Tronic: Changing Courses

Browsing through Tronic’s website is like taking a digital tour of the future, complete with sound effects. Tronic, a multidisciplinary design firm, directs and animates scalable cross platform applications for brands such as Target, Diesel, Adidas, Sharp, and Smirnoff.  The design, direction, and animation studio founded by Jesse Seppi and Vivian Rosenthal pushes ideas to the limits of innovation, experimentation, and most importantly, realization. We caught up with Seppi and Rosenthal to find out how they keep Tronic’s designs ahead of the curve. 

Unlike many designers who got their start by studying design, Seppi and Rosenthal started as graduate students in the architecture program at Columbia University. Rosenthal says: “I went to architecture school thinking I was going to design buildings, but I just instantly got seduced by this whole idea of animation and moving images, because it gave you greater access to what was in your imagination.” Indeed, Tronic’s designs look like dreams of the future.  As the digital design world redefines itself, frequently crossing over with architecture and other disciplines, Seppi and Rosenthal’s unique background lends them a particularly valuable niche.

It might be easy to imagine Tronic getting sidetracked with so many possible directions to take their designs, but thorough planning keeps them on task. “We stay focused by developing a concept early on in the process that drives the artistic trajectory of the project. We continually make sure that the idea doesn’t veer too far from the original concept, so that we don’t lose track of the original goal of the project. It’s a constant dialogue between our conceptual vision for the project, the artistic manifestation of that vision and the desires of our clients.”

Tronic’s conceptual vision and the desires of their clients don’t always jive. Tronic cites this as one of the more difficult aspects of being commissioned to create work. “The first real challenge is when you are working on a project that you feel very passionately about and the client wants to change it in some way that you are certain will be detrimental to the design or feeling of it.” But this can become a positive experience by opening a dialogue between the designers and the client.   "Often we are able to explain why we want to do something a certain way so that we end up seeing eye to eye with the client once they fully understand our reasoning behind a decision, but sometimes we do need to change the look of a piece and find a creative solution that works with the new direction.  There is a client and it is a dialogue, and while this can sometimes present a challenge, it can also be a very rewarding dialogue that pushes the project into new territory.”

Tronic affords itself more creative freedom by pitching concepts directly to brands instead of waiting to be commissioned or working through ad agencies. While they admit that this method isn’t right for everyone, for them “it was critical in being able to define our artistic sensibility.”  Tronic tends to defy conventional wisdom, staying true to their mission and purpose.  They explain, “Our goal is to create an artistically and conceptually driven body of work that inspires, challenges and excites ourselves and others... We’re inspired by the idea of creating things that we haven’t seen before.”   And that's a great way to evolve from architecture into one of the world's leading animation/direction/design studios..