BRANDING DESIGN LAB
Design Lab is a monthly meetup community for over 5000 visual, interactive, and product designers in Berlin and London that I founded with my company Novoda in 2016. For this project, I developed a brand strategy, visual assets, and templates to represent the brand on various platforms.
The Approach
Versatility and variation were top considerations of this brand - and because the elements would live inside noisy social media platforms, I went for a bold and eye-catching visual style. Branded elements would need to be produced over the lifetime of the community, so I opted for libraries and design rules to guide anyone who may need to make varied assets in the future.
Theming and Color
To make sure our brand would work everywhere we needed it, I created a dark and light theme for logo assets and illustrations. Each theme is built on a light or dark neutral color and corresponding primary color, while accent colors work well in both themes. In most cases, neutrals and primary colors can be interchanged in typography, logo, and illustration to fit whichever theme is needed.
Illustration Library
Creating new imagery over time was going to be a challenge. To solve this, I built an illustration library made of pieces that can be mixed and matched to create new combinations in the future. Illustrations in the library exist in two types - broken down into their most basic shapes (for designers to work with), and in pre-made compound illustrations (for community organizers/non-designers). Here is a sample of some of the elements in the illustration library:
Keeping Social Media Fresh
We needed the ability to generate a large number of unique but recognizable social media posts, but we didn’t have a designer available to support Design Lab all the time. The illustration libraries were built with this scenario in mind. Our community organizer can easily pull up a template, swap out new illustrations from the library, and voila! We have a unique post for any event.
Representing our Cities
The heart of Design Lab is the local community - so I wanted to showcase our city pride in a fun way by illustrating a landmark to represent each. Since we also advertise city-specific events quite often, it helped to have some elements to distinguish London events from Berlin events.
