest screen in Times Square to the most prestigious pages in print. It was the moment Microsoft tried to make one design language span every device in your life, and for a season the Metro look was impossible to miss, on phones, on tablets, on newsstands and on the side of a building.
Credits
Justin Evergreen
Associate Creative Director
Crispin Porter + Bogusky
Agency
Microsoft
Client · Windows 8
Windows Everywhere
42 countries · October 2012