Visa
Visa
Overview
- Creative and art direction
What We Did
The Outcome
Visa needed to bring its refreshed brand identity into the real world through a focused Out-of-Home campaign. The goal was to reimagine the “Tap to Pay” message using a new visual system that could scale across environments, formats, and audiences. Therum was brought in to help translate the updated branding into a creative rollout that felt modern, clear, and unmistakably Visa.
We owned the creative direction, CannonballSF took it into production
Visa handed us full creative control after earlier concepts hadn't landed, so the direction was ours to define rather than follow. We owned the thinking and the design work: the organizing idea, the transit map system behind it, and the concept art across every format, from turnstile decals to tram wraps. CannonballSF then expanded that direction into a full production pipeline and delivered the final assets into Visa's out-of-home placements. Two clear halves of one job, with the line between them drawn at the point the concepts were approved.
Visa gave us full creative control, a rare opportunity to rethink how the brand could live in public space. Earlier concepts hadn’t landed, so we weren’t following a direction. We were defining one.
We turned to the NYC subway map system, for its design, clarity, structure, and ability to guide people at scale. We built a design system inspired by transit maps to tell the Tap to Pay story through motion, connection, and accessibility, designed across three levels of zoom: Macro (full environmental layouts), Base (clean visuals rooted in Visa’s refreshed identity), and Micro (close-up graphics highlighting transaction moments). The system wasn’t just inspired by wayfinding. It was designed to become part of it.
A full suite of campaign assets crafted for movement, repetition, and impact across environments: bus shelter graphics, bus wraps, tram wraps, large-format banners, turnstile graphics, motion-based digital posters, and hallway and corridor takeovers.
Bus shelter graphics
Bus wraps
Tram wraps
Large-format banners
Turnstile graphics
Motion-based digital posters
Hallway and corridor takeovers
Visa embraced the concepts we delivered, marking a shift in how the brand communicates movement, access, and everyday transactions. Our work laid the visual and strategic foundation for a larger campaign rollout, from there, CannonballSF expanded the direction into a full production pipeline, delivering final assets across Visa’s Out-of-Home placements.
Borrow the language of the place the work has to live in
The move that carries this campaign isn't a headline, it's the decision to speak transit. Route lines, node dots and a TAP to RIDE sequence read the same way on a turnstile decal, a platform poster, a bus side and a tram wrap, because riders already know how to read that grammar. A system built on the visual rules of its own environment stops asking for attention and starts giving directions. That transfers to any brand working in public space: find the vocabulary people already trust there, then say your thing in it.