Branding at its best draws you into it's story and takes you for a ride. First year curriculum allows students from photography and design to collaborate in New Media, an inter-disciplinary exploration of branding, marketing, media production, and more. The task for recent students was taking an everyday object – in this case it was cereal – create a story behind the brand, make it look delicious and like something you want to throw in your shopping cart again and again.
Check out a few of the results.
Jetpack:
Jetpack is a cereal that launches you on your day. According to the team that made it, it is "ultra convenient" and has espresso for a built-in buzz.
For the project teams were tasked with not only creating brand, logo, packaging, photography, 5 customer touch points (advertisements such as in a magazine, on a bus side, etc.), and coding a responsive landing page, or making a webpage that is easily navigable from a desktop or on a phone.
Creating a lively brand story Jetpack feels like an exciting and playful way to start your day.
Testing the cereal and branding meant displaying and creating a user experience in line with the brand. Jetpack offered a photo booth so participants could show their love.
Sustain:
The Sustain team made a cereal that focused on highlighting quality ingredients for an efficient and healthy breakfast option. Their signature color and iconography made them an easily recognizable brand.
Using a 3-d printer to build the designed containers for the cereal, and designing a carrying case like a six-pack holder, Sustain made a compelling argument for convenience.
Using different tactics for advertising, team Sustain wallpapered their posters. Their wall takeover paired photography showing the cereal in the hands of real life users with their easily recognizable yellow icons.
Top Flight:
Top Flight offers the very elite of cereal options. Bold branding was in order. Using celebrity profiles to highlight the brand qualities and thread a story of luxe exclusivity.
Team Top Flight's branding extended to their installation where the sleek booth offered a chance to engage with the online presence of the brand, check out the unique packaging and the daring feel of their online presence. With a name like Top Flight they saw it as strategic to pursue a partnership with an airline and used Alaska Airlines in the mockups. The finished product was a cereal that feels like something from the movies.
New Media pushes first year students to think about a cohesive and full-spectrum branding for a product, working cohesively as a team and creates the climate of a challenging creative process. Watch out for what these designers and photographers will come up with next!
Alumni Profile
I’m Martin, and I’m a type designer. Right now, I’m getting a master’s degree at a small art school in France doing type design. I’m really enjoying the school I’m at. I like my work, I like my teachers, I like my colleagues, I like living in France. So I decided to stay for another year. But I’ll be back in the U.S next year.
Alumni Profile
I wrote a lot of comic books. I was very involved with the Seattle comic scene. And I think that also was something, and I know a lot of cartoonists that went through the program and that really parlayed well with learning even UX like storyboarding and that type of thing, but also it's really useful to be able to visually display something. And so using those skills, using something I knew how to do.
Alumni Profile
Megan is a 2007 Creative Academy graduate who runs her own graphic design business with her sister in Bellingham, Washington