Case Study

CLIENT: RCP (Fictional)

PROJECT TITLE: ITECH 100 Digital Design – Brand Identity, Logo and Social Media Campaign

DATE: SPRING 2022

DESIGNER: Dana F.

DESCRIPTION:
A college project in which I was tasked to create a brand around a specific sustainable theme. I chose Responsible Consumption and Production, and I created a fictional non-profit with the same name.

This theme is meaningful to me because most of the power over what happens to our planet is held by a few megacorporations. Individual actions such as saving water are unlikely to make a difference when large factories dump gallons of waste into the ocean simply because it is the cheapest way to dispose of it. The only way to truly make a difference is to hold these companies accountable, and reform the economic system that led to all this waste in the first place.

All of the projects in this case study were made with this idea in mind.

RESEARCH:

Our professor gave us the option to either create a new logo for an existing organization, or make our own fictional one. I used X4Impact's report to look through organizations with the same sustainable theme. Most of the organizations already had clear, effective branding. The Natural Resources Defense Council logo has a polar bear and a northstar; a metaphor for the goal of protecting natural resources. In addition, none of them had the anti-corporation image that I wanted to create a brand around.

With my sustainable theme in mind, I conducted interviews in order to gather inspiration for my fictional non-profit's logo. I asked the interviewees what the theme meant to them, and what images came to mind. The five objects that stuck out most to me were earth, penrose stairs, balloon, a farm, and a forest.

I also performed research while designing the social media ads. After making rough concepts with placeholder text, I researched facts to insert. The most interesting thing I learned from this is that British Petroleum created the term “carbon footprint”. BP used this word to deflect responsibility for carbon emmissions away from themselves, and onto ordinary people.

CHALLENGES:

A significant hurdle was the lack of direction. With every assignment I receive, my goal is to meet all the requirements to the best of my ability. But for the logos, I was given no specific instruction other than to simply keep designing and iterating. The reason this was difficult had more to do with my level of confidence than my level of skill; and I eventually became comfortable with being creative for these open-ended assignments.

I also, of course, initally struggled with the Adobe suite of software. I had used digital art software before, specifically Krita and the GNU Image Manipulation Program, but Illustrator was far less intuitive than the software I had come to know. I became frustrated easily, because I mistakenly thought that ease-of-use was the reason Adobe's products are so popular. Eventually, I learned that the actual advantage to Adobe is the options they provide; their software contains every feature a professional could possibly want.

STRATEGY:

Everytime I heard about branding, whether it was from the professor's materials, or my marketing professor's lessons, or my own research, one point of guidance was repeated more than anything else: all of the branding should create a clear, consistent image. So I made sure that everything I designed related to the theme of “making cruel corporations take responsibility”. I also wanted to make sure that my attempts to communicate this were understood clearly, so I paid close attention to any and all feedback, and used it to improve my designs. For the logo, I decided to use the earth and penrose stairs, because I felt they were best for communicating the general idea of Responsible Production. When I was choosing typefaces, I thought carefully about what personality each font represents, and which fonts match and contrast with eachother nicely. The design brief was also made to communicate the brand's values with color, type, heading style, and choice of photos.

DESIGN APPROACH:

When deciding how to use the earth and penrose stairs in a logo, my first good attempt was to make a mostly visual logo in which the stairs wrap around the earth, with the initials of the non-profit in small letters in the earth. I figured a square logo like this would make for a good site icon, which is a great quality for a logo to have in the digital age. As I iterated on the design, I made the letters larger and larger so they would be easier to see at small sizes. After my professor advised me to do so, I tried inverting the black and white, and it improved the design. But then I realized this logo was perhaps a bit too positive. I did want the logo to be mostly positive, but to convey the central idea of anger at corporations, the logo needed to have at least a hint of negativity to it. I changed from an image-oriented design to a type-oriented design, which I feel makes it more serious. I used a serif font to increase the serious feeling. I kept the earth and stairs by putting them inside the letters. I added the image of the recycle icon, because it's another symbol for the general idea of responsible production. I had been playing around with bright colors before this point; to that color scheme I added dark red, and made that the main color of the logo. The red represents anger. I kept the rest of the bright colors because they contrasted nicely with the red.

RESULTS:

Here is the final logo. I decided to use Libre Baskerville for the logo because, if I use the same font in the body text, titles, and logo, it will make the branding stronger. Using accessible-colors.com, I made sure all the dark and light colors contrasted with eachother, so they could be used for documents and webpages as well as the logo. The colors have meanings that tie into the brand's values. Red is anger, yellow is progress, white is honesty, and green and blue are the colors of the earth.

Here is the finished design brief. I tried to make the brief itself match the design discussed within; because the other design briefs I researched were designed like this. However, the design brief could be improved with more visual examples of the design. With every design decision I made, I explained how it ties into the brand's values.

Here are three finished social media ads. Advertisements are supposed to push people to make a decision, so I used an emotional and ethical appeal to make people feel frustrated about companies, and push them to support our organization. I focused on disproving the idea that individuals are responsible for environmental damage.