CISCO UMBRELLA
Client: Cisco
Creative Director: Juan Rocha
Illustration: Juan Rocha
Story and Copy: Juan Rocha
Art Direction: Natalie Sanchez
Creative Director: Juan Rocha
Illustration: Juan Rocha
Story and Copy: Juan Rocha
Art Direction: Natalie Sanchez
It’s not every day that you’re asked to be part of a project perfectly fit for you. This is exactly what happened with Cisco. To put it lightly, I'm a huge comic book fan. I like how they’ve become our modern mythology and appreciate the innovative creativity within them. Cisco was planning to launch an internal product and decided to present it in a more creative way; yep, as a comic book. I was asked not only to come up with the story but to design the characters and develop a 16-page comic book. It was quite a challenge, but I dove in head-first. The following is an outline of the creative process:
The Sketches
After several meetings with the Cisco team, the sketching process began. I'm heavy influenced by the 90s era of comic books, when the coloring was very simple, which helped to save time when finishing the characters and, ultimately, the comic book. I started with the heroes. In a nutshell, the product has 5 components that work individually to protect web users but when combined, becomes the ultimate protection against cyber-attacks. They all live in the Cisco Cloud so the name, The Cloud Squadron, was derived from that concept and an amalgam between the Justice League and The Fantastic Four. The sketches were made with felt-tip markers for more efficient coloring.
The Heroes
Firewall, Layer, Gateway, Shadow, and Intel are the protectors of the virtual realm. Each character represents a component of the product who are explained in depth in the comic book itself. Here are the first sketches of our heroes:
The Villains
Their nemesis was another challenge. Once the heroes were created, coming up with the design of their counterparts was even more fun. At the beginning, there were going to be five villains, but the client decided to focus on the main two (as seen in the comic book). Here are the sketches for Haxx, Gemini, Swarm, Kodish, and Riot (coming up with the names was another fun part, for sure).
Inks and Colors
Here are the final versions of the inks and the colors for all the characters involved in the story:
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The Story / The Comic Book
To communicate clearly what each of the products do, we needed to come up with a believable story that involved cyber security and the dangers of cyber-crime. We thought about multiple scenarios, but the most likely (in comic book terms) was a worldwide blackout. Haxx and Gemini conspired against the Cloud Squadron releasing a harmful trojan called Emotet (an actual trojan virus). The trojan was released by an infiltrated worker at a power plant through an attached and compromised .doc file which he opened on his phone using the power plant's Wi-Fi. Emotet causes the blackout that spreads across the globe and it is up to the Squad to combine their powers to stop it. Here are some inks and colors of some of the comic book pages:
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Read the entire comic here::
| cloud_squadron_number_1.pdf |
Impact
The execution of this concept was implemented in different materials such as pins, stickers, big format posters, etc. It was distributed across eight countries including all US-based Cisco facilities, ultimately helping the team understand the product and doing so in a more creative and enjoyable way. The launch was a complete success and the Cisco team achieved their goal of product dissemination and team development.