In college, I was tasked with creating a branding package as a project. I went above and beyond to create a fictitious company around the branding package.
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RevyuCru is a platform for product research and customer service. It calls everyday customers (Cru Members) to share their positive and negative experiences with a product or service, and guides them to easily create fair and useful reviews across text, video, and image media.
It also provides data about customers' experiences with the companies who sell those products and services, giving those companies valuable insight into how customers truly feel about their products.
Finally it helps both customers and companies by providing them with a way to connect directly and resolve minor issues, and adds valuable data about issue resolution and customer service to that company's metrics.
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In addition to my work samples, this page contains some mild design elements from the RevyuCru experience.
RevyuCru as a company is very focused on "you" as a customer or a company that uses its platform. It's about you, your opinion, your company, your brand, you sharing your experience with other "yous" out there. Because of that, there's a heavy focus on the letter U, and that was behind the decision to spell "review crew" the way I did.
RevyuCru's branding started with fonts. The two fonts used are from the BankGothic and Eurostile families. I selected BankGothic to represent the title and logo work because I wanted a more bold, unique square shape, especially at the letter U, and Eurostile (the font you're reading now) because it carries BankGothic's rounded-square shape through the rest of the design without being difficult to read.
Next came colors. It was essential to me to have a color palette that was bold and recognizable. I wanted people who saw those colors out in the wild to immediately think of RevyuCru. Blue and green are colors that complement each other well, and so I selected hues of those colors that were bright and eye-catching. Green would lead, an easy-on-the-eyes grey would support it, and the brighter, louder blue would accent it.
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The colors presented an opportunity to further highlight the letter U as a short logo. I used three Us, one for each color, paired with macrons (the line above a vowel that signifies a long vowel sound instead of a short one) of opposing colors to create a simple, instantly recognizable logo that RevyuCru could display all on its own, either with one U or all three.
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Finally, there was the tagline. "Get in the know" is a short, simple, memorable phrase in the imperative voice which not only describes what RevyuCru does, but calls those who hear it to participate.
assets
Among the assets I designed for the branding package is a business card. The design language I had established for RevyuCru is about boldness and recognizability, and I carried that forward with the decision to use a vertical design instead of the more traditional horizontal design.
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Like with the tagline, I used lower case lettering in the Eurostile font for titles. On the front of the card, I carried that into the card holder's name and title, with right-alignment. I used left alignment in many other applications for practicality. For example, at the top of this section, I have the title "Assets" left-aligned to account for the way an English speaker's eye will travel the page. For the business card, I chose right alignment because a business card needs to grab attention quickly, and right alignment was more eye-catching. It works well in the smaller space of a business card, and in consideration of eye movement, the block of information at the bottom is very separated. The large U in the background can carry eye movement down toward it, and the name and title don't have to.
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The bright blue highlights the card holder's name. The person's title is in more muted dark grey, but its proximity to the name leaves no doubt to its purpose. The large U in the fills most of the white space, but uses opacity to avoid being too obnoxious or distracting. Below are the card holder's contact details, using left and right alignment to preserve a column in the center that clearly divides the two blocks of information.
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The back of the card simply displays the centered 3-U short logo and tagline. The entire card is finished with RevyuCru's signature green, blue, and grey around the edges of the card, to be made visible in print when looking at the card edge-on.
I also designed an envelope for RevyuCru's branding package. On the front, the company's full logo is displayed above the properly-formatted address in the top left corner. The same opaque U from the business card is displayed on the right to better control white space and balance, without obscuring important elements such as the destination address and postage. The back of the envelope displays the short logo and tagline on the flap, as well as the company's website. Like the business card, the entire envelope is framed by the company's colors.
Finally, I completed the RevyuCru branding package with letterhead. It starts with the full logo left-aligned in the header to preserve eye movement, followed by the company address formatted to be the same width as the logo itself. The address is restricted to one line to maximize the amount of usable space on the page.
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Left alignment was important for this header because the attention line will likely begin just beneath it, on the left side of the page. Unlike with the business card, this eye movement is important to preserve so that all the information the reader needs is directly in the path that his or her eyes want to travel.
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The bottom of the page displays RevyuCru's short logo and tagline, and like the other assets I designed, the entire page is framed by the company colors. The result of all my design decisions is a letterhead that is clean and spacious, yet bold and full of RevyuCru's character. Looking at a page of this letterhead, or any asset, should feel like looking at the company itself, and that is what I strove to preserve throughout my design.
Since this project, RevyuCru has stayed with me as evidence of my ability to create consistent designs that not only represented a brand, but spoke its language to a viewer, and my ability to interpret a brand into something visual, tangible, and recognizable. Someday, I would love to see RevyuCru become real. I devoted many hours toward its design and "existence," what it did, why, and how it could make money as a business, and it means a lot to me as a representative of my ideas and skills.
I hope to take those ideas and skills to real companies and people that need them, and in addition to expanding my own skillset, improve the way people think about design and user experiences.
