Shift, Creating An Identity:
After our first day of research (see link), my team split into two groups to collect our thoughts to have an idea pool the next morning; Sofia Kluge and Sophie Youle gathered at their house, and myself, Matt Wright and Ollie Purssey gathered at my house.
Both groups created something to show, and from there it was a case of feeding back and merging some ideas to produce our logo and identity. There were two items that we all thought were important to incorporate: we thought that a circle should be involved in the logo due to the cyclic relationship that universities have with the Design Industry, (i.e. designers help students, who then become designers that help other students etc.), and within the Shift logo we wanted to involve an up-facing arrow - this is the link to the Shift Key on the keyboards that all students/designers are united in using, and the positive, progressive transition that we felt was at the heart of the scheme.
As the Shift logo was an up-facing arrow within a circle, we thought that as well as alternating the colour of the other schemes within Shift, using different geometric shapes for each would distinguish them further - thus giving them their own separate identities within the project. We first of all settled with the idea of having Shift’s colour scheme as purple, with the other projects differing slightly from Shift’s colour; we arrived at pinks, lilacs and mauves which we agreed were a bit too ‘girly’. The purple, yellow, red and green colours came from our group experimenting with kind shades of simple colours; these colours seemed to not only work well by themselves but compliment each other, so these were the hues that we concluded with.
Our pitch to the panel of Visual Communication experts went well, we all contributed to the designs, and we all contributed to pitching them. The panel agreed that our identity produced a ‘strong suite of icons’ for the scheme to use, and they could see clearly how the logos related to one another; however, they told us that some imagination was needed to deconstruct the logo to find our values that we had thought so hard about. Their suggestions were to perhaps incorporate photography into our identity, perhaps use some kind of strap-line to back up the progressive, positive values behind our scheme.
From here, the Shift team was given an extra two weeks to go away and build on our identity further; all groups that took part in re-branding Visual Communication will have to re-pitch their ideas to the same panel to see where we are at that time. I’m very pleased with our identity, considering that we only had one afternoon and one morning, we produced a substantial amount of work. From here we need to gather again and give it one more push to give the identity justice, showing how it would work in situations around University, through posters, leaflets, a website etc.
Watch this space for Shift.
