To further my pitch I felt it would be a good idea to create a brand around the idea to make it feel more real and allow for an easier buy in from the judges.
Typically I find names come quite naturally when I prioritise my research and development but in this instance I’m still at a blank. When I envision the concept with an applied brand that idea of modularity and building blocks feel very prominent. One of the issues I’ve felt when considering names is whether or not to market it as a traditional university/academy/institute. I do want it to exist in the same realm and maybe even challenge these organisations but I do wonder if exploring a new naming convention might work better to establish it as unique within its industry.
I considered the nature and purpose of the idea and I eventually landed on using Stack as the leading brand name. I feel that it encapsulates the motivation behind the idea whilst also straying from the formalities of typical university names. To me it feels exciting and eye catching amongst its competitors. In regards to communicating that it is actually an organisation that provides a higher education, I looked through as many synonyms of school and university as I could but they all felt the same in the end. What I did feel paired well was the word Institute. This made if feel more open in its approach but also quite unified and solid. I think this might help in selling the idea.
I wanted to create a logo to accompany my brands name to help the viewers imagine the product in a real setting and hopefully legitimise it a little. For the logo I immediately knew what I wanted to explore. It was that idea of building blocks that has followed me through the whole development of the project. I feel that its the perfect visualisation of my idea and makes for a great logo.
I was really happy with this logo. I added rounded corners but I left the touching corners sharp. This made it look like the blocks were linked and or morphing which I felt was a nice nod to the flexibility and growth promoted by Stack.
When searching for typefaces I wanted to have both a serif and sans serif for the pitch. From my research I noticed that good presentations have really effective type hierarchy, a lot of this included varying type used accordingly with differentiating content. My main content will be presented with a sans serif to keep it clean, modern and familiar and I felt it would be good to utilise a serif as a summary for each slide, short one liners delivered with intent.
I always get stuck using the same helvetica-ish sans serif typefaces like poppins and inter so I wanted to branch out a little in this regard. I eventually landed on using an expanded typeface. To me these typefaces felt easy to read and kind of exciting as they aren’t too popular. I settled on EtruscoNow.
For the sans serif I did a lot of searching but surprisingly landed on Times New Roman. A word classic that I would have never thought to use for a design project. What swayed me to TNR was actually the italicised version. This was exactly what I was looking for, that impactful, thought out one liner. Here is how these elements looked once combined.
