For my final term of college, I worked with Professor Michael Salter, director of the Art and Technology program at the University of Oregon, on a brand design and development project. The brief I created was for an outdoor apparel brand in the Pacific Northwest that emphasized quality. Inspired by guilds and artisans like blacksmiths, carpenters, or leatherworkers, I wanted the brand to feel historic - almost medieval - while still following modern design principles. The first part of the term was spent developing the brand logo. I spent a lot of time on this portion because I knew that the right logo would set the rest of the brand design up for success. Eventually, I landed on two logos to be used in conjunction.
The natural next step we felt was developing a color scheme for the brand. I wanted to chose colors that met AA contrast standards, and felt both natural and modern at the same time. This was arguably the hardest step for me, as each color combination I tried felt just as fitting. Eventually, we both decided that locking into two colors wasn’t necessary for our purposes. Instead, I chose a few color combinations that I was pleased with, and used the same color language throughout the project. If I were to take Siskin further I would choose two-three colors to stick with to help customers identify the brand.
I wanted a few physical products I could use to field test the logo and to give some substance to the brand page. I did an outdoor photoshoot with four products I created and made a page with fake listings for people to see them. I also created a series of digital and physical ads, as well as designed and 3D modeled a traveling pop-up shop for the brand. Check out ‘Products’ for the product listings and ‘Marketing’ for the advertisements and pup-up shop renders.
