A STRATEGY FOR MAGIC

Products’ form and function matter, but the way they make people feel matters most. The experiences that leave a mark tap both sense and emotion, giving people a powerful impression not just of a product, but of the company behind it. This is where the magic of brand affinity begins.

While we’d created gaming peripherals—keyboards, mice, headsets—that rated high and sold well, we were missing the opportunity to create a memorable experience that was unmistakably Logitech G, that would make loyal customers for life. We needed a strategy for magic.

LET THERE BE LIGHT

Because the typical gaming environment is dim or even dark, peripheral lighting has become prominent in recent years. While a lot of gamers see it as gimmicky, plenty consider it key to an immersive experience. Most of this lighting uses a generic rainbow effect—an RGB color-wave keyboard, for example—and we’d done the same. Our approach was pretty, but it didn’t really stand out from anyone else’s. 

I began thinking about grid patterns, merging sensory experiences, treating lighting as an integrated facet of the product rather than the “decoration” on top. Was a lighting strategy the answer we’d been looking for to create a signature Logitech G experience? I believed it was, and core to it would be—believe it or not—everything I’d learned while designing what we called “wonders” for WET, designers of the spectacular Fountains of Bellagio.

FROM CHOREOGRAPHY TO KEYBOARD

Each aspect of our multi-sensory experiences for WET was vital to the whole. We didn’t just put spotlights and speakers in the fountain pools. We began with wanting to evoke a feeling, then wove together elements for uniformity, simultaneity, and harmony. My job, along with designing the fountain layout, was to choreograph the interaction of water, lights, music, and a variety of effects like fog and fire, drawing heavily from principles of animation and controlling variables like directionality and timing.

Different fountains—like Aquanura in the Netherlands, which I was on the design team for—were meant to evoke different feelings, depending on the setting, the audience, the purpose. Though the electronics products we were working on for Logitech G were on a much smaller scale, I knew we could make them stand out if we approached their design with expression, movement, and synergy as our guides.

So I developed a lighting strategy, “signature lighting,” based on the principles of synchronicity, efficiency, and inclusivity, with an expression inspired by the organic—the movements of waves and aquatic creatures in nature. Our approach would lay the foundation for treating peripherals as a whole, to unite the experience of using them. It would minimize energy use, thereby increasing battery life or charge. It would expand the palette to include hues and tints typically associated with the feminine. And of course it would push us always to do more than please: to delight.

The Logitech G Aurora Collection marked our leap into bringing this new lighting strategy to life. We introduced motion and nuance—quite a change from static RGB backlighting—into our keyboard, mouse, and headset lights. The experience centers on aspects of water’s behavior, from the keyboard start-up effect of light appearing at the center and spreading outward in a wave, to the active-play effect in which keys gently light at random, as if raindrops are falling on the device and activating them. We also brought in a secondary color to complement the recognizable Logitech G cyan—hot pink, to highlight the logo and the WASD keys, used for movement in gaming.

And the keyboard, mouse, and headset can all be set to use this Aurora Collection lighting, through the G HUB app. This synchronization contributes powerfully to people’s seeing them as a true collection they want every piece of—a design strategy that’s also a business strategy.

As we worked to weave in kinetic effects, we realized that by turning the LEDs on and off to create the illusion of movement, we were in fact building in a lot of downtime. As a result, Aurora peripherals use 40% less energy than comparable products with LEDs, so they stay powered up for longer. This is true even though we added edge lighting to the keyboard, effectively “wrapping” it in a wave of color, carefully coordinating how many LEDs to use and where to place them for a unified “dance” with the keys.

Aurora’s colors evoke a sunrise, a meaningful guiding metaphor as we worked to consider everyone who games. We thought it was time to move beyond traditional RGB to tap into the beauty and appeal of a broader spectrum. And, like all sunrises, it’s only the beginning.