Case Study · Creative Studio · 2009–2019
The Studio Behind the Studio.
Building a complete in-house creative operation inside a feature animation company — from brand identity and digital design to custom typography, costume character development, and interactive experiences. And why it is still running today.
5
Oscar-nominated productions served
2
Webby Award nominations for digital work
30+
International territories managed for brand consistency
4
Named acknowledgements in Chronicle Art Books
Most creative organisations separate making from marketing. At LAIKA, the gap between those two worlds had to be closed from the inside — by building a creative studio capable of serving both simultaneously, without diluting either.
What began as a need to produce better marketing assets became something significantly larger: a fully integrated in-house creative operation covering brand identity, digital design, typography, consumer products packaging, event and experiential branding, interactive digital experiences, costume character development, style guide architecture, and international quality assurance across more than thirty territories. All of it built from zero. All of it still running today.
01
The Problem With External Creative
The early model was standard for a studio of LAIKA's size: work with world-class specialist partners. Way To Blue brought genuine expertise in social strategy and digital. Wieden+Kennedy brought the kind of campaign thinking that defines the industry. The challenge wasn't the quality of what those agencies could produce — it was LAIKA's ability to keep pace with it. To give partners the production-accurate assets, the institutional context, and the filmmaker-informed creative direction they needed to do their best work. And when a concept arrived that was close but not quite right for the studio's specific aesthetic, to be able to say not exactly that — but here is this, this, and this instead. That response requires internal creative capability. Without it, even the best external thinking meets a studio that can only say yes or no, never something more useful.
The gap wasn't in the agencies — it was in us. Style guide assets reached partners late, or in formats that didn't serve their needs. Creative direction arrived after concepts had already been developed rather than shaping them from the start. The institutional knowledge that made LAIKA's aesthetic legible — what made Coraline's world feel different from ParaNorman's, what the filmmakers cared about most, what the production imagery actually contained — lived inside the studio but had no reliable pathway out of it. Building the internal creative capability wasn't about replacing world-class external partners. It was about becoming a world-class internal partner to them.
The solution was to build that capability in-house — not to replace the external partners, who continued to handle strategy, media, and distribution, but to give them what they needed to do their best work for LAIKA specifically. Production-accurate assets. Filmmaker-informed direction. A creative team that could respond to agency ideas with something more useful than approval or rejection.
"The knowledge required to get it right lived inside the studio. The work was to build the infrastructure that made that knowledge actionable."
02
What Was Built
The creative team's output spanned every surface the studio touched. Rather than a single discipline, it operated as a multidisciplinary studio within a studio — with distinct but interconnected capabilities built and refined across six consecutive productions.
Film Asset Curation
Every puppet, prop, set environment, and film still used in marketing, consumer products, social media, and international distribution was processed by the in-house team. Green screen removal, paint fixing and seam removal, colour grading to match the final film grade, and pattern and texture extraction from physical puppet and set materials. For the Missing Link style guide alone, this meant processing 113 puppet assets, 172 props, 54 patterns, and 233 Pantone colour swatches — all curated, colour graded, and organised for downstream use by marketing teams, licensees, and distributors worldwide.
Typography and Custom Font Design
Original typefaces were designed entirely in-house for all movies. The Kubo Title font — based on the film's main title treatment — became the primary promotional font used for headlines for Kubo and the Two Strings across all marketing, publicity, social media, and awards campaign materials. The Missing Link End Credit Title font was designed at the specific request of the production designer and appears in the film's end credit sequence itself, as well as in all subsequent promotional use. Both were produced in multiple variants. The fonts exist inside the films and outside them simultaneously — the most direct expression of what it means to build creative infrastructure that serves both making and selling.
Image — LAIKA fonts
LAIKA's custom fonts. The fonts served all promotional and awards campaign needs, All fonts were commissioned by production and appear in the films.
©LAIKA LLC
Brand and Quality Assurance
Once the internal creative team had the assets, the style guides, and the institutional knowledge to articulate what correct looked like, it became possible to serve external partners properly — giving them what they needed before they asked, and responding to their work with specific, informed direction rather than general approval or vague requests for changes. Every piece of creative carrying the LAIKA name — consumer products, social media, international distributor materials across more than thirty territories — moved through a review process grounded in that internal knowledge, with final sign-off at the most senior level of the studio.
The international QA process covered Bulgaria, Denmark, Russia, Israel, and every other territory where LAIKA films were distributed. The challenge in many cases was that LAIKA hadn't previously provided those partners with sufficiently precise guidance — on logo application, film font usage in non-Latin scripts, or the specific colour and texture language that distinguished each film. Building that guidance into exportable, usable assets was as much the work as the review itself.
Digital Design and Website Direction
The LAIKA studio website was completely redesigned — architecture, navigation, content structure, and all visual assets generated internally. The site served as the hub for all heritage film content, character pages, news, and community engagement, with each film's section designed using its specific style guide palette and texture language. As internal creative lead directing and approving the work of external web partners, with final sign-off at President and CEO level, the redesigned LAIKA website received a Webby Award nomination in 2019.
A Webby nomination had also been received in 2013 for the ParaNorman website — again with the in-house team directing the external creative partner's output. Two Webby nominations across the same period, for two different productions, in the Movie/Film category.
Event and Experiential Branding
Every major LAIKA event was designed end-to-end by the in-house team. LAIKA Live San Diego required large format character banner artwork at 60" x 144" per banner, louver wall installations at 160" x 120" featuring all heritage film characters, SDCC booth wall art at 93.5" x 110", branded pedicabs operating throughout the Gaslamp Quarter, custom character headbands, and promotional materials across print, digital, and social channels. The Missing Link New York Premiere required individual character SEG banners at 54" x 96" and a large scale elephant wall banner at 240" x 96". The Coraline 10th Anniversary required a custom logo design process — twenty-plus concept iterations before the final mark — and exclusive merchandise produced for the Oregon Symphony orchestral concert.
Video — LAIKA Live San Diego 2018
The official LAIKA Live trailer for the San Diego 2018 event — a free public experience in the Gaslamp Quarter featuring puppets, sets, props, and merchandise from across all LAIKA productions. Every element of the event branding, from the louver wall installations to the pedicab wraps, was designed in-house.
©LAIKA LLC
Other events designed and produced: LAIKA Cannes, the Licensing Show Las Vegas, the Portland Art Museum Animating Life exhibition (including large outdoor banners at 386" x 611" and bus decals across the Portland TriMet network), all film premieres across multiple locations, and LAIKA Pride San Diego.
Olympic Broadcast — Original Animated Spots
For the London 2012 Olympics, LAIKA produced two original stop-motion animated TV spots featuring ParaNorman characters performing Olympic events — a zombie on the pommel horse and a second spot aired across NBC's Olympic broadcast coverage. Producing bespoke original animation for global Olympic broadcast rather than repurposing existing campaign material was a significant creative and logistical undertaking, and an unusual approach to film promotion at any scale. The IndieWire coverage at the time noted that LAIKA had "taken over the international stage known as the Olympic Games" — something considerably more ambitious than the standard film marketing playbook for a summer animated release.
Video — ParaNorman Olympic TV Spot · "Nailed It" · London 2012
The first of two original stop-motion animated TV spots produced for NBC's London 2012 Olympic broadcast. A zombie performs on the pommel horse. Both spots were created specifically for Olympic airtime rather than repurposed from existing campaign materials.
©LAIKA LLC / Focus Features
Video — ParaNorman Olympic TV Spot · Second Spot · London 2012
The second original stop-motion animated TV spot produced for the London 2012 Olympics. Both spots were covered by FirstShowing, IndieWire, and the wider film press as a notable example of creative ambition in film marketing.
©LAIKA LLC / Focus Features
Press Coverage — IndieWire
"The film's marketing department has instead created faux newspapers for the fictional town of Blithe Hollow, sent zombie slippers to members of the press and even taken over the international stage known as the Olympic Games... The fact that Laika created original shorts specifically for the big event is quite admirable, and they seem to capture the fervor of the moment and mood of the film quite well."
386"×611"
The largest format banner produced for the Portland Art Museum Animating Life exhibition. The same in-house creative team that designed the Kubo title font also produced large-format installation graphics at architectural scale.
Costume Character Design and Development
Designing characters for physical costume performance requires solving a problem that sits at the intersection of character integrity and human ergonomics. The character must read as itself — maintaining the proportions, silhouette, and visual identity that audiences recognise — while accommodating a human body whose proportions are entirely different. For LAIKA, where characters are designed for stop-motion animation rather than human performance, the gap between character design and human anatomy is often significant.
The Coraline and Other Mother costume characters were designed personally after working through the process of the initial character sets with industry partners — working through the specific constraints of each character's design to find solutions that preserved the visual identity while making the costume buildable and performable. The exercise also clarified where the limits were: the Zombie Judge from ParaNorman was the least successful, because the fundamental disproportion between those characters' designs and human anatomy created constraints that couldn't be fully resolved without compromising character integrity; where as Coraline and Other Mother were, by far, the most successful designs.
Interactive Digital Experiences
The Coraline Button Your Eyes web experience — allowing users to upload their own photograph and replace their eyes with Coraline-style buttons — was an early example of the kind of interactive marketing that social platforms would later make standard. Built for the 2009 Coraline release, it predates most brands' engagement with participatory digital marketing and remains one of the most inventive pieces of interactive work produced for a theatrical animated feature of that period. The Coraline website itself won a 2010 Webby Award for Best Use of Animation or Motion Graphics.
External Verification
"The website for Coraline involves an interactive exploration game where the player can scroll through Coraline's world. It won the 2010 Webby Award for 'Best Use of Animation or Motion Graphics,' both by the people and the Webby organization."
Interactive games were also developed across multiple productions: Kubo: A Samurai Quest (iOS and Android, published in partnership with Focus Features and Fifth Journey), Kubo: Street Showdown, ParaNorman: 2 Bit Bub, The Boxtrolls: Build Your Own Boxtroll, The Boxtrolls: Slide and Sneak, and Kubo: The Moonbeast Brawl. Each was developed with involvement in the design and concept, ensuring the game aesthetic extended the film's visual language rather than departing from it.
Image — Kubo: A Samurai Quest
Kubo: A Samurai Quest. One of multiple interactive digital products developed across the LAIKA slate — each extending the film's visual world into a new medium without departing from the aesthetic standard set by the production.
©LAIKA LLC
Video — Kubo: A Samurai Quest · Official Mobile Game Trailer
Official trailer for Kubo: A Samurai Quest — iOS and Android, published in partnership with Focus Features and Fifth Journey. The game's origami aesthetic extends Kubo's visual world directly into gameplay. Published on the LAIKA Studios YouTube channel, August 2016.
©LAIKA LLC / Focus Features
Style Guide Creation and Management
The style guides produced for Missing Link and Kubo and the Two Strings were designed, built, and maintained entirely in-house. The Missing Link guide — 77 pages, the most comprehensive produced to date — covered 113 puppet assets, 172 props, 54 patterns and textures, 233 Pantone colour swatches, 144 individual graphic elements, 79 character quotes, 45 VFX background characters, 70 clean environment film stills, and 25 behind-the-scenes photographs. It served marketing, consumer products, social media, and international distribution simultaneously from a single source of creative truth.
Published Art Book Design
The Art of Missing Link and The Art of Kubo and the Two Strings were both designed and laid out by the in-house creative team. In both cases, the film directors wanted the books to reflect the same visual standard as the films themselves — which required the institutional knowledge and the access to production assets that lived inside the studio rather than with the publisher's art department. Working alongside Chronicle Books and similar imprints, the internal team took design responsibility for both volumes, producing books that met the directors' creative standard and were published commercially to that standard. The contribution is acknowledged in the credits of all four LAIKA Chronicle Art Books.
03
The Proof of Infrastructure
The most reliable test of whether a system was genuinely built or merely operated is whether it outlasts the person who created it. Systems that depend on an individual's presence are not systems — they are personal knowledge, which leaves when the person does.
The creative studio built at LAIKA between 2009 and 2019 passed that test. The structure remained the operational foundation of the studio's creative output after the work there concluded. The team member who was developed within that structure now leads the department. The discipline — the semantic approach to asset management, the brand quality assurance process, the internal creative direction of external partners — continued and scaled.
This is the same principle that underlies the Building Block System's most underappreciated quality: the compounding effect. Each production made the next one faster. Each team member developed became a multiplier rather than a dependency. What required significant effort and negotiation to establish was, by the end, simply how the studio worked.
"The measure of infrastructure is not whether it works while you are there. It is whether it works after you leave."
04
What Transfers
The creative studio work at LAIKA was specific to stop-motion animation and a studio whose entire identity depended on the integrity of its hand-crafted aesthetic. But the underlying discipline — building internal creative capability that can direct and support world-class external partners while serving every downstream use simultaneously — transfers to any organisation where brand integrity matters and where the gap between internal knowledge and external execution is costing something.
The same semantic approach to asset organisation that made LAIKA's style guides usable by thirty international distributors has been applied in other industries and other contexts. The principle is identical: understand what the downstream user needs before they ask for it, build the infrastructure to serve them, and maintain the standard consistently across every surface the brand touches.
Creative studios do not have to be built by creative agencies. Sometimes the most effective creative infrastructure is the one built from the inside — by someone who understands both the making and the selling, and can hold both standards simultaneously without compromising either.
Press Coverage — Nike × LAIKA Partnership
"LAIKA is poised to have a big presence at San Diego's Gaslamp Quarter during San Diego Comic-Con... LAIKA merchandise for sale, and daily drawings for a pair of Nike's LAIKA-themed shoes designed by Tinker Hatfield... In partnership with LAIKA, Tinker Hatfield, Vice President for Design and Special Projects and NIKE have created a limited-edition NIKE shoe to celebrate each of LAIKA's animated features."
Press Coverage — Tinker Hatfield on the Kubo XV
"For the release of Kubo and the Two Strings, Nike, Laika, and Focus Features have connected to rework the Air Jordan XV... The Kubo XV follows in the footsteps of specially designed sneakers for each of the three previous LAIKA movies: Coraline, The Boxtrolls, and ParaNorman. Mr. Hatfield designed shoes inspired by the films; the latter proved to be a particularly popular shoe, and each new issue has become a collector's item."
What This demonstrates
Creative leadership at every level of execution
In-house creative studio leadership — building a multidisciplinary team from zero inside a feature animation company, developing talent, establishing process, and maintaining output quality across six consecutive productions
Published book design — taking over art direction from professional publishers at the director's request and delivering commercially published art books acknowledged in all four Chronicle LAIKA publications
Infrastructure that outlasts the builder — the structure established continues to operate and has scaled, led by talent developed within it
International brand quality assurance — reviewing and correcting creative output across 30+ distribution territories in multiple scripts and languages
Large-scale experiential production — event branding from identity through to installation at architectural scale, across SDCC, Cannes, premieres, museum exhibitions, and orchestral concert events
Interactive product development — concept and design involvement across six digital games and interactive experiences across multiple productions and platforms
Digital design and UX leadership — directing and approving the creative output of Wieden+Kennedy and Way To Blue respectively on two Webby-nominated film websites, with sign-off at President and CEO level
Custom typography and font design — two original typefaces designed internally, both used in film promotion and one appearing in the film's end credit sequence itself
The Numbers
2
Webby Award nominations
4
Chronicle Art Book acknowledgements
70+
Detailed pages in the Missing Link style guide
10+
Interactive digital games developed
30+
International territories QA'd per production