On Saturday, I attended an Iconathon for the fist time. We were about 30 people, in a work session organized by The Noun Project that brought together not just designers, but all walks of life including educators, volunteers, civic leaders and others.

The concept is great:

… Symbols serve as some of the best tools to overcome many language and cultural communication barriers. The aim of Iconathon is to add to the public domain a set of graphic symbols that can be used to easily communicate concepts frequently needed in civic design.

Besides contributing much-needed civic minded symbols to the public domain, Iconathons also bring together people from all aspects of the community… Iconathons are specifically designed to let the public participate in the design process and to further increase their understanding of the civic topics they engage with.

The goal of the Iconathon I participated in was to help develop the visual language of Wikipedia. And it was tough! Some concepts required abstraction, while others lent themselves more to storytelling solutions. The people at Wikipedia had put together a list of concepts to visualize, such as user types (e.g., administrator, registered, anonymous, bot, blocked), article status (e.g., featured, rapidly changing, reviewed, nominated for deletion, unreviewed), and other features specific to the Wikipedia editing experience (e.g., if an article is encyclopedia worthy, or has a neutral point of view, or contains no original research).

Due to the nature of Wikipedia, a reference site available in 285 languages, with 500 million unique visitors from practically every country on the planet, and over 25 million collaboratively written and edited articles, our icons had to as universal as possible, forbidding us from using metaphors open to different interpretations depending on the culture of the viewer, and from relying on words.

The process was fun. After a few introductions and presentations, they divided us into small groups, each containing at least one Wikipedia member to provide background. Each group came up with at least three icon sketches per concept. After brainstorming for a couple of hours, all groups got together and presented the work.

Then, in a remarkably civilized crit (kudos to Edward Boatman from The Noun Project), we discussed as a group the pros and cons of each approach and narrowed things down. In a future phase, The Noun Project will take those ideas and turn them into actual files. Resulting icons from past Iconathons are already available free for download.

Throughout the day, had great conversations with Wikipedia staff and learned about their unique community-driven decision-making process, or how their design decisions must work across extremely different language needs from one culture to the next. I also met fellow designers who are working on some cool stuff (like Stephen Kennedy and an initiative to create the first bus map for the city of Dhaka, funded through Kickstarter!)

So, all around inspiring. Makes me want to revisit my Symbolic Relationships experiments and see if some of those resulting icons are worth uploading to the ever-growing Noun Project library.

(Top and bottom images in this post courtesy of @nounproject on instagram, twitter.)

Since teaching a graduate class on branding called Nature of Identity at the Academy of Art in San Francisco during 2011, I’ve had several students approach me asking for advise on their thesis projects. This post showcases one of those student’s work which I mentored during the fall of 2012, and was recently selected as a winner in the 2012 Brand New Awards student category.

Katie King Rumford, 2012 MFA graduate, focused her thesis on the intersection of cooking and graphic design. She noticed how people in her generation avoided cooking, and wondered if graphic design could be used to turn the situation around. She called her thesis Counter Intuition. In her words:

Julia Child said it best, “No one is born a great cook, one learns by doing.” This thesis is rooted in the belief that cooking is about building intuition through practice and experience, bringing a new generation of cooks to the counter.

By the time we started the mentoring sessions, Katie had already been working on her thesis for about a year, and her research on the problem was outstanding.

And a lot of work had already gone into the design solutions as well. But she felt there was room for improvement, and reached out to me for some advice. With my background in branding, I posed questions that allowed her to understand and define who the “customers” were and how to reach them, mapping out customer journeys and identifying relevant brand touchpoints.

And as she began designing all those applications, by helping her identify strengths and weaknesses in the look and feel system she was developing, she was able to create a flexible but consistent identity that was relevant and engaging. Below is a small sample of the system in use.

My belief has always been that the best design solution lies within the problem. Translated to my mentoring approach, that has meant always bringing the student back to their original thesis statement.

Within all the expected and unexpected applications worth designing, could there be one core application that embodies the thesis solution in its entirety? In this case, there was and it meant redesigning the recipe. If young generations are afraid of the kitchen, it’s possible they might be intimidated by those dry sets of instructions. Katie did a great job of theorizing what a visual recipe could look and work like.

As impressive as all this looks, there’s a lot more. Read the thesis book, or visit her portfolio and find out more.

For this thesis, she also filmed a visual recipe video, illustrated and designed a cooking tips book, developed visual aids including recipes and flash cards, designed posters and other printed materials, extended the brand to products and packaging, a website, even an app.

Really outstanding work from a very talented designer. Looking forward to seeing where her career takes her next!

Since teaching a graduate class on branding called Nature of Identity at the Academy of Art in San Francisco during 2011, I’ve had several students approach me asking for advise on their thesis projects. The first one who did was Whitney Clark, and I mentored her during the fall of 2012. This post showcases the resulting thesis work.

Whitney graduated as an MFA last year, with a thesis focusing on how the understanding of classic literature could be aided by graphic design. She noticed how people in her generation read less than previous ones, and wondered if graphic design could com to the rescue. She called her thesis Re/view and used Shakespeare’s Hamlet as a case study. In her words:

Re/view, an educational company with a focus on alternative approaches to literature, is based on the idea that written works can be made more accessible through visuals. Re/view acts as an umbrella organization for smaller facets of the company that focus on creating materials for specific authors.

Re/view Shakespeare is a collection of visual tools for novice students of the Bard. The tools are intended to provide a highly visual and alternative approach to the written word and focus on breaking down the strangeness of the plays that are created by 400 years of cultural and language differences. The tools act as a way to delve deeper into well studied themes, to prompt nuanced and thoughtful questioning and to demonstrate that there is more than one way to approach and access a text.

By the time we started the mentoring sessions, Whitney had already been working on her thesis for about a year, and had a very strong foundation thanks to the research conducted.

When it came to the developing a compelling design approach, I got a chance to mentor her along that journey over two semesters. With my background in branding, I posed questions that allowed her to understand and define who the “customers” would be (students, educators, and enthusiasts) and how to reach them, mapping out customer journeys and identifying relevant brand touchpoints.

She was then able to develop and expand a look and feel system that required variety to engage those audiences. And we discussed each application’s purpose within her system, establishing strengths and weaknesses in each approach. Below are some examples of the applications she designed.

My belief has always been that the best design solution lies within the problem. Translated to my mentoring approach, that has meant always bringing the student back to their original thesis statement.

Within all the expected and unexpected applications worth designing, could there be one core application that embodies the thesis solution in its entirety? In Whitney’s case, two strong contenders fit the bill of demystifying the language used by Shakespeare for a young generation in a visual way.

One deconstructs famous passages in Hamlet, allowing educators and students re-interpret the words and understand the power of this classic author’s approach. The other pokes fun at the language, by visualizing insults found in Shakespeare’s works. 

As impressive as all this looks, there’s a lot more. Read the thesis book, or visit her portfolio and find out more about other applications she designed for this thesis, including flash cards, posters and other promotional materials, a website, even an app.

Whitney has recently started working as a designer at the Disney Museum, and I can’t wait to see how she will continue exploring the intersection of education and design.

Earlier this year, I developed the new brand identity for AgilOne, in which patterns play a singular role. At the time, I wasn’t skilled enough to generate them through coding in Processing, so I resorted to building them in Illustrator. While not completely manual (I made use of some fantastic scripts by Hiroyuki Sato and John Wundes), the process was still tedious. I knew there was a better way.

My experiments with Processing have come a long way from my crude attempts earlier this year. While my coding skills are still low, I’m making steady progress. I’ve taken a second workshop at GAFFTA, this one run by Realitat from Mexico. And in November I took classes at The Crucible, taught by Jon Foote. On the side, I’m slowly completing the exercises in Learning Processing, the book by Daniel Shiffman.

So a few months later, now with more coding knowledge under my belt, I revisited the challenge and the results appear below. Click anywhere in the pattern with your mouse.

Each click triggers an algorithm to redraw the pattern, based on rules established in the code: a defined set of shapes is arranged in a grid and colored with the brand colours. Processing allows exports of PDFs, so a custom app could be used to generate patterns with ease.

Coding brings endless possibilities to brand identity and design in general. I’m excited about incorporating it more into my practice as I keep gaining knowledge.

Following the design research explained in part 2, let’s now get into the exploration of design solutions. This part of the process is both exhilarating and nerve-wracking, because it’s all problem and no solution yet. But after working for many years as a designer, one gets used to it and even enjoys it.

Arriving at design solutions, for me at least, first involves pencil sketches. I shy away from the computer when the exploring begins, not wanting to get caught in the details, instead focusing just on ideas. The goal is to uncover as many ideas as possible.

The sketching allowed me to see that some solutions could involve a wordmark-only logo (without a symbol), so concurrently I began a type exploration. It’s always important to find a typeface that reflects not just the brand attributes, but also stages the brand name well.

The next step is to begin a different round of sketching, this time on the computer. Many pencil sketch ideas may show potential, but the only way to find out if “they have legs” is to try creating them digitally.

Always in the back of my mind during this exploration phase was what I had promised in the proposal to show during the first presentation:

• Explore a range of concepts for the core signature, which may include symbology, wordmarks and logotypes
• Explore corresponding look & feel concepts, addressing elements such as: color palette, typeface usage, image style, graphic layout style, iconography
• Create two-dimensional prototypes to enable us to assess each concept’s strengths and weaknesses in the context of real-world applications: business card, 2-page data sheet, PowerPoint cover and text slide, brochure covers. (Prototypes are not working templates, but rather mock-ups that stage the design)
• Present 3 concepts and their respective prototypes.

My aim was getting to three distinct directions for the presentation, and give the client an array of options to choose from, as varied as possible from each other. After working on the computer for a while, I identified those logos I deemed strongest, not as stand-alones but with enough character to build a look & feel system around them.

Those look & feel systems required their own exploration, which meant going back to pencil before returning to the computer.

Overall this round of exploration before the first presentation can involve two or three weeks, maybe more depending on how many concepts are shown. The goal of the presentation is to pick one direction to move forward with, maybe with some refinements.

That’s exactly what happened in this case, with the added bonus that the client was torn choosing between them because he liked them all! But we identified pros and cons of each approach and landed on one, but with some minor refinements.

The proposal called for the design of specific applications, so we had a few more weeks devoted to rounds of design and presentation of stationery, presentation deck templates, collateral templates and other deliverables.

To find out how the identity looks, visit my portfolio.

As explained in part 1, with the approval of both proposal and design brief, the foundation was set to begin exploring design solutions. But even with a design brief already in place, I invested some time in the Briefing and Objectives phase, researching the company and the industry, as well as design expressions that could serve as visual fodder in the Creating the Identity phase.

Design research

My creative process always begins with words, and a good design brief can be an invaluable source of inspiration. The AgilOne brief had several passages that pointed the way for me, beginning with the list of brand attributes:

• Simple – the subject is complex, the output or how the customer benefits is straightforward
• Trusted Ally – this tool is the very first thing a marketer looks at, uses and shares every morning
• Bright – super-smart, gifted, ingenious, resourceful and energetic (brilliant is an appropriate word in the UK – in the US it can connote arrogance; this brand is not arrogant)
• Friendly – sincere, kindred, family-like; eager
• Prescient – the predictive aspect of the offer is critical. The difference is that it is data or science driven

I like to fill my brain with those brand attributes and their synonyms, making associations and finding hidden patterns. The tool of choice for this is a word map.

Another passage in the brief provided context for the brand:

AgilOne is in the business of enabling and empowering better marketing outcomes through the marriage of machine intelligence and human intellect. They take all of the very disparate data points available to a marketer – both internal and external, structured and unstructured – integrate, cleanse, map, calculate and predict to maximize value.

If I could visually represent that “marriage of machine intelligence and human intellect” the identity would be strong. To get there, I looked at examples in art and design where math played a role in the creative process, and got a cursory introduction to artificial intelligence by reading articles and watching lectures.

The last step in the research phase was to look at the existing identities in the industry. How high was the bar set by the competitors? Did any of them “own” a colour, or had a distinctive style?

Other than use of blue by some identities, most had an expected identity-for-an-internet-brand look to them.

My course of action was set. It was time to begin the design exploration. I’ll be sharing that and more in part 3.