Leading the Creation of a Brand Identity
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Understanding the Product
Continuing a new design tradition in the department
2025 Design Colloquium
The Challenge
Create a cohesive brand while coordinating a student team
Our goal was to develop a cohesive identity for the colloquium while managing a small team of student designers with varying skill sets.
Unlike a typical class project, this was a self-directed process. Much of my role focused on organizing the team and guiding the work toward finished deliverables.
Our Goal
Produce a cohesive event identity while creating a structured and collaborative design process.
Research
Building structure for a collaborative project
I recruited and organized a team of eight student designers. Because everyone had different schedules, I set up a recurring four-hour work session each weekend for the next month so we could make steady progress together.
I worked with the colloquium’s faculty producer to define deliverables and priorities. Posters and attendee notebooks were identified as essential, while social media graphics and giveaways were secondary if time allowed.
Analysis
Facilitating collaborative concept development
The faculty producer provided a short brand brief outlining the 2026 colloquium theme and focus: Creativity and ingenuity as central parts of being human and essential to the design process.
I organized a brainstorming workshop where the team created moodboards and quick pitch decks exploring three potential visual directions for the theme.
Coordinating work across contributors
Once the concept was defined, I organized the work across the team based on interests and strengths.
Some designers explored typography and selected fonts that emulate the museum-inspired tone while providing strong readability. Designers specializing in illustration created hand-drawn motifs that added a human-made quality and reinforced our theme of creativity. A third group of designers sourced from public domain scientific imagery that fit the archival theme.
Through this process I learned to delegate work intentionally and create opportunities for each designer to shape the outcome.
Some early ideas
Our collaboration process slowed down
As the team began producing assets, we began to experience workflow bottlenecks.
We were working with multiple files and programs, and collaboration became fragmented, partly because designers varied in their knowledge and comfort level with the tools and partly because our tools did not support real-time collaboration. When only one person could work on a file at a time, our hand-offs got out of control and messy!
It felt like we were all working on our own mini ideas instead of contributing to the greater project.
Adobe Express to the Rescue!
To address this problem, I introduced Adobe Express to our workflow and created shared brand guidelines with reusable assets, which allowed designers to quickly experiment and create variations while staying within the visual system.
Importantly, Adobe Express enabled real-time collaboration. Designers could work in the same file, build on each other’s ideas, and iterate asynchronously. No more messy hand-offs! Another bonus: our faculty advisor could always access the latest file asynchronously in order to review and provide feedback.
A museum-inspired identity system
The final identity used collaged archival imagery, student illustrations, and structured typographic layouts inspired by museum catalogs and scientific journals.
Primary deliverables included:
A poster triptych presenting event information, speakers, and schedule
An 8-page attendee notebook with speaker information, space for notes, and a keepsake bookmark
Supporting visuals that could extend to social media and event signage
Celebrating human creativity as a design tradition
Circe Light
Celebrating human creativity as a design tradition
ABC Gaisyr - Book
Simplified & Scannable
A Simple Side Nav
The new design reduced the number of options displayed in the side nav from 25 to 10.
This clean and minimal approach reduces cognitive load and improves findability.
What Belongs Together Lives Together
Grouped Nav
Conceptually similar navigation options are grouped and presented together.
Users no longer need to memorize where options live in a long list!
No Extra Work Required
Same Number of Clicks
The new design did not introduce any extra clicks for users to reach their target destination.
Efficient Access
Easy to Reach Related Areas
Users can easily navigate between related areas via the subnavigation.
Clear Differentiation
Dedicated Home for Actions
Actions always live in the same area, making it easy for users to understand what can be done given their current context.
No more hunting when you need to get something done!
Time to Build!
I created a developer hand-off document that outlines every component of the new design and how they should behave across different scenarios, including edge cases, visual states, and interactions.
Writing this document was a great exercise in clarity as I needed to think through each part of the system and ensure that all behaviors were captured and understandable.
Clarity was also key as my development team was in India and I needed to make sure that they could rely on the document to get the information since I couldn’t be there in person.
Final Thoughts
This internship was a crash course in real-world UX. I had the chance to work on a meaningful product design challenge that involved collaborating with people from different departments and across the world, and importantly, working directly with users.
My user interviews and design feedback sessions were a real highlight. Being able to hear from people who use the Work Order as part of their daily job gave me unique insights and helped me to advocate for improvements. I kept these people in mind throughout my design process and reflected on them when I made design decisions. The user research also connected the product team with users in a new way. Seeing how people used the product in the real world was an eye opener for everyone!
never considered treating things differently and how nice it is to have a clear and consistent pattern
the power of simplicity and the power of tidying up. Avoid adding complexity when not necessary
Scaling was a new thing for me to consider, importance of close collaboration w/ dev partners