Design, Brands, and Futures: Designing Product and Service Identities

Catalog description

In this course, students and I will delve into investigating social and cultural patternsboth historical and contemporarywhich guide effective approaches to branding products and services. For example, what helps people feel happy, accomplished, confident? What do they wear? What do they eat? Where do they gather? What do they do for enjoyment? What do they value? Students will work to align their discoveries to the graphic forms, colors, typography, and taglines that they create as part of a comprehensive branding strategy, which they will base on a product or service of their own choosing. Students will achieve these goals by engaging in a creative process where they will sketch, iterate, test, and refine graphic symbols and typography using conventional paper and pencils as well as Adobe Illustrator. Throughout the course, we'll also discuss communication trends and the role technology plays in shaping how and where brands appear in our everyday lives. Based on what they learn, students will propose various forms that their graphic symbols may take and brainstorm contexts in which they may appear. For example, how might their concepts appear in motion in a video viewed on a phone, or on the side of a food truck? Through this process students will explore the affordances and limitations of various mediums and contexts and test the flexibility of the branding systems the create.