designIntermediate3-5 hours

Design a Complete Brand Identity

Maps to: Designer · Art Director · Creative Director · Marketer

You're going to turn a one-page plan into a whole look for a business: a logo, a set of colors, fonts (the style of the letters), and three pictures showing it used in real life. The skill is making it hold together: picking ONE look out of all the options and making everything match it, then saying why that one fits the plan. That's what people who do this for a living actually do, decide what belongs and what doesn't. You'll have the whole look plus one document that shows it all off.

You're done when: A look that holds together (logo, colors, fonts, 3 pictures of it in use, and one document with it all in) where you picked ONE version and can say why it fits the plan, having dropped the others on purpose. Holding together is the work: not 'I made some logos,' but 'it all matches and I can say why this one, not the others.'

How this shows up on a resume or college app

I designed a complete brand identity from a one-page brief, generating options, then picking and defending ONE direction against the brief and killing the rest. I learned that brand design is decisions, not options: the work is the choice and the point of view, not the number of ideas.

When you finish you have the thing itself, plus a Common App activity description Sidequest drafts from what you actually built.

Not sure yet? Play 5 minutes as a designer first and see how the work feels.

See what this career pays and what it takes to get in.

The plan

1
Step 1
Decide what the business is, and write it all down on one page
Decide what the business is: who it's for, how it should feel, and 5 words it has to feel like. Write it on one page. Everything you make gets judged against those 5 words, so vague words mean the whole thing could belong to any business, not just yours.
2
Step 2
Make a lot of different logos
Make several different logos and keep going. First-try logos look boring for everyone, and most people stop before the third try, which is exactly where a real opinion starts to show. Push past the boring stage.
3
Step 3
Pick ONE direction + defend it (kill the rest)
Out of your options, pick ONE and say why it fits the plan better than the second-best, then drop the rest. This kind of work is decisions, not options, and what you reject counts as much as what you keep.
4
Steps 4-5
Show it in 3 real places, then write down the rules for using it
Show the look out in the world: 3 pictures of it on real things, like a shop sign, a poster, and a phone screen. Seeing it that way is how you, and everyone else, tell whether it all looks like one thing.