The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design
Nick Hussain and Victor Hedström met as client and studio on a Puma and Final Fantasy XIV capsule, and then spent the following years swapping ideas, memes and Chris Cunningham videos over Discord. That relationship has turned into LETRS, a creative services agency co-founded to sit alongside Hedström’s Stockholm-based studio NMBRS, which produces cinematics and trailers for gaming and esports. Hussain arrives from the brand and commercial side, through London / Amsterdam agencies and Adidas; Hedström brings the CG production house. LETRS extends that world into music, fashion and sport. In this interview, the pair discuss the Sony PlayStation campaigns of the late 90s that set their bar for creative boldness, why they hire for taste and attitude before ability, and how they plan to make room for risk.
TBI Nick, Victor – how are you both?
VH We’re good! It’s been a wild few weeks, honestly, a wild few months, with this new chapter for the organisation as well as some EWC, which is always a big project calendar moment for us at NMBRS. The world is what it is but we continue to grow and move with the flow of it. So yeah, we’re good. (Nervous smile)
NH It’s also not so often you get to launch something new, so we’ve been very meticulous and obsessive over that, but in a fun and slightly psychotic way. Designing merch before we’ve even launched a website is kind of fun. To us, that’s part of building the identity. Yes, the website is a huge part, but we want to understand and get a feel for who we are with this new entity and what it wants to be, and that takes iteration and experimentation, also letting something imperfect live and grow into maturity.
TBI How did the two of you come together to launch LETRS?
NH I mean, we had been talking about doing something together for years now, since we first worked together. I was actually their client for a previous Puma X Final Fantasy XIV capsule project. I was looking for a studio with VFX / cinematic capabilities but also a sense of style and taste, and I came across NMBRS. During the project, we just clicked and stayed close ever since, exchanging weird ideas and suspicious memes for years over Discord. Then last year, we started to discuss things we wanted to get after and found a lot of overlap there, so we just started to work on what that shared vision could be and how it aligns with the growth vision for the larger NMBRS group, and that formed into LETRS.
VH We’ve spent good time shaping the position NMBRS is in today, but we also get enquired and are passionate about many other sub-cultures outside of gaming and esports, as well as being creative outside of cinematics. We’re obsessed with product design; we spent months producing these custom rings for our 5th anniversary, not to mention the apparel we make for us and others. We just wanted to continue being creative outside of what we’re known with NMBRS without diluting the potion of what NMBRS is and will always be about.
TBI What's your history with gaming and what made you decide to venture into this sector from your current path?
NH Gaming was a big part of my young teenage years (and for most of my peers). I've always found the medium super fascinating with how intrinsically tied it is to the advancement of technology and culture, arguably more so than any other art form. Of course, back then I only cared about the soundtrack on the new Tony Hawk PS or finding the Hot Coffee mini-game in GTA.
The problem was, it was always considered the most unattractive quality by all of my ex-girlfriends, so it always felt like this dirty secret that was always at odds with my ‘cooler’ passions, so making music, DJing, and graphic design were what really defined my creative identity. Now, gaming has reached this interesting intersection; it’s having another cultural renaissance, where it’s being more widely adopted and celebrated as something more than just what our parents would say was ‘a waste of time.’ It always was for the real purists and loyalists, but we see now how embedded gaming has become in wider culture (Gentle Monster x Tekken, Louis Vuitton x League of Legends). These are great for the culture, but they’re big-splash moments. To me, finding ways to more authentically bridge this medium with more sectors and art forms in design/culture first ways is what’s really fascinating. Basically trying to prove all our ex-girlfriends were wrong all along lol.
NMBRS builds the world, and LETRS extends the world.
TBI You came up through commercial design, from London agencies to Adidas. How does that path shape what you’re bringing to LETRS?
NH I spent a lot of my career traversing through different areas of design, from comms, moving image and experience design to interactive and retail. I always knew myself to be more of an inter-disciplinarian. I got bored too easily, and when I was coming up, it was never enough to be specialised in one thing. People were too good; you had to be a generalist, multi-disciplined creative, or absolutely shit hot in that one specialism to stand out. I never was that shit hot at one thing; I was good and maybe at moments better than good. But I understood early that being able to see the interplay between design and experience, searching for the weird, new, unusual and beautiful pieces of culture, the relentless archiving and categorising to keep my taste in tune. From there, learning the art form of client collaboration and communicating your vision, and most importantly, having personal relationships with the actual shit hot artists of the world to bring the thing to life, that’s it for me.
TBI Why build LETRS as a separate arm rather than expanding NMBRS itself?
VH We always believed we wanted to make sure NMBRS felt like a hyper-focused proposition, because we’ve carved out a special place in the culture of gaming with what we do and how we present our honest selves. Introducing the vastness of what we want to do with LETRS under one umbrella, we believe, blurs that core proposition. For us, it’s about building a set of clear and distinct functions that complement and connect to where we have the resources and the expertise to figure out any creative challenge.
For us, NMBRS builds the world, and LETRS extends the world.
TBI What does the gaming world tend to get wrong about design?
VH We believe now, with how much is at stake on the scale of these IPs, there’s less room for creative risk. KPIs need to be hit; clear ROIs. It’s not just within gaming; it’s across the board, higher up the value chain.
NH At LETRS, I always wanted to instil that essence of risk-taking and alternative creative solutions. It stems back from our shared love of this golden era within gaming marketing. We would always pull YouTube links up together (after a heavy night of whisky and Lonkorro). That late 90’s early 00’s period when Sony PlayStation (and even at times Xbox) were marketing some of the wildest campaigns you had ever seen. Working with (at the time), fringe directors like Chris Cunningham, David Lynch. The Designers Republic defined the visual language of the time, all of them pushing the tone of that culture with sheer boldness, creative ambiguity and irreverence.
I always want to cherish that attitude and try to have that essence; otherwise, we’re just another production house and just another creative studio colouring within the lines. We have a saying – it’s irreverence without ignorance; that’s what we strive for, understanding and deeply caring about the culture and lore of something, and then finding a way to subvert expectations. That’s what those guys were doing during that golden era.
TBI LETRS is framed around cross-pollination with music, fashion and sport. Where do those worlds already overlap with gaming more than people realise?
NH I think they have been overlapping for decades now; for instance, when CD-based consoles arrived, it opened the creative floodgates. Before that, the biggest creative constraint was memory; CDs changed all of that. And that shift was during my creative and culturally formative years, electronic music, jungle, drum and bass, rave, punk, The Prodigy – it was my entry into all of it. The cultural colour of games became so much more vivid, from Jet Set Radio Future’s art style and soundtrack to The Designers Republic work for Wipeout on the PlayStation, Western cinematic influence in Kojima’s Metal Gear series. The technological advancement of the art form literally grew the size of its melting pot.
TBI NMBRS describes itself as ‘a new breed of creatives’ – how do you hire for that?
VH Very simply, it comes down to two things predominantly – your taste and your attitude. Ability is secondary, and, to a certain degree, table stakes in this day and age. But those two are what truly make you a NMBRS (and LETRS) type of person. What’s your cultural consumption? The sharpness of your eye? What are your draws of reference and inspiration? That’s what we’re interested in understanding and what will always set us apart and keep us as a collective, in tune. That’s our commodity. The saturation of our industry only grows with the accessibility of hard skills in CG, but what will always be ownable is our taste, style and service of work. That’s why you come to us and why you come back. Nowadays with all the synthetic creative processes (AI) your human sensibility and personality is so much a defining factor of your practice, and sets you apart, so we really try to let that shine with us.
What will always be ownable is our taste.
TBI Can you tell us more about your Phish @ Sphere work?
NH Jesus. Yeah, that was a wild ride. Firstly, a huge amount of appreciation has to go to Moment Factory and the show’s Creative Director, Justin Restaino (with whom we had worked previously at Riot Games). It was a huge risk for them to allow us to take the lead on those two specific concepts (Baby Bird & Chateau De Phish).
For us, we had worked on many large irregular screen formats before, but The Sphere is a different beast. The scale of the creative and the 12k native requirement (no AI scaling) meant our pipeline had to be hyper optimised for rendering, and as we have a very robust UE pipeline we opted for the majority to be there, but certain elements where we needed to go that extra bit further on detail and realism we used our offline pipeline (Blender and cycles as opposed to our typical houdini pipe for further efficiency).
Then, on top of that, creatively reviewing both for myself and the artists was a huge challenge. Given the spherical format you would have to QC basically every pixel through your own monitor (as given the final scale basically every pixel is clearly visible) then checking scale and position through VR with a custom made virtual build of The Sphere to review from varying vantage points, then we would have specific dates we were able to test on Big Dome (Sphere’s 1/10th scale version) where of course all your colour and brightness would be seen as close to the real thing as can be. So safe to say it really pushed us, but thankfully, we have some of the most insane technical/creative psychos to figure it out, developing custom tools and hacks to be able to get it to where we needed it. But these are always the growing pains of a new creative and technical venture, and now we know how to do it on this scale, which primes us much more for next time.
But as challenging as it was, seeing it play on the largest screen ever created with the band and 20,000 people in front, and the overwhelming response after was truly a once-in-a-career moment.
TBI What kind of client do you most want LETRS to attract early on?
NH For us, it’s not really the client itself that attracts us (of course we have biases), but a good story and an opportunity to do something truly new and irreverent and move the needle of culture that attracts us.
Naturally, with my fashion background and experience, I’m interested in telling those stories in new ways. I cut my teeth in CG and art direction for many years. From Adidas, helping to set the brand direction for the use of CG, to then building a creative product visualisation studio within the fashion team of Amsterdam-based CG agency INDG. Now I want to bring back that love for live productions and in-camera storytelling with mixed media, alongside finding ways to create hybrid AI VFX solutions. We believe in the importance of handcrafted pixels but also see the opportunity synthetic solutions bring to the creative process. Interactive, IRL experiences, physical products, maybe even making our own IP (which we’re already doing) or even our own game. We want people buying into our creativity first and foremost, whilst allowing LETRS to be the fluid morphing creative organism it needs to be, growing and changing along the way.
TBI A year from now, what would tell you LETRS is working?
VH To us, that sign of success is split between making sure we’re sustainable and growing healthily whilst not losing what it is that makes us unique. But when it comes down to the work, it’s about diversity. Of course, our bread and butter is and will always be CG image making, but our creativity extends much further. So if we can look back in a year’s time at the work we’ve done and see that diversity whilst also upholding our LETRS/NMBRS attitude and values along the way, we can say cheers to that.
NH During early blossoming of CG as a more commercial medium, there were a few key figures of the time (who some of which i’m glad to call friends and peers), creatives like Julien Simhauser & Jonas Hegi of Builders Club, Marcus Wendt & Vera-Maria Glahn of Field.io, Simon Holmedal of Panoply and Man vs Machine, Ash Thorp, GMUNK among many others, they were the people you knew behind the studio, not for any sense of fame or clout, but for their creative sensibility and style. They, to me, were the antithesis to the big faceless agencies. If we can leave an impression on people with NMBRS and LETRS for our creativity first, the way they did for me, then alright alright alright.
P.S. and if we hadn’t done some sort of ridiculously weird project with Hideo Kojima by then, we’d also be royally pissed off… That’s the dream.