The brief for this project asked designers to choose an existing cultural institution whose branding could be improved through a logo redesign and a new overall brand strategy. The deliverables for this brief were a complete brand book, as well as a new logo that was developed through typographical exploration.

The cultural institution that I selected was the Cinema Touching Disability Film Festival, held annually in Austin, Texas. Founded in 2004, after fourteen successful years, Cinema Touching Disability (CTD) maintains its status as the top cinematic celebration of disability in the state. Since its foundation, the Festival has grown to be the longest-running and most successful disability film festival in the state. The Short Film Competition provides an opportunity for independent filmmakers from around the world to screen their films about disability, from documentaries to animated shorts to the avant-garde.

Ideally representing the diversity of the community that produced artwork for the festival.

An ideal outcome of more cohesive branding would be an increased appeal to potential festival sponsors in the future. 

Providing opportunities to better engage through social media in other to spread awareness, increase interest and participation with the local community.

One challenge here will be to avoid large-scale uses of infographics as they are incompatible with site readers.

Streamlining the Festival’s brand identity was my immediate focus. Over the years, there have been several iterations of branding but no consistent logo or wordmark. In addition, the current branding relies heavily on a stylised graphic of a person in a wheelchair holding a camera; while I fully understand the value of highlighting the fact that this is a disability film festival, I wanted to do so in a more inclusive way.

The wordmark logo that I developed for this brief utilises a dot display font (a custom variation of the Gas font) for the CTD acronym, with "Film Festival" in all-capital (Rift font, standard) along the side. The decision to utilise a dotted font resulted from a brainstorming exercise in which I conceptualised ways of representing disability without using standardised symbols. The dots themselves are reminiscent of braille, and the coloured dots within the letterforms themselves are the actual braille letters for "C, T, D"” Additionally, the white and coloured dot scheme is similar to the seat selection interface used by the cinema where the Festival is held annually.

The new wordmark's goal is to acknowledge the status of the film festival as the longest-running and most successful disability film festival in the state, without making the identity entirely about disability. The filmmakers, performers, and attendees are disabled people but are also directors, actors, artists, and creators, and the new identity seeks to promote this notion. In a conscious effort to be inclusive, a pattern was designed to mirror the grid structure of the wordmark and includes the internationally recognised symbols for Autism (puzzle piece), disability (wheelchair), blindness (eye with slash), and deafness (ear with slash).

Another branding element I amended in this project was to change the brand colours for CTD Film Festival. The current colours are light blue, similar to the one I used, as well as a pastel green. I chose to retain the blue (with some slight modifications) while also adding a vibrant red as well as a navy blue. The contrast between these colours makes brand elements more legible and contributes to an overall bolder look for the brand. After selecting these colours, I ran them through multiple colour-blindness simulators to ensure that none of the new brand colours would too difficult to distinguish for people with colour-blindness.

The above images show the exact results of testing the new brand colours for Deuteranopia (red-green colour-blindness) as well as Tritanopia (yellow-blue colour-blindness).

Having developed this new brand identity, I sought to apply it in several ways, across various forms of media. Doing so reaffirmed the flexibility of this new brand strategy as well as its integrity.

As the CTD Film Festival website is nested within the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities website, the design should remain cohesive within the rest of the website. Small aesthetic changes can be made to the website to make it cohesive with both the CTD website and the brand identity. Including the brand fonts and colours, as well as integrating photographs in keeping with the imagery guidelines.

Additional proposed brand guidelines we well as the full branding book can be viewed by downloading the complete brand guidelines at this link.