Through our work with Ikano Bank, we’ve been able to work with their sister company, legendary Swedish furniture company IKEA, and their Finance Services division.
They got in touch with us to help them with their new product which gives customers an even simpler and flexible way to pay for IKEA goods online. They wanted us to create a series of animations to help customers simply understand the process. The service is a facilitator for people to have the things they want, at home, and to raise awareness of how to get credit whilst in store showing simple steps.
Working closely with the client we felt that the simplest, and therefore “most IKEA”, way to explain complex solutions was with relatable, minimalist illustrations. Every drawing in the entire video catalogue for was developed in-house by the Arch team. The aim was to create something simple to tie in with the clean Scandinavian style, but also pulling from the IKEA instruction illustration of simple, black line art.
In order for the video to be understood quickly in a store environment where there are other sounds, we created the video without a voiceover, making this as simple and visual as possible. This also future-proofed it for universal appeal, and gave us the flexibility to be able to adapt quickly in other languages with simple copy changes.
The animations were developed to incredibly tight turnaround times. We managed the entire process, from brief to script-development, storyboarding, illustration, animation and delivery.
Arch have worked with IKEA and Ikano Bank for many years, and some of the best work we’ve done with them is our video content. We’ve created numerous animated films to explain new products internally which deftly and briefly dissect potentially complex new tech products whilst sticking on-brand style and telling a compelling story. We’ve also produced a range of internal engagement videos to help inspire co-workers.
Videos like these need to be accessible and, if you’re not careful, you can lose sight of what you’re trying to achieve in the difficulties of logistics. Luckily for us, we’re blessed with great project managers at Arch, who keep our work on track so our designers can keep the creative heading in the right direction – and we’ve also built up a relationship with a recording studio in Sweden, who we’ve directed over Zoom calls.
Take a look at a few of these animations in our showreel above (we’ve removed the Swedish voiceover artists!)