Creating the ‘studentconnected’ Brand.

It is important to note that branding is one of the most crucial segments to creating a company that will represent the passion, ideas and concept behind the product.

App Icon:

Creating an icon that would stand for studentconnected’s vision on what it means to produce an app that allows students and tutors work to their most productive through a simplified system of functionality and aesthetic would be quite an open ended brief. To help myself design this icon I decided to give myself some rules that I would have to follow and if I really needed to, I could break them. They were:

  1. Colourful
  2. Streamlined & Flat Style
  3. Simple
  4. Showcase Creativity

I chose to follow these rules as I believe that these will serve as guidelines to accurately represent studentconnected’s vision; a colourful and creative icon assisting to signify the creative visual students who would be using the app and the projects that they create for the university. The steamlined, flat and simple style was interesting to me as I did research into what current brands are doing with their own logos and app icons. It turns out that many of them have gone down the path of dropping sharp edges, sans-serifed and pastel/flat colours with next to no gradients. This is something that I incorporated into my app icon.

App Icon Version 1:

 


StudentConnected App 2 StudentConnected App 1

I designed these two icons helping keep within my rules and guidelines I set upon myself. I used a university cap as its universally recognised for its higher education connotations, polygons were used to create the lowpoly effect seen in many creative outputs such as 3D modelling – while demonstrating contrast in the background.  Two different colour themes were used to showcase what differentiating styles would look like.

Logo:

Finding the definition of a good and a bad logo seems like it would be quite easy, however once you’ve got past the clearly blatant bad logos and start looking towards the multi-million pound companies that you see daily; you begin to look really in-depth as to the quality and thought put into and some of the elements behind the logo.

 

To me a good logo is something that represents the company in a clear and concise way, this should be done in two ways:

  1. The first is to have a logo that’s elements make up what you stand for, whether that be Costa Coffee, with their coffee beans boldly at the forefront of their logo or Wikipedia’s world built up of connecting jigsaw pieces with various written languages on.
  2. The second would be a logo that can stand by itself and be acknowledged clearly by the public domain. Perfect examples are Nike, Apple & Facebook, without the need for text cluttering up some products. Nike and Apple, are great at this with Apple’s iMac’s and iPhone’s clear black logo on the fore front of the products design. It’s instantaneous, you know who it is – Nike are the same with their famous tick on shoe boxes & TV advertisements.

 

I initially began creating a mood board of different fonts that I found visually appealing that looked sleek and simplified as mentioned above; these fonts were chosen with students and education in mind to help make sure that the two would fit with the apps general aesthetic.

 

Logo

Eliminating the fonts was fairly easy as I wanted a font that would work as one single word with no spaces or caps lock – this was a concious choice to separate studentconnected from other brands within the market such as Black Board. These were the shortlisted typefaces that really stood out to me, I found that most of them had a similar feel to them and looked like light or bold versions of each other. This made it even easier to cut down. The final font that I chose was the last on the list.

Logo_Shortlist

I was very fond of the app icon as a logo that would stand for itself as an image however a university cap is quite difficult to use as a synonymous brand. This is why I decided to incorporate it within the logo but with something directly linked to studentconnected. I aimed for an all lower case, no space literal spelling of ‘studentconnected’ with the university cap placed ontop of a letter. This logo will still be worked on as I am not 100% happy with the look of the logo and feel that it could be improved greatly.

 

Logo_Final

 

Within a future blogpost I will talk about future improvements & alterations to this logo.