How R/GA built a record label identity from the glow of a live crowd — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design
One Day is a Sydney-based record label that builds careers from the ground up, backed by EMI Music Australia and part of the wider Universal Music family. It signs emerging and overlooked talent, backing artists from their first ambition, rather than waiting for a breakthrough to prove themselves. To carry that posture into the brand, One Day turned to creative innovation company R/GA, which delivered a system spanning verbal identity, visual design and a digital platform.
The idea behind it all started with the label’s name. Every artist has a ‘one day’ – the moment they are working towards – which R/GA decided to make visible before it arrives. “We took the name and turned it into a clock,” explains Creative Director Henry Cook. Rather than sitting as a static mark, the logo runs as a countdown towards each artist’s breakthrough, and the dream it counts towards is one that the artist names themselves.
For Jade Yee-Smith, it was ONE:DAY I’ll play to 20,000. For Chillinit, ONE:DAY my bars will pay off mum’s house. And for tiffi, ONE:DAY the world will know my story. The countdown can shift into a date, or the BPM of a track, tracking the highs and the lows while the dream stays fixed in view. When an artist reaches it, the clock resets to a new horizon. “That clock became this constant reminder of, ‘One day, I'm going to get there,’” Cook tells us.
Setting their dream is built into the relationship from the start. The contract an artist signs requires them, in that moment, to write down their One Day. Jane Duru, Creative Director of Verbal Design at R/GA, kept the tone deliberately unpolished, acknowledging the friction and the mistakes and the moments an artist wants to throw it all in rather than smoothing any of it out into marketing copy. One Day’s co-founders, Nick Lupi and Adit Gauchan, act as filters for what feels authentic, catching anything their artists wouldn’t say. “The verbal construct does such a good job with that because we can give it to an artist and they can say whatever they want,” Duru details.
R/GA designed the visual identity around the energy of a live performance, translating the glow of a crowd and the flare of stage lighting into patterns that respond to sound, tempo and movement. The reference point was a specific moment Ben Miles, Chief Design Officer for APAC at R/GA, kept noticing at One Day shows: the second the crowd lifts their phones to record.
To rebuild that feeling, R/GA partnered with motion studio Never Sit Still and constructed a full CG stadium in Cinema 4D, using thousands of light instances scaled from photographic reference to stand in for a crowd. The camera favours a handheld point of view, with long-shutter effects streaking the lights, and the renders were composited in After Effects with depth of field, grain and bloom for a filmic finish. An AI-generated dancer, rigged to prebuilt motion, moves through the scenes. The artists’ own audio, worked up with their sound engineers, drives the tempo and mood of each composition.
“We didn’t just want to build a graphic pattern; we wanted to build a feeling,” Miles reveals. “By combining thousands of CG light instances with raw, handheld camera movements and real artist audio, we managed to capture that exact, unbridled moment when the beat drops and the whole crowd raises their phones.”
The black-and-white in the colour palette comes from the concept of stage lighting – the feeling of standing under lights so bright they flare to white, an atmosphere Cook describes as a dream state. Against it sits a bold red drawn from the recording light found in studios.
The colon in the ONE:DAY wordmark turns the name into a time code that reads as a clock counting down. “It takes a cultural phrase that is usually treated as a distant, passive aspiration and transforms it into a hard, active deadline,” Cook explains. The typefaces were chosen to feel unapologetic and urgent. ABC Bingo carries the headlines as a tool of declaration, holding the artists’ voices against the dreamlike patterns, while Pitch by Klim Type Foundry handles the quieter passages through its typewriter-inspired character that’s reminiscent of an artist penning lyrics.
Across every decision, R/GA pushed away from the polish that defines major-label marketing and the predictability of the streaming ecosystem, anchoring the brand instead in the grit of the journey. “We ultimately wanted to do something really different. We based this on feelings, we moved away from the predictable polish of big bold labels, and embraced the magic of imperfection,” Miles details.
The brand has already begun to prove itself in the places that matter to the label. Australian artist Alli Kate signed with One Day over more established competitors, citing alignment with their ethos. The new identity sat at the centre of a pitch that won a share of $1.7M in national funding through Music Australia’s Record Label Development Scheme, and One Day was selected to present the system at Universal Music Australia’s conference.