Creative Spark

The idea behind this brief was a competition to rebrand the Creative Spark brand for the University. Creative spark is an exhibition which takes place every year at Sheffield Hallam University and is like an end of year show for graduation students. Every year the brand is changed and new concepts are build, being in the final year of my course it was my year's turn to have a go.
We were asked to re design the Design departments of the exhibition, this includes, product design, graphic design, fashion, media etc.
I teamed up with a couple of friends and designers from my course Nikita and Gemma and started the project by researching past competition winners and what themes and designs they used.
We wanted to come up with something new, still fitting in with the university guidelines and showed that there is a lot unseen talent and work.
A few words and Ideas we came up with for our brand were; bold, simplistic, iconic logo, creativity and something that had a bit of atmosphere and movement. We thought about themes we could base our idea on and thought what better theme than Sheffield and its buildings and structures.
If you've ever been to Sheffield or knows anyone from here he would know about the amazing variety in architecture that this city has to offer. Park Hill being one of those influential places we wanted to somehow include this in our design. We went up to park hill and took a few pictures of the structures before messing around with them in photoshop. To go with this we looked at other structures around the university to overlay, this happened before designing the logo.
We thought that this would be a good route to go with, the target audience for this brand was to it be for current students, parents and friends of students, the public, designers and professionals and new students and families. We thought about how much talent lays within the walls of Sheffield Hallam University, how proud of it we are and how much potential it holds.

For the logo we wanted something that would have a 3D effect, something that would pop out to the target audiences and to be fun, something people would stop for and want to find out more. When researching we looked at 3D typography and using materials such as string, wood and typography with 3D structures to tie in with the rest of our design. After a bit of development work we realised that at the scale we were working at which was A4 wasn't really working and decided to work these ideas up in Illustrator.

 The idea behind these were the use of pins and string, linking all the letters and words together. Linking was a bit part of the design for our idea and each piece of string or line would represent the links between the different areas of design. After working these up we decided that the designs didn't really for fill our wants and decided to move on from this.
For looking at past winners we noticed a huge use in shapes and adapted this to our 3D design ideas. As you can see the logo at the top of the page was the logo we eventually ended up with, each of the arrows representing the design fields and people. The colours we chose were that of the university colours, we thought it would be a good idea to keep them within the branding guidelines we were given.

Next we worked on the typography for the brand, as a general design rule to stick to 3 typefaces we chose Helvetica, Myriad Pro and BodoniXT. All that was left after that was to apply it to all of the areas that needed branding.

My area of the branding was to redesign the website, produce the letter head, formate the guidelines and as a bonus produced a winners letter for the winners of the award that is given out every year.
Again everything we used stuck to the branding guidelines of the university. On the website I kept all the links that are available on the original but just livened it up. After looking at the original I decided that I wanted to design something that was more eye catching and interesting to the user, rather than dull and lifeless. I think the use of the arrows from the logo on the homepage was a nice touch as well as adding the structural design to the page which linked the designs together. The winners letter and cover letter are just simply laid out along with the university logo and at the bottom the guideline page of the colours and fonts we used.

The Website

Winners Letter & Cover Letter

Branding Guidelines 

My other group members produced the advertising that would be shown around the university and city as well as invitations to the event.  I think as a group we were really happy with our end results and how the whole thing tied together. After producing a powerpoint of our ideas we gave a presentation of the re brand and was it. Sadly we did not win but we were still really happy with what we had produced in the time that we did!.