Universal Music Publishing Group
A World Ahead
Music publishing is the business of songs. It’s how the work of songwriters reaches your favorite recording artists and soundtracks the most iconic moments in entertainment. Before the record labels and household names, publishing is the 11-billion-dollar industry that shapes pop culture the world over.
Universal Music Publishing Group leads that industry.
For the first time, the biggest publisher in music set out to publicly define its own authentic voice. Through a deep strategic and creative collaboration, GrandArmy guided the brand to become an infinitely-flexible system of design, language, and motion, as they champion songwriters across 48 offices in every corner of the globe.
All imagery is either public and published via UMPG’s channels, or FPO with songwriter and artist approval.
A strategic platform,
born from human conversation.
How do you capture the spirit of a global organization?
We started with an international listening tour.
What we discovered was a company with worldwide reach but a fanatical focus on music discovery and innovation.
UMPG is A World Ahead: They discover earlier, dig deeper, and play bigger. It’s boutique service at global scale. But just like the songwriters they represent, UMPG — and music publishing as a whole — are an often-overlooked part of the music industry.
This strategic platform puts a flag in the ground around UMPG’s role in driving music forward.
A worldwide manifesto.
A unifying set of ideas.
Because of their forward-thinking approach, UMPG empowers artists and songwriters to make a living from what they create.
An empowered tone of voice.
Challenging listeners to dig deeper.
A bold new brand identity.
When it came to evolving the visual system, we started with the logo. We sought to craft a mark that can serve UMPG’s ambitious spirit of growth, literally and conceptually.
A logo built for growth.
A flexible visual system, for a world of music.
A versatile, responsive color palette.
In many ways, the UMPG brand is a canvas for the artists and songwriters they represent, so we developed a system that could easily pair with a wide range of photography and let the songwriters shine.
In that same spirit, our typography system had to work across languages, as UMPG discovers and advocates for songwriters across 48 offices.
A loud, condensed headline typeface, paired with a human, archival-feeling serif, gave us a dynamic set of visual tools for everywhere UMPG needs to communicate.
UMPG curates playlists in every genre it represents, and we carefully crafted covers, derived from our identity system, that could honor the breadth and vibrancy of UMPG’s catalogue.
The new UMPG website is a total reimagining of how information is organized and how the company presents itself, to make every facet of UMPG more accessible to a worldwide audience.
Physical and digital applications around the globe.
Project Type
Credits
Creative Direction: GrandArmy
Animation: GrandArmy, Ian Crane, James Stuart
Strategy, Messaging: GrandArmy, Garrett Mireles
Sound Design: UMPG Audio Branding