Logo and Branding Design: VLAA Lab
Overview
This was a project for Dr. Wyatte Hall, an assistant professor at the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC). Dr. Hall contacted Sheena about branding needs for his research lab. The goal was to create a new logo and branding guide for his newly created Visual Language Access & Acquisition Lab (VLAA Lab).
Audience: Parents of deaf children, deaf education institutes, early intervention services, mental health services, and deaf community organizations.
Responsibilities: Creative Direction, Logo Illustration, Branding
Tools Used: Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign
Problem and Solution
Dr. Wyatte Hall of the VLAA Lab at URMC needed a new logo and branding guide to go with it. The logo and branding would be used in presentations and publications along with relevant social media channels (e.g., Twitter). With his lab focusing on language deprivation in deaf children, Dr. Hall requested a logo that people would instantly recognize as representative of the deaf community and the importance of language access.
Sheena would be responsible for brainstorming the logo, illustration and design, and ensuring the logo and branding represented both VLAA Lab and URMC. The logo would be friendly and non-intimidating for parents while conveying a deaf-centered, research-focused aesthetic style that would also stand in distinction from URMC.
Branding Process
Discovery
Collecting all information from you.
Brainstorm
Creating a visual brainstorm and narrowing down options with you.
Draft
Drafting out your selected concepts and visuals.
Feedback
Collecting feedback from you and your team or community.
Delivery
Giving you all assets ready for use.
Branding Process
Discovery
Collecting all information from you.
Brainstorm
Creating a visual brainstorm and narrowing down options with you.
Draft
Drafting out your selected concepts and visuals.
Feedback
Collecting feedback from you and your team or community.
Delivery
Giving you all assets ready for use.
Moodboard and Sketches
Sheena collected information from Dr. Hall, focusing on the ideas to be incorporated into the design. She put together a moodboard of logos of related research labs and university departments/programs. Through those examples, we could see how other labs had embodied a bright, eye-catching, and children-themed aesthetic.
After narrowing down initial visual concepts with Dr. Hall, Sheena sketched out the first draft of various rough concepts that would simultaneously represent children, deafness, and language growth with positive, family-friendly elements. After Dr. Hall’s review and feedback, Sheena created a second draft of narrowed-down sketch concepts. This time, all new logo sketches incorporated sign language with visually centered hands and motion.
Moodboard and Sketches
Sheena collected information from Dr. Hall, focusing on the ideas to be incorporated into the design. She put together a moodboard of logos of related research labs and university departments/programs. Through those examples, we could see how other labs had embodied a bright, eye-catching, and children-themed aesthetic.
After narrowing down initial visual concepts with Dr. Hall, Sheena sketched out the first draft of various rough concepts that would simultaneously represent children, deafness, and language growth with positive, family-friendly elements. After Dr. Hall’s review and feedback, Sheena created a second draft of narrowed-down sketch concepts. This time, all new logo sketches incorporated sign language with visually centered hands and motion.
Logo and Branding
Dr. Hall selected a logo with simple geometric shapes (pyramids, cubes, spheres) to represent the “building blocks” of children learning, which would go along with hand signs that depicted “sign out loud.” Sheena vectorized and colorized the selected logo.
He then asked for several color palettes that the logo could be used to represent sub-branding: one for presentations, one for social media, and so on. Sheena put together a new moodboard of various possible colors. Dr. Hall determined the fonts and the final primary and secondary colors. Sheena finalized the logo and delivered all assets with a complete branding guide to Dr. Hall and URMC’s branding point of contact.
Results and Takeaways
Dr. Hall was very happy with the end product. Although Sheena had created numerous logos representing deaf organizations in the past, this project was new in that qualities of swiftness, change, and motion were incorporated directly into the hand signs.
With this approach, the logo and branding aims to be truly representative of the Lab’s language deprivation work and make a visual mark among deafness-focused research labs.