My first major project as Mount Vernon Presbyterian School's Creative Director was to work with a stellar design team to rebrand the process of Design Thinking. Our definition of Design Thinking is people-center problem-solving. Creating empathy centered students is a strong design principle for the school leadership to prepare students who are college ready, globally competitive, and engaged citizen leaders. It is one of the first projects that I got to steward the branding from initial concept to full out styling and implementation. The final product included a new logo, typeface treatment, color scheme, graphical support, and a printed notebook to facilitate the process. It has been an incredible journey with such a fantastic team.

As the graphic designer new to the concept I began with an immersive look at the current conception and function of the design elements in practice. The team was a huge help to get me up to speed. One major insight was that empathy was central to the ethos and pathos of the educator's intention. Conclusively the name, DEEPdt, in of itself had appeal because students were challenged to connect with others in a 'deep' way by empathically connecting to their need. 

 

The initial concept was a simple, flat treatment that had implicit depth. DEEPdt facilitators use self-discovery and questions to allow students to dig deeper without necessarily knowing how deep they were going. Here is the initial design:

The vibrant polygons jumped out to me and it led me to doodle in illustrator moving similar shapes around. Its funny how designs just hit you. You can be working for months on a single mark grinding it out to make it work and then sometime its takes 10 minutes to stumble upon a muse-directed moment. Playing with shapes I created a "C" with the four DEEPdt mode polygons and in the process of adding the fifth shape I saw a question mark emerge.

 

This was intriguing because at the heart of the DEEPdt model is the importance of curiosity, needfinding, rapid-prototyping, and user-centered feedback. All of these methods demand the designer to constantly ask questions of their user, design team, and the function of their design. Questions in the design process externalize the designers intention by facilitating a symbiotic and interlocked relationship between a user and design concept.

 

This made the question mark a strong symbol for the branding anchor. Also, the polygons arranged in this way creates an mark that could be easily be used as an indicator for each of the four DEEPdt modes. The font used for deep is Green Piloww and the dot beneath the question mark is PEIXE FRITO. Both were created by Billy Argel.

Now that the mark had been created it was time to extend the branding into other areas. So far the team has extended the brand to two resources. One is a Design Notebook for facilitating the design challenges and another towards micro-credentialing via badges. 

 

Part of the mission of the Mount Vernon Institute For Innovation (MVIFI) is to be a hub for educational innovation. Through a variety of avenues MVIFI equips lead learners in various organizations to promote 21st century learning. The Center For Design Thinking, one of three centers within MVIFI, has an annual conference that gathers 100 leaders from across the globe to teach the values of people-centered problem solving. In 2014 the team wanted to create a guide for learners to interact with that provides tools to use DEEPdt in their organizations.