for Motorola

At Fibre, I led the creative direction and design of a corporate history book for Motorola’s seventy fifth anniversary, titled The First Car Radio on the Moon. Instead of producing the usual hardbound volume with cloth covers, gold type and sepia photographs of senior executives, we set out to create something unexpected that reflected Motorola’s restless, experimental spirit.

Working with a small team, we spent months in the Motorola archive, hunting for images with the retro cool of old technology. Men in trench coats holding mobile phones bigger than their heads, early lab graphics, NASA photography and handset prototypes were all remixed into a bold visual narrative that revealed a company with a surprisingly hip heritage. The design treated each spread as a piece of editorial storytelling, pairing imagery with short, sharp copy rather than long corporate essays.

The result was a book that felt more like a cult design object than a conventional corporate publication. Geoffrey Frost, Motorola’s Corporate Vice President and Director of Global Consumer Communication, summed it up neatly, describing the project as “you guys: 10, corporate apparatchiks: 0”.