Google I/O

Role: Art Direction
Agency: Instrument
Client: Google

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Each year, Google I/O brings together developers from across the world. To generate anticipation for the event, the date, and location are released through a playful and nerdy teaser. The goal of each year’s event teaser is to engage and challenge the developer community.

Google challenged us to make this puzzle even more difficult to solve than previous years so we created an experience centered on a bizarre poem, a cryptic video, and bezier mathematics.

A cryptic tweet from Google led to a page with a lone video on it. The video, an unusual visual poem of seemingly robotic origins, contains all the clues necessary to find a set of bezier curves and solve the key hidden within them.

The cryptic nature of this year’s video led to a lot of speculation and hilarious commentary across the developers community. The puzzle did what we aimed for it to do: harness the community’s diverse skills and connect them together to solve a fun challenge. Thousands participated, with 37 brilliant people in 4 countries solving it. View the puzzle explained below.