Helaman Higley’s
Process Book Kidsburg Brand & Identity Guide
Table of Contents Project Brief Discover|First Round Sketches Logo Design| The Pinwheel |Second Client Meeting |New Directions Station Logos| Sketches |Digital Drafts
Project Brief
T
HE REXBURG KID’S DISCOVERY ZONE (tentatively named: “Kidsburg”) is a 4,800 square foot indoor recreational and activity center focused on children ages 18 months to 8 years of age. The Kid’s Discovery Zone will provide families with a safe, indoor facility where they can take their children to play, learn and interact. The Discovery Zone will focus on creating quality user experiences, based on “active play” where children will experience a “kid’s version” of the Rexburg community. The Rexburg Kid’s Discovery Zone will be located within the exvisting Rexburg Zone Recreational Center and will take advantage of shared resources such as: shared space, shared staffing, shared management, name recognition and more.
The Kid’s Discovery Zone will feature an “open play” concept where families and children will learn and play at their own pace. The cost of admission will be competitive with other children centered venues and activities in the region with a focus on affordability and convenience for potential patrons. Project Goals & Objectives: The goal of this project is to create a bright, interactive, fun and inviting adaptive brand guide that can be followed to create a space that will appeal to children and their parents. Ideally, the final brand direction will visually “kidify” a local community and will contain all necessary brand elements and assets to provide guidance to designers who will be making the final space.
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Project Details:
“Kidsburg” presents an opportunity to create a parent brand with sub-brands within it. These are the playhouses and the individual station brands. You will need to create a logo for “Kidsburg” as well as logos/signs for each of the stations and playhouses as follows. “Kidsburg” is divided into the following stations: • Race Track • Gas Station • Mother’s Nursing Area • Construction Zone • Fort • Farm/Agriculture In addition to the stations, “Kidsburg” will feature 5 playhouses that will be designed to look like storefronts of local businesses. The following is a list of some playhouses “Kidsburg” is thinking about building: • Doctor’s Office • Restaurant • Home • Store • Bank • Fire Department • Other (we are open to suggestions) Sponsors: • “Kidsburg” will offer local businesses the opportunity to sponsor the space. General sponsorship is broken up into the following categories/tiers: • Resident Partner: Logo on the “Kidsburg” website community sponsor page. • Business Partner: Logo on “Kidsburg” website, Named plaque on a cubby. • Neighborhood Partner: Logo on “Kidsburg” website, named plaque on cubby, Name of business prominently displayed at the entrance of “Kidsburg”.
02 | Project Brief
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Community Partner: Logo on “Kidsburg” website, named plaque on cubby, Name of business prominently displayed at the entrance of “Kidsburg”, Logo on “Kidsburg” print and web advertising. Stake Holders: • City of Rexburg • Local Businesses (potential sponsors) • Local Families from surrounding counties Target Audience: • Children 18 months to 8 years old • Families with children 18 months to 8 years old • Rexburg and surrounding counties: Madison County (pop 39,549), Jefferson County (pop 27,839), Fremont County (pop 12,943), Teton County (pop 10,960)
Creative Considerations:
Because the project is slated to be built in phases each phase progressively more elaborate and complex than the previous phase, the final brand solution should accommodate for these phases of development. Phase 01 should be the least expensive option providing guidance on colors and graphic elements that will be low cost but high impact. Phase 02 can add a few more expensive visual features while Phase 03 would represent the final installed version of the space. Because communities grow and change, this space should be able to grow and change easily while maintaining a consistent look-and-feel. The “Kidsburg” brand is paramount but should accommodate local sponsor logos and elements without making them the focal point of any station or space. A “sponsor wall” may be proposed...
Deliverables:
Each student in this course will design their own proposed version of a visual brand for the discovery zone to be delivered as a printed and bound brand guide. Students will also deliver a PDF version of the brand guide.
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There
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Define | What is Kidsburg? The first step in creating an identity for a brand is to discover who they are. What are their goals, who is their audience, why do they do what they do?. The the right is an image of notes from a meeting with my client, the City of Rexburg. The key points of what I learned from this is the City of Rexburg wants Kidsburg to be a children’s center that gives back to the community while also being an interactive place for guardiance/parents to learn with their children.
04 | Define
Most Relevant Competitor Images of Kidstown at the Falls, a children’s center 30 miles away in Idaho Falls and the most direct competitor of Kidsburg.
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Kidsburg Brand Brief Brand Brief After meeting with the client I assembled this quick and dirty brand brief to organize my thoughts on what I thought Kidsburg could be. The three biggest things that solidified in my mind while creating this were: the audience is not children, it’s their parents, and I wanted to develop Kidsburg as a brand about interactive discovery first and foremost. As will be explored in further detail in later sections, the theme of interaction influenced everything from the dynamic logo system to the name of the stations.
Values:
Big Idea
Discover
Primary Target Au
Family, education/discovery, community, fun.
Personality Attributes:
open, welcoming, legit (credible), safety, cohesive, fun, return value (customers come back), realism, engaging.
Key competitors: In Town: The Craze, FatCats and Gravity Factory Out of Town: Museum of Idaho Falls, KidsTown, Blast Off and Squealers. Fast Food: Sonic and McDonalds
Business Product Services:
A safe, educational, and affordable play space for the targeted age group to make discoveries about the local community.
Parents With Young Childre This inlcudes families local to R as young families where the par students. Families are looking fo the money spent.
Value proposition:
Educating kids while they are p consideration for varying kid ty environments for each. “We aim place where parents and children discover together.”
06 | Define
• Play • Educate
uduence
Secondary Target Audience
en Rexburg as well rents are college or a great value for
•
Extended Family
•
Pre-Schools
•
Day Cares
:
playing. General ypes - different m to provide a n can explore and
Core Purpose:
To provide families with a community focused environment for children to learn through interactive play.
Value Proposition
The secondary audiences want to create memoral experiences for the children through activities which they can trust to be safe for the children.
Proof Points:
local, community, intimacy, affordable. “Sense of familiarity with the new, educate children on the ‘why’ for each discovery zone, local & affordable, reliable - clubhouse”
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|Name Exploration
In my search for a name, the client came to the discussion with “Kidsburg.” In my exploration I was looking for a name I wanted to find one which would emphasize either the idea of play or education. Circled are the names that I initually thought had the most promise: Kidsburg, Ka-burg!, Child Mode, Child’s Play Kid Station and Playcation. It’s worth pointing out that not every name was a winner, but was actually quite laughable. Some of the worst offenders where Freezeburg, Shaburg and Discoburg.
08 | Define
“Real isn’t how you are made, It’s a thing that happens to you.” The Velveteen Rabbit
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Discover|First Round Sketches Sketching In The Dark For these first sketches I still had no clue what I would go with for the name so my sketches felt directionless. None of these ideas ended up being the final logo — or even influencing the final logo, but it was good to get the initial ideas out of my head so I could get to the good stuff. After this experience I stepped away to refresh and came back with a stronger vision. The name was going to be LEAP and I had some fresh ideas for the logo.
10 | Discover
|Second Round Sketches What is LEAP? Leap is an acronym discovered by a classmate which stood for Learn, Explore, Achieve, Play. It resonated with me and I new it was the perfect name to go with my theme of interaction. With a concept in mind I did a series of sketches exploring what ideas that went with the name.
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A Dynamic Logo? Around this point in my sketches I had the idea to create a dynamic logo that would use two lines and a circle to create various shapes. This could encourage children to exlpore basic shape manipulation and interaction.
12 | Discover
|First Digital Draft LEAP DISCOVERY CENTER
LEAP DISCOVERY CENTER
LEAP DISCOVERY CENTER
LEAP DISCOVERY CENTER
The First Take This first go at a digital sketch was interesting, but not ready for the big time. The end products felt too generic and lacked a substantial weight due to mainly using lines and not solid shapes. So it meant more skethcing to find a better solution.
LEAP DISCOVERY CENTER
LEAP DISCOVERY CENTER
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14 | Discover
The Logo Starts to Take Shape On this page I found the idea which would inspire my final logo: pinwheels. They had a connotation of childhood, they were interactive, and could be used for some simple scientific experiments. The problemI had to solve first though was how to create a pinwheel that wouldn’t look like Google Photos’. I settled on creating a pinwheel out of four elipses with acute corners.
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“Well, maybe it started that way, as a dream, but doesn’t everything?” James and the Giant Peach
16 | Discover
Logo Design| The Pinwheel
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LEAP Discovery Center
Discovery Center
18 | Design
My Thoughts The logo in the teal frame is the variant I settled upon. I chose this one because I thought the colors where an interesting variant of the primary colors and the transparency of a pinwheel offset behind the main pinwheel created a feeling of motion.
Discovery Center
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|The Kidscovery Brain
20 | Design
The Proccess The amount of sketches that led to this logo was drastically shorter than the amount leading up to my pinwheel logo. This was because after a few sketches I discovered an idea that I thought was really strong: Take a brain and combine it with a geode.
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kidscovery
kidscovery
center
center
kidscovery
kidscovery
kidscovery
kidscovery center
center
center
22 | Design
center
kidscovery center
kidscovery center
|Second Client Meeting The Clients’ Thoughts The City of Rexburg was not a big fan of either of the names because they didn’t emphasize community enough. Also, they escpecially didn’t like LEAP because they were concerened about the extra work it would take on their end to teach their customers what LEAP means. As for the logo designs, They were alright with the idea for the pinwheel but not entirely sold. The brain felt like a logo that would be belong to a science discovery center, which they weren’t going to be so they did not like that option. After the meeting, I decided to change the name to Kidsburg because they still liked that name, and to develop the pinwheel idea more.
Discovery Center
kidscovery center
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24 | Design
|New Directions
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“Believing takes practice.� A Wrinkle In Time
26 | Design
Station Logos| Sketches
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28 | Design
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|Digital Drafts Hospital Fort
Construction
Gas Station
30 | Design
Farm
$
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32 | Design
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34 | Design