CONTRIBUTIONS:
Research, Visual & Conceptual Development, Logo Design, Branding Guidelines, User Flow and UI Design for App
TOOLS:
Adalo, InDesign, Illustrator
DURATION:
9 weeks (October-December 2023)
Final App Icon design.
Final Logo.
Cover for branding guidelines
Branding guidelines logo usage
Brand guidelines logo scale
Brand guidelines type sample
PROJECT SUMMARY:
For this branding project, I used Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, and Adalo to work on the brand design and to create some app mock-ups. I had never done any brand design before and learned a lot about what goes into a brand during this project.
The app is based on sparking new connections, so my supervisors loved the idea of using a sparkler as their logo. Previous iterations included hearts, gears or lightbulbs to represent the "Learn" in DPL, and game-like "play" iconography for the game-based nature of the app. Since it's targeted towards teens, I went with a bright, fun colour scheme as well.
The branding guidelines included logo usage (including what backgrounds to use, proportions, scale, and how it should just be the sparkler in small usage), typography, app mock-up designs, and colour guidelines.
PROJECT BRIEF:
This brand design project was for an internship with DPL Studios Inc. which I worked on at the end of 2023. DPL stands for "Date, Play, Learn" and they were looking for a logo design, branding guidelines, and some app interface design for their teen social app.
This project took about 8 weeks and was entirely remote communication between myself and my supervisors. We met weekly and worked together so I could design branding that they were happy with. It was a very iterative process and there were about 20 drafts of the logo before we landed on the final style and colour scheme.
TECHNICAL WRITE-UP:
The assignment began with research, looking for visual and conceptual references and colour samples to get a sense of what my supervisors were looking for to represent their company. This moved into logo sketching in Adobe Illustrator, which evolved over weeks 3-7 of the internship through iteration and consultation with my supervisors. The final few weeks of the internship were adapting the logo to an app icon, creating style and colour variations for different usages, creating a branding guidelines package in InDesign with all the brand design decisions, and using Adalo to create some user flow sketches and interface designs based on the branding guidelines.
Iteration Process:
Condensed logo design from Week 5 of the process.
App logo design from Week 5 of the process.
Text logo designs from Week 5 of the process.
Sketches from Week 3 of potential logo directions.
