Gabriel Nivera
Gabriel Nivera Rebrand

The Purpose

The purpose of this project was to separate Gabriel Nivera from the sea of photographers in Canada – and give him a distinct point of view and positioning to potential clients.

The Challenge

Toronto has an abundance of talented photographers. Like many in the creative class, photographers need to have a variety of talents in order to survive. While ensuring their financial survival in the short term however, it can prevent them from establishing an identity over the long term. We needed to give him a more defined identity but not so narrowly define him that he would have to go months between jobs!

The Insight

While he did a lot of things well, he did two things very VERY well: Landscape photography and Portrait photography. These are also terms that are used to describe the way photographs are typically presented. Horizontally configured photographs are typically referred to as landscapes. And vertically configured photographs are typically called portraits, which led to a beautifully simple idea. The agency would show only his portraits in the vertical “portrait” mode, and only his horizontal landscapes in the “landscape” mode.

The Execution

The agency created a design system that showed you either his landscape work or his portrait work depending on how you viewed his work. If, for example, you held your tablet in the “vertical” position while looking at his portfolio, you saw only his portrait work. But if you held it horizontally, you saw only his landscape work.

It was completely responsive to how the viewer viewed his work. Every execution represented this photographic duality.

If viewing his portfolio on your mobile phone, you saw either his landscape work or portrait work depending on how you held the phone. Even his business cards reflected the idea. Held vertically, it read: Gabriel Nivera, Portrait Photographer. Flip it over and the type was configured horizontally, which forced you to look at it that way. It read: Gabriel Nivera, Landscape Photographer. His portfolio book was designed the same way. It was a simple, but ingenious trick, which the agency executed across all his promotional materials.

The Impact

But the impact of this work is that Gabriel Nivera now has a point of view and a uniqueness within the “jack of all trades/I can shoot anything” world of photography. It says and proves in every possible interaction with his work that he is an authority on portrait and landscape photography.