Brand Design

Brand Design is an undergraduate studio that treats identity not as a logo project but as a system of voice, behavior, and consequence. Over the course of a semester, students develop a brand for a fictional or real-world client of their choosing, moving from positioning and audience research into naming, voice, visual identity, and a fully articulated set of touchpoints. The studio is organized around three interleaved tracks: critical reading, structured making, and weekly critique. Students read short texts each week — from Wally Olins to contemporary practitioners — and bring those frameworks directly into their projects. We pay close attention to the way a brand sounds when read aloud, the way it behaves under stress, and the way it changes when the audience changes. Projects are evaluated less on polish than on coherence: does the system hold together when extended into spaces the designer did not originally imagine? The final deliverable is a complete identity guideline, a campaign in three media, and a short essay defending the brand's underlying argument. Students leave with a portfolio piece and, more importantly, a working theory of how identity operates in contemporary culture. Guest critics from practicing studios join us for the midterm and final reviews.