UH DigiFest ID System
The DigiFest event at the University of Houston is held as a senior showcase for senior Digital Media majors to network with industry professionals. The event is meant to help propel Digital Media graduates into their career fields by allowing them to put their best foot forward and present the work they are most proud of. DigiFest is held once every year in the Spring Semester, and is considered to be a formal career fair. This project focuses on creating an identity system for the event, much like a conference or music festival, to help bring awareness to the event and its importance. As it was a study on identity systems and branding, I was excited to implement what I had learned about abstraction and concepts into practice.
For this project, I chose to focus on the function of the event more so than the themes and topics that the name DigiFest implies. Because the digital media industry is so multifaceted and covers so many avenues for expression, I found it troubling to represent the event and its brand through objects like cameras or computers. I didn’t want to diminish Digital Media as an industry and a UH program to any single area of emphasis. When focusing on the function of the event, I realized that the value and purpose that this event holds for UH seniors is its ability to connect students to industry professionals. The event serves to help students build a network for their careers. From this idea of networking and interaction, I decided to create an abstracted illustration of this concept. I drafted several different line drawings in Adobe Illustrator, some had curves, some were spiky and loud. My goal was to create a sense of dynamics and movement with the lines, to help represent the different paths and opportunities that this event can help bring to students. The criss-crossing and overlapping of the lines also help to enforce the branching out digital media as a whole. The different dimensions and subsets that digital media encompasses are also represented through the different lines. The different styles and curvatures of the lines are meant to represent the different layers of digital media as well, not in a strict representative sense, but in the sense that each branch of the digital media industry comes from similar origins but carries with it different implications and connotations.
