MRU’s Sustainability Forum
Goal: Create brand style and application guidelines for Mount Royal University’s Sustainability Forum, including revising their existing logo and brand imagery. Design a website for the Forum using the new guidelines.
Tools
Illustrator, Squarespace
Year
2024
Course
Roles and Practices in Contemporary Communications
This project is part of a community service learning project completed with a team of Communications students for our Communications capstone course. I worked with two Public Relations students and a Broadcast Media Studies student to complete brand updates for Mount Royal University’s Sustainability Forum. My contributions to the project include logo revisions, creating brand guidelines, and designing a new website for the Forum. As of now the new website is not yet live, but the logo revisions can be seen in use on the Forum’s webpage here!
Design Process
Defining the Project
After our team was matched with the Sustainability Forum for this project, we met with the Forum team to get a better understanding of their asks for the project and what they envisioned for the final products. They walked us through the different deliverables they were looking for, and we learned more about what their goals were for this project and for the Forum.
Before beginning any work on this project, we drafted a proposal for the Forum team outlining the work that was to be completed.
Logo Revisions & Branding Round 1
This is the initial logo revision I showed to the Forum team. They did not want a drastic change in their logo— they liked the existing concept but wanted it cleaned up a bit. In the image to the left, the existing logo can be seen compared to the first revision I showed the team with all changes identified.
I also created a horizontal lockup, which they did not have for the existing logo, and chose some potential brand colours that suited the logo. The Forum wanted to lean heavily into the themes of sustainability and nature, so I kept their blue and green palette.
The Forum already had one specific image in mind that they wanted to use consistently for brand communications, so I only edited the colours of the image slightly to better suit the brand colours.
My other deliverable for the Sustainability Forum for this project was a website. As of this project, and now, the Sustainability Forum’s webpage is hosted on the Mount Royal University website. This means that they have very little freedom to design the webpage according to their own brand standards, as they must follow the University’s. The Forum wanted their own, externally hosted, website. I set up, organized, and designed the Forum a Squarespace website which followed their new brand guidelines and the site map they provided.
Meeting notes
Logo Revisions & Branding Round 2
Brand Guidelines
As the new website is not yet live, these are screenshots taken just before presenting and handing over the finished project to the Sustainability Forum.
The Sustainability Forum team came back with a few changes they wanted made to the logo revision I had proposed— specifically that the wordmark had been made too small and the main line of the infinity symbol made too thick. I adjusted my design accordingly, and “Version 2” is the final version of the logo that was approved by the Forum.
I provided the Sustainability Forum team with a brand guidelines document to help them ensure future brand communications remained consistent with the logo, colour, and imagery decisions we had made. View the whole document here
