How do you empower the digital hobbyist?

Wacom tablets are legendary among designers, photographers and artists, but general consumers had barely heard of the brand—suggesting a huge, untapped potential market. Ziba partnered with Wacom to design a line of digital tablets that could bring their world-class technology and wonderfully natural interaction to an emerging group of digital hobbyists.

We began by defining Wacom's new strategic target, the Social Creative: a growing group that creates art, video and rich documents regularly, for work, pleasure or both. Their diversity of habits and needs suggested a range of products: Bamboo Pen, Touch, Fun, Craft and "Pen & Touch" versions each offer a different combination of interface, surface size, and software. Bamboo Craft, for example, is optimized for scrapbooking and other craft activities, while Bamboo Pen specializes in digital sketching and handwritten notation. They also had different expectations around form and aesthetics, so we created an entire new design language for the Bamboo line, featuring a slim profile and a unique asymmetrical layout that works beautifully next to a laptop keyboard.

Bamboo put Wacom's high-sensitivity digitizer technology into a consumer-friendly product, at a consumer-friendly price point. Wacom products have been featured in trade publications and professional websites for years, but the Bamboo line earned glowing reviews from consumer-friendly sites like CNET, Engadget, Mac Life and PC Magazine. This attention opened new market opportunities, bringing the entire Wacom line into retailers like Best Buy, Fry's Electronics, Amazon, and the Apple Store, that previously had little interest in pen or touch tablets.