BRAND IDENTITY: The School of Interaction & UI/UX Design
School Days
For many years, I was the Associate Director of the School of Interaction & UI/UX Design at the Academy of Art University, San Francisco. People always seem to be surprised when I tell them how much design was involved in the job!
AN UNUSUALLY LARGE SCOPE
When people hear “Associate Director,” they usually assume that I was an administrator. There were, of course, administrative aspects to the position. But there was also a huge amount of design.
My duties included branding the department, curating the environmental art and signage, and (far more importantly) shaping the visual design curriculum and building the visual design and typography classes, both onsite and online.
Those duties involved a lot more active design time, and left me in the unique position of helping build the department from almost every possible angle.
BRANDING A SCHOOL
The requirements of the department’s brand were fairly clear. Focus on Human-Computer Interaction, UX Design, Visual Design, and Technology. Use structures that convey modernity, cleanliness, and innovation. Contrast between us and the rest of the 24-odd schools that comprise the sprawling AAU behemoth.
When I was first made part of the department’s full-time faculty, as Visual Design Lead, I set about creating our first real brand. We were “Web Design & New Media” back then.
And when the school’s leadership changed radically, I shifted the brand along with it. I created a WNM ambigram logo with an implied, negative N, to show adaptability, and the letterforms were inspired by Herb Lubalin’s Avant Garde Gothic letterforms, their stress implying forward motion.
An exciting moment came when we finally got what we’d been asking for for many years: a departmental name change. We went from the obsolete “Web Design & New Media” to “Interactive & UI/UX Design,” which reflected much better our vision and stance in relation to the industry.
The new brand had to reflect that. The idea was to emphasize “interaction,” and mark explorations eventually led to a product that suggested a blending of two different elements into a third by way of interaction. The structure was reminiscent of NASA’s old “worm logo,” a slightly retro-styled idea of futurism. And the type was all brand new and custom designed by me for the department.
The design process, indicated by the second-round options on the left, was a matter of whittling down prospective logos until we reached the final mark and colorway.
Since our sister school, the School of Advertising, used the first half of the rainbow in their branding (red, red-orange, and yellow-orange), I went with the latter half for ours (green, indigo, magenta).
The type is custom: a modular face that I designed specifically for the department, the text version of which became my font Gorgonzola Gothic.
Designing A LEARNING SPACE
One of my favorite parts of the job creating an environment that put the focus squarely on the students and their work. This was way more than decoration—it was about creating an energetic, motivated learning sapce for the students. It focused on four very important things:
Getting students the information they needed on a daily basis, from maps of the floor to curriculum infographics to (eventually) Covid protocols.
Inspiring students to look to the past as well as the future, and to think of design in a more human-centered way. Many students enter the program thinking of Interaction Design as a moneymaking venture. I wanted to establish a departmental ethos of service and even humanitarianism.
Showcasing student work, both to inspire future students and to encourage enrollment. Coordinating gallery design with onsite campus tours gave tour guides a way of defining the focus of the department (which many found difficult to differentiate from, say, Graphic Design) through the work.
Bringing in the industry to portfolio review events every semester, so that students constantly received professional feedback about their work.
AND IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT A LOGO…
I created all graphic materials, collateral, and imagery for the School of IxD, from signage to social media graphics to the visuals and awards we gave out every year at our annual Spring Show.
It was a place of constant creation. Constantly honoring the design past. Constantly pushing toward the design future. Constantly striving to be better, to reach higher than you thought you could. Constantly remembering that design is about more than making money, and that beauty, humanity, and grace are also ROI.
And all of it was for the students. For the love of watching them grow.
BUILDING THE CURRICULUM
Finally, but most importantly, there was coursebuilding. This involved not only shaping the arc of the visual design curriculum, but actually building the lion’s share of the visual design courses from the bottom up, from introductory-level through to senior-level classes, for the BFA, MA, and MFA programs alike, onsite and online. I built the Visual Design & Typography courses from the ground up: all the text, all the graphics, all the videos.
Coursebuilding was a great joy. And using visual design and motion graphics to convey important points within classes made them more dynamic, and ultimately more fruitful!
Following are some clips from my online class lectures.
AND THE CRUX OF IT ALL:
TAKEAWAY: SUCCESS
My years with The School of Interaction & UI/UX Design were perhaps the most fruitful and fulfilling of my life to date. I carried literally thousands of students through the program, watching and shaping the development of their eye, their skills, their ethics, and their portfolios, and ultimately seeing the lion’s share of them through to fantastic careers.
It was always about them. I’m very proud of that.