Context:
Senior UX design course project.
The Public Brand Animation
The Public Theater
A brand design that explores the unexpectedness in the conventions.
My Role:
Visual Design, Content Design,
Art Direction, Researching.
Duration:
Sep. to Oct. 2020
- 4 weeks
Team:
Hannah Lim, Kesha Omarali, & Sherry Liao.
Context:
Senior Experience design course project.
The Public is a campaign-focus imaginary Brand Design project for The Public Theater. During the creation of the project, I collaborated with other designers in the team redesigning the brand and other campaign assets for an imaginable client, utilizing a series of design principles from design pioneers.
The objective of the project is to learn about unique design principles referencing designated design pioneers, and to represent the client’s unique characteristics by creating a novel brand design that differentiates from the original brand.
Brand Research
The client - The Public Theater
The Public Theater is an arts organization based in New York City that aims to develop and produce plays from up-and-coming playwrights and performers. The theater aims to provide accessible art related to the complexity of contemporary society to the general public.
Brand Characteristics
+ Bold;
+ Unconventional;
+ Rebelling;
+ Straightforward.
The Original Brand Design
The Original Brand was designed by the famous designer Paula Scher & Pentagram. To visually present the characteristic of the brand, the designers used vibrant colors in strong contrast, bolded and large size fonts, with multiple layers of content on slanted grids leaving minimal white space.
The original logo designs and the campaign posters.
Designer Research
We researched and learned about two desiginated designers - Wim Crouwel and Ellen Lupton, gathered the insights and design principles from the designers to utilized in our design later.
Insights from Design Pioneers
Wim Crouwel: The grid allows for rearrangement of type into new forms, which emphasizes the message itself.
Wim Crouwel's design is famous for using type as a form and experimenting with the grid.
Ellen Lupton: By looking at the constraints of a system from a new and fresh perspective, unpredictable results can be produced.
The design principle we drew from Ellen Lupton's Book - Graphic Design The New Basics.
Design Focus
In order to create a scope our design could focus on, we combined the insights from the design pioneers and the brand attributes of the Public Theater to create a problem statement and framing questions to guide our design.
The Problem Statement
The project proposes to design an identity that emphasizes unpredictability to reinforce the unconventional characteristics of The Public Theater.
Framing
How might we create unexpectedness through layering design elements on the grid?
Ideation
When coming up with the art direction for the design, we used an ideation method that we learn from the course - The grouping process. In the grouping process, basing off the Ellen Lupton's graphic design principles, we pulled and grouped images we found online which relate to photography, architecture, graphic design and other art works.
We put the images we found online on Figma and using it as a virtual white board.
Art Direction
Organizing the image that we found using the grouping methods and aligned it with the key words and paragraph that we pre-scripted focusing on the brand's unique characteristics, we came up with the mood-board.
The mood board and the detailed explanation for each of the images.
Final Products
Following the art direction, we created several digital and print campaign assets:
Print Products:
The Main Poster.
Poster variations in the environment.
Play ticket design.
Play ticket design.
Theater program spread design.
Digital Products:
Instagram post design.
Website landing page design.
Reflection
From the project I learned greatly about the process how to form the core concept of a design, and frame the problem space by combining the brand’s values with outside inspirations.
I also learned significantly about how to find design inspirations & insights and the process of turning them into unique and workable design methods.