designIntermediate3-5 hours

Design a Complete Brand Identity

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

Design a logo and a whole look for a business.

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.

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 look and say why (drop the others)
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.