True Beauty - Style Guide
True Beauty is a full-blown Gen Z cultural phenomenon. With nearly 7 million English downloads, Webtoon’s masterpiece resonates with South Korean and Western markets alike, with its powerful portrayal of social status, and the influence of personal image in the modern age.
For anime teams in Japan and Korea, using a UK creative partner to bring their IP to western markets is a huge leap of faith. But Stacey’s Licensing team has a rare speciality - an authentic passion and understanding of anime combined with vast experience of the CP space, markets, and the licensing landscape. So for our in-house anime fans, working with Webtoon to bring True Beauty to life in the western space was a massive honour!
Feminine, fluid and romantic, True Beauty is a visually stunning and incredibly detailed IP, and Webtoon knew exactly what they wanted to see from our style guide - of course, the licensing team smashed it.
With such a distinct, detailed visual brand, our priority was staying true to the character art, but enhancing and celebrating elements which would appeal to western markets, which comprise a broad range of consumer needs. So our guide stays true to the brand DNA, using loose stylisation and subtle solutions such as recolouring to provide emphasis (instead of reinvention), to provide a wide array of assets and elements to cater to market needs.
Our focus was on storytelling and flexibility - producing a kit of parts comprising a variety of graphics, comps, badges and icons which could be picked up and popped on a product as required, to service a variety of market needs and consumer target segments. But longevity was also important - with a visual brand identity as strong and long-running as True Beauty’s, it was vital all our assets were evergreen - infused with the same visual identity, retaining their authenticity. The result? A kit Webtoon loved, and a growing relationship with tons more projects in the pipeline.
It was a pleasure and an honour to work with Webtoon on True Beauty… stay tuned for more anime goodness later this year!
