On Tuesday we were briefed by QED who wanted to create branding for The Student Voice. This is to do with the student surveys and student engagement across the university. We were asked in groups of 5 to create a brand for the student voice in 48 hours, which could be used to communicate better with students but also with people across the globe.
As a team we started to come up with ideas of things to do with voice, we thought of sound waves, punctuation speech bubbles etc. From this we were drawn more to this idea of the punctuation more and the use of SV to stand for student voice. We thought that because we are used to seeing SU around campus that SV would be something familiar but different.
Over the first night we spent time looking at variations of the logo designs (created by Luke) to decide as a group which one we thought we should develop further. We eventually decided on the use of the mark in the v, the mark being there to symbolise starting the conversation. We initially started off using the colour from Cardiff Met while incorporating a bright orange to be unique and symbolise communication and social. However, later one we decided to develop the colour scheme opting for a bright pink and orange to make the brand feel more contemporary and engaging to students. Before the colour felt slightly corporate and we thought that student would respond better to other colours.
Furthermore, as the project started to move forward we started to develop other areas of communication. I created some gifs which could be used on social media platforms like instagram, movement in a image is more likely to attract attention than a still image which is why we decided to create a GIF. Inspired by our mark I used inverted commas as the basis then slowly the logo marque emerging alongside the slogan. We thought that digital design was important as majority of student interact with things happening the university through their presence on social media.
Another thing that we thought about was about the project being bilingual, which was a key requirement of the client. We made everything from the posters, logos to lanyards bilingual to highlight that the branding works in both languages well. We also thought about Student Voice Week which was something that clients spoke to us about we took this idea into motion to show how the brand would work with way finding and other areas of the student voice. Megan created this map using the marque as pin points for where stands and reps would be, this would be handed out to students so they could find their way around the campus. This lead onto us thinking about applying SV to hoodies for student reps to wear so that they would further promote the brand and make students aware of student voice.
From this project I learnt how much I was able to achieve in only 48 hours which is a confidence boost for myself. This will also help me in my On Display project where I will to get a number of deliverables created by a certain time. I found it useful as it also gave me an insight into what it’s like to have a live project and the timescales that they bring as we aren’t always the same as the timescales we might have in the university. I really enjoyed this project and it helped me understand more about what creating a brand includes.
Abbie Louise Williams 