Rebranding Visual Communication:
Over the last seven years, my course Visual Communication has pushed the Peer Assisted Learning (PAL) scheme; the past two years saw the Design Buddies scheme arrive, this enables 3rd Year students to be mentored by a designer from industry; the TLK lectures have run at AUCB alongside the Design Buddies scheme, TLK provides a platform for local designers to share their experiences about the Industry with students. All three of these schemes are centred upon a common theme: sharing knowledge and experiences to support the transition of design students to designers/illustrators.
Our new project, Identity, asked us to provide a new name, branding, and publicity for these three schemes as a collective item. We must create a name, logo and an identity for the scheme that encompasses PAL, TLK and Design Buddies. We were asked to produce a new visual identity that creates new ways for the scheme to connect with people.
We were placed into groups that we had worked with previously (myself, Matt Wright, and Ollie Purssey - see Truths project) with the addition of two 3rd Year students: Sofia Kluge and Sophie Youle. Our first task was coming up with a name for our scheme - this took us hours; we thought a lot about what these schemes meant: friends, mentoring, advising, sharing. From here we thought about other words that related to those values: ally, coach, educator, collective, collaborator, syndicate, cabinet, outfit, partnership, committee.
In the end we settled on the idea of transition, all of these schemes are about the transition of a designer - from their first year of studying at a university, to their first year of working in the Design Industry.
From ‘transition’ we got: evolution, progression, growth, development, flux, shift. Straight away we all latched onto ‘Shift’, it was punchy at five letters long, and it is also a button on the keyboards that everyone at University is united in using. Not only this, but the keyboard button symbol is an arrow facing up, therefore symbolising a progressive, positive transition – a value that we were all keen on communicating through our brand.
