“CetraRuddy Celebrates 30” by CetraRuddy Architecture: 2018 Best of Year Winner for Collateral Branding/Graphics

Husband-wife design duo John Cetra and Nancy Ruddy established their namesake firm CetraRuddy Architecture in 1988, making this year its 30th anniversary. To celebrate and commemorate the occasion, the Interior Design Hall of Fame members launched a marketing campaign called “CetraRuddy Celebrates 30” that reflects upon their shared history creating some of the world’s most forward-thinking structures and environments.

Collaborating with creative consultant IF Studio and animation outfit TwinArt, the team pored over three decades of photography, interviews, and meeting notes, ultimately distilling the firm’s DNA into six “pillars” that were then translated into short videos: Architecture Is Home, Every Site Has a Story, History Matters, Height Is Perception, the Intimacy of Craft, and Journey Builds Legacy. The visual narratives were released once a week over a six-week time frame via e-blast, which steered recipients to a micro site on cetraruddy.com. After watching the 60- to 90-second animations, users could click back to the main site to examine the firm’s breadth—including one of its most recognizable projects, One Madison, a New York residential building completed in 2014.

The heart of the campaign is Cetra’s deceptively simple pen-and-paper sketches, which evoke a childlike sense of wonder that belies their projects’ complex geometries. They are paired with aphoristic phrases typed in Gotham Book font—lowercase for a more intimate feel. “Our goal was to provide the viewer with a multisensory experience to reveal our values,” he says. “The campaign represents who we are and what we look to accomplish in the next 30 years,” adds Ruddy, his partner in every sense of the word.

Project Team: Emmanuelle Slossberg; Meredith Cocco;
Natalie Dargham; Besa Xani; Reia Tong.

> See more Best of Year Project Winners from the December 2018 issue of Interior Design