Pennywise Solutions - Srishti Collective 2020
A dedicated UX designer with over 4 years of experience in the ever-evolving design industry. As a strategic thinker, I have developed expertise in design thinking,
Projects
Srishti Collective 2020 is an annual college graduation show of Srishti Institute of Art Design & Technology going online due to the COVID restrictions imposed in 2020 by the Government of India. To put this up on the internet, the college hired PennyWise Solutions - An Ogilvy Group Company based in Hyderabad.
For this 3 weeks project, there were 63 students from across the college, and different courses were divided into 3 groups of Interaction Design, Publication Design, and Brand & Visual Identity. These 3 groups were further divided into 3 more subgroups each with 5 students from different courses were randomly put in each sub-group. I became part of Brand and Visual Identity Group 2. This project was led and mentored by the Product Design Lead- Shiva from PennyWise Solutions.
Tools used- Miro
Future Ambitions
Firstly we planned a little ice breaker for the group by discussing aspirational stories about the business, the ambitious and audacious goals that had to be set for Srishti Collective as a brand and business. We decided to set the collective idea of the future of the business on a timeline and the singular unified thought on business goals growth and what we need to achieve. The set future ambitions are as follows:-
1. Suitable and appropriate equilibrium of digital and physical space
2. Extend the scope and boundaries - online open houses to showcase the work of the other batches.
3. Connect and associate with the audiences using alternative + supplementary forums and means.
4. A well sketched-out recruitment program for graduates.
Purpose
The next step was to define the purpose of the brand Srishti Collective 2020 by answering questions like, What does the brand do? How does the brand plan to do it? and, Why does the brand wants to do it?
Therefore, we followed Simen Sinek's Golden Circle to define the purpose of Srishti Collective as a brand.
Purpose - Give a virtual platform to the interdisciplinary community of aspiring artists and designers to exhibit their work, interact with their audiences, and share their journeys.
Values
What we did next defined the values by making the 'why' in the purpose more specific which would give the brand a reason to keep going and developing. by listing and ranking your company values.
Values:-
1. Have enterprising roots and a willingness to experiment.
- Simplify DashboardSetupand Customization: Simplify dashboard creation aligned with Goals/OKRs and offer user-friendly customization for various analytic skill levels.
- Efficient Data Analysis and Behavioral Insights: Minimize time and effort in searching and analyzing end-user data. Track usage behavior, provide key insights, and offer both overview and deep data exploration options.
- Effortless Sharing and Interpretation of Analytics: Facilitate sharing of executive reports aligned with business goals. Simplify report creation, enhance data interpretation, and ensure user confidence in data storage & security.
Target Audience
We then segmented the audience list by understanding the set of people whose opinions matter within the show. This helped us in defining the brand position.
We divided our audience in two parts depending upon the priority of the opinions of the listed audience:-
- Primary Audience:Graduating students, Practitioners, Recruiters, Collaborators/Partners, In-house faculty, Mentors.
- Secondary Audience: Competitors, Faculty and students from other colleges, Prospective Students, Friends/Family, Current Students,Press/Media.
Brand Persona
We then used the 12 brand archetypes to define the brand persona. Brand archetypes help to give the brand a character that made it accessible and relatable to the predefined set of audiences.
The brand archetypes we selected were The Magician & The Creator
- The Magician:Turning problems into solutions, making dreams come true.
- Curiosity
- Innovation
- Grandiose
- The Creator: Inspiring creativity, creating an authentic brand story, and fusing technology and artistry.
- Imaginative
- Enterprising
- Expressive
Theme
The theme of the exhibition was then defined by keeping the defined brand person in mind. A thorough brainstorming session and back and forth ideas by me and my peers helped me come up with the idea of "Kaleidoscope" as a theme for the exhibition.
The kaleidoscope symbolizes the release of blocked creativity and it gives you the opportunity to see yourself in the bigger scope of life and connect to the meaning of it.
- Unique patterns - the significance of the uniqueness of each project.
- Srishti Collective as a representation for reflection of the past 4 years.
- Inspiring playful typography and experimenting with overlays and geometric color blocking systems in color guide.
- Srishti is the kaleidoscope that encourages the collaboration of interdisciplinary practitioners.
Vision Board
After deciding on our theme, we went on to create the vision board to visualize our brand styling.
Colour Scheme
The next thing we did was decide the colour scheme according to the set vision board. The initial set of colours that we decided on were yellow, purple, orange, ivory and green. But these colours did not go through as they completely fell off the kaleidoscopic vision. When we were deciding the second version of colours, we did not want to make the same mistake and constantly referred to the vision board and made sure we took diverse colours which would create a kaleidoscopic effect when these colours met.
Retrospective
With experience, I have a list of aspects like typography, iconography, atoms, elements, for my further projects which I can keep handy. My favorite part of the project was that the guidelines created by our team were selected, rolled out, and further disseminated to students of the subsequent batches to build upon, conceptualize and execute UI/UX and graphical content for the project. So, there was a lot of guidance and coordination from our end making it quite exciting.
