Is it just us or are CG products having a moment? We asked CG sorceress Haruko Hayakawa to weigh in

If you stumble across Haruko Hayakawa’s work on your feed, it’s impossible to scroll past it swiftly. Exquisitely choreographed, each of her compositions are pretty hard to look away from. Whether it’s a jar of Blueland hand soap levitating over a field of spring blooms, a glinting bottle of Casa Malka’s tequila set amidst a lush desert landscape, or a bowl of slurpy noodles – topped with Fly By Jing’s Chengdu Crunch hot sauce – sitting in a bamboo forest, Hayakawa’s digital trompe l’oeils take notes from the reality of the physical world around us, and then push things a bit further. From SKKN, Bon Appétit to The Telegraph, the Brooklyn-based CG artist and creative director has worked with a wide range of clients, helping brands tell their stories through her fantastical compositions.

As we kept a close eye on Hayakawa’s growing body of work over the past years, we also noticed a shift in the larger industry – the world of branding now seems to be swimming in CG products. Whether it’s Milk Makeup sending tubes of their viral Jelly Tint flying to the sky for its launch campaign, or Hermès tapping into 3D animation to highlight the craftsmanship of their throw blankets, CG is helping brands go to a place they couldn’t reach before. And as the tide swells, the job of a CG product artist also seems to be on the rise. While it may be in demand, the skills required to master the painstaking wizardry of CG calls for extensive experience, and really, just a whole lot of resilience. Take, for example, the story of Hayakawa, whose journey to her current hi-def portfolio began at the age of 13, when she stumbled upon a 3D landscaping program called Bryce, and began fumbling her way through creating “what was called ‘3D abstract art’ in the early 2000’s,” she says.

I spent all of 2020 creating a body of work that was reflective of where I wanted my career to go.

Her creative path, since then, has been anything but straightforward. As her career evolved, she worked as a graphic designer, creative director, and also got pulled deep into the realm of food styling and photography – an experience that colours her work to date. But the big push into CG happened only in 2020, when Hayakawa quit her job at a creative agency and was working on a packaging project riddled by the production delays due to the pandemic. With no samples at hand, she mocked up the product in CG, and that sent her down a “3D rabbit hole,” as she describes. “Perhaps it is part of living in a place like NYC, but throughout my 20s, I felt a go-go-go sense of urgency to move forward in my career and the pandemic completely shut down that feeling,” says Hayakawa. The lull of the pandemic allowed her to take a pause and freely experiment with CG. “I spent all of 2020 creating a body of work that was reflective of where I wanted my career to go and what I wanted to be hired for.”

Diving back into the world of CG, Hayakawa began creating work that hovered somewhere between reality and surrealism – first, for herself, and then, for brands that quickly took notice. “CG allows me to do brand storytelling in a way that’s eye-catching and impactful at first glance,” she tells us. “I think what helped my work take off was that I created work that felt familiar in a ‘photographic’ sense, but brought a surrealistic, illustrative edge which felt fresh.”

We’re in a place where there’s a desire for more fun and out-of-this-world, high-impact visuals.

This ability of CG to bend the rules of reality allows Hayakawa – and brands at large – to write their own rules and build their own worlds for their products to live in. “There’s a reason why CG is booming. We’re in a place where there’s a desire for more fun and out-of-this-world, high-impact visuals. CG allows the creator to build any world they please which may not be possible to create, or might be highly costly to produce in a studio environment,” shares Hayakawa. Tapping into this latitude that CG provides in terms of worldbuilding, she created a campaign for Fly By Jing’s launch of their hot sauce, Chengdu Crunch. The making of the hot sauce had taken Fly By Jing’s Founder Jing Gao and Design Director Stacy Zou on a long trip through the city of Chengdu, and the duo wanted all of their experiences from the trip – from “having hotpot flavoured with so much spice our lips would go numb and ears would start ringing” to “walking through a green bamboo forest with cicadas singing” – to be bottled into this campaign. “We knew that a photoshoot with a few sets of food plating simply wouldn’t be able to transport you to a different world, in the way that both computer-generated imagery and the taste of something new can,” explains Zou. Staying true to her reputation, Hayakawa delivered a larger-than-life campaign, where the jar of Chengdu Crunch – always set in richly composed landscapes – was clearly the star of the show.

With its sky-is-the-limit potential, CG offers an interesting counterpoint to hyperrealistic brand photography, often taking brands into a space where perhaps a photo can’t, as Zou points out. “For a long time, there was resistance to 3D renders being equivalent to images taken of the physical product. Those days are no longer acceptable; no one should be thinking it doesn’t look the same. It looks better in most cases,” INDG’s Bastiaan Geluk said in Adobe’s 3D Trend Report 2023. And on top of helping push brand storytelling into new, exciting places, CG can also iron out the usual kinks of production that designers and brands struggle with.

The client was able to use these images and marketing assets as proof of concept to build and raise money for the brand.

When Ohio-based studio Nihilo and Hayakawa began working on the identity and campaign for tequila brand Casa Malka, “the actual product or liquid did not exist yet,” says the studio’s Co-founder & Creative Director Emunah Winer. “This allowed us to imagine the product and brand from scratch, including the bottle and the CG environments in which it lived. The client was then able to use these images and marketing assets as proof of concept to build and raise money for the brand,” she explains. “Creatively, it allowed us to imagine that anything is possible. We made up a bottle, and we are not industrial designers. We made up sets, and we are not set designers. Because of this, what you see in the renders is pure unadulterated concept without the dilution of any practical restraints. That became the standard for the brand, which we are now working to live up to in real life.”

The potential that the medium has is boundless, no doubt, but dexterity with CG, though, doesn’t come easily. “To me, learning 3D is like a marathon, not a sprint,” says Hayakawa. “I recommend emerging designers to go on YouTube and find some beginner tutorials and just start experimenting. Also, find something that feels “fun”. I think the idea of having “fun” may come off as frivolous and self-serving, but my entire career has been built on enjoying my work.” Her biggest piece of advice, as she puts it, is “to play around and focus on the aspects of 3D you enjoy the most – whether that’s modelling, lighting, animation, sculpting, simulations etc.” The secret to grasping the intricacies of CG, “or quite frankly, anything in life, is resilience,” says Hayakawa. “The secret to my work is a near daily, personal creative practice, tapping into what I enjoy and listening to my intuition.”

Haruko Hayakawa