This semester focuses on working in a group setting. Our teams are randomly assigned, something I am excited for. Personally, I prefer working hard when it comes to projects over being buddy-buddy with my teammates. Not being in a group with friends allows me to be professional much easier.

For the first 3 weeks, every group was tasked with creating a brand for themselves. Let me take you through my contributions.

On the very first day, I already began making logo sketches after our group decided on our name.

They are incredibly low-fidelity, but I had a vision that I wanted on paper. Besides that, I also wanted to just... Get started. Begin on the project. As the Dutch say, "de kop eraf hakken".

Following the tiny ideas I had, I thought about our brand identity and realized it would be nice if the logo matched the aesthetic of our brand. I looked at patchwork patterns and inspiration images online and thought about what we do and provide. I then tried to create a few different ideas that are all wildly different, using different colors, styles and fonts.

Along with it, I created a poster concept utilizing one of the created aesthetics. This shows what it would look like when being put to use.

My group was rather enthusiastic about the small calico cat idea in (5.4). However, the teachers weren’t convinced it was relevant and fitting, so I created a more detailed visualization of the idea. It explains my thought process and different iterations of the logo. Unfortunately, the teachers still were not convinced after this. And so, we chose to continue with the logo of a teammate.

For the logo idea from my teammate, I helped by creating moodboards that would help establish the vibe and colors we want to aim for.
After viewing different kinda of logos and patchwork images, I decided to go with something fresh and colorful. After all, we are a studio who wants to be approachable. I personally feel like colorful logos give off that playful vibe we want, but still look professional in combination with the sharp square patches.

I tried to implement the moodboard's colors to the logo created by my teammate. This took several attempts before we found what we liked.

Image 1: purple text which I realized looks bad after I saw it on my laptop.
Image 2: stitch colors that didn't look nice.
Image 3, 4 and 5: these were all liked and will be tested with others.

We compiled the logos we liked and went around the class to ask which one was preferred. We also checked with the teachers and received some feedback.
Black stitches won, and so we stuck with that.
Also, I learned that you should never go for full black in logo designs. I will definitely keep that in mind for next time.

Now that the logo is done, we decided to expand and work on the brandguide. I did this with one other teammate. We divided the different pages and went to work.
First, I made sure to look at other brandguides and take them as examples. My favorites are Uber's and CoolBlue's. I think their style is simple, bold, and out there, using only little colors. I especially love CoolBlue's branding. It's super recognizable and fun.

One thing I struggled greatly with was the Tone of Voice. I kept looking at examples and tried to create an example for our brand using Figma, but it never felt right. I asked for feedback but none of the teachers nor my groupmates gave clear answers...

Ultimately, the Tone of Voice would take on a much different look.

The new Tone of Voice page features a much broader explanation of the vibes we wish to give off. Furthermore, as you can see, the styling has been done in our studio's style, featuring patches in geometric shapes using the colors we chose.

It was quite a lot of repetitive work, but it was fun. I love styling and decorating, so this was right up my alley. I worked on this at school in long sittings, and so I don't have many work in progress images.
However, here is the full, finished brandguide.

I mostly worked on the title page, typography page, and the tone of voice. The full brandguide as a PDF can be viewed here.

As a group, we wanted professional pictures to show who we are. We went to Fontys's Pixel Playground, a studio with tons of professional technology. We got Jan to explain the workings of it, and we were allowed to truly "play" around with the equipment (very respectfully).

We got pictures made. However, we don't like showing our faces... So I came up with the ideas to draw cartoony masks over our faces, which also helps us stand out. The original idea was to actually make into real props, but we never got around to doing this. For this, I asked my teammates which animal they'd like me to draw for them. Of course, I stuck with our studio's color palette. For myself, I chose a jackalope. Bunnies have always been my thing (my username is "ishybun") and jackalopes are simply really cool.

Though it was not my task, I helped a little bit with the website design the others from our group were making. The layout was done by them, but they had trouble with the colors. So, I helped them by iterating on their layout and coloring the design following our brandguide.