Process: Gen Z Rebrand

Gen Z Rebrand

FORM & FUNCTION Project 3 1

Fall 2018 Maggie Chuang

In Situ

This fast-paced project aimed to rebrand Generation Z with a new name that would encapsulate the attitudes and truths about this evolving generation in America.

Our brand became “Gen Open,” focusing on the presence of the open platform of technology and people’s openess to sharing their ideas and beliefs. The project ran for 2½ weeks, and finsihed with a logo mark and two pieces of collateral.

The work was done in collaboration with Isabella Levethan and Rachel Yoon.

In Situ

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Research What did you turn to for reference, inspiration, and understanding for your project? How did it influence—directly or indirectly—what you made?

Discovery What was your process for generating possible ideas for the project? How wide and deep did you explore before coming to a final idea? Did your discovery process generate outcomes that were successful?

Refinement How did you refine your work? How did you make decisions as you refined your idea? What criteria did you use for evaluation? Did you find your final refined idea to be the final iteration of your idea?

Criticism What criticism did you receive from your peers and faculty about your project? Did you agree or disagree with it? What did you learn from criticism?

Collaboration How did the collaborative nature of this project affect your process? Did it have an effect on your approach, and if so, how?

Did you learn anything from the roles that you took within the group dynamic?

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Research

What did you turn to for reference, inspiration, and understanding for your project? How did it influence—directly or indirectly— what you made?

Brainstorming and defining the concept behind our rebrand may have been the most important stage with this brand, because of how key it was to capture the spirit of the generation. We started broadly with all the associations we could make about Generation Z, covering trends, pop culture, politics, world events, attitudes, etc. Through our exploration we began to focus in on the types of attitudes that this generation shows; we saw patterns of people being adaptable, honest about their opinions, and engaged with topics they care about. We landed on “open” as the most encompassing word for what we were describing; using this as a foundation, we crafted a positioning statement and tone to form our brand.

The positioning statement directly formed the visual research we collected. We wanted to have a brand that was modular and adaptable, so that it could be a tool for users to take and make their own.

We found styles that felt modern with clean layouts and bold, geometric visuals.

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Positioning Statement Our generation is defined by how open we are—specifically, in the way we are constantly open to sharing our ideas and making our statements heard. We are adaptable and we put ourselves out there.

Brand Name “Gen Open” rallies the generation to put our personal mark on the world and make a statement.

We’re open about ourselves, our ideas, our beliefs We’re open to connection We’re open to change and adapt to our environment We’re open to interpretation We’re open to being seen, shaped, and exposed We’re open because we don’t hold back

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Tone Our generation is defined by how open we are—specifically, in the way we are constantly open to sharing our ideas and making our statements heard. We are adaptable and we put ourselves out there.

Language Our generation is defined by how open we are—specifically, in the way we are constantly open to sharing our ideas and making our statements heard. We are adaptable and we put ourselves out there.

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A selection of our visual reserach. We focused on finding inspiraition for certain factors that we wanted to explore in our final brand: Modularity Parts coming together as a whole Adaptability Structure Abstractability

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Discovery

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What was your process for generating possible ideas for the project? How wide and deep did you explore before coming to a final idea? Did your discovery process generate outcomes that were successful?

Although we ended up with “Gen Open,” there was lots of iteration before that to test other names. We ultimately stuck with this brand, but the process helped us define exactly what we meant by “open,” which better directed our visual iterations. Our driving concept was to create a modular system, or a logo that could be disassembled and moved around; we felt that this spoke to the adaptability and undefined nature that we had described in our positioning statement.

At this time, we were also generating ideas for what collateral we would make, because we knew it was important to pick products that clearly showed our intentions for the brand. We threw around lots of options—stickers, a website, an installation, posters—and began to investigate what each of these would say about the use of our brand. Ultimately, we knew we would want something print and something digital, in order to capture the scope of interactions our generation engages with in a day.

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OPEN Early iterations for the logo and its application

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starting conversation

Iterations on our final concept direction of having blocky pieces to create the letters. The goal was to create the letters out of simple shapes that could be disassembled to form a pattern.

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Refinement

How did you refine your work? How did you make decisions as you refined your idea? What criteria did you use for evaluation? Did you find your final refined idea to be the final iteration of your idea?

With the timeline of the project being so short, my team focused our refinement stage on the final execution/look and nailing down the connections to our concept. We continued to come back to the positioning statement, and looking at whether our logo and collateral spoke to our idea of openness. The logo was tweaked throughout this phase, pushing legibility by seeing how much of each letter we could remove. Once the final mark had been established, we were able to move on to color and typography studies.

The final collateral was also decided in this phase: a sticker set and a digital gif. Each product has a variety of options/variations within it, all of which is meant to increase the adaptability in function. The gifs are designed for social media and other online promotions, as a way for this generation to promote its ideas and quickly share them with the world. Similarly, the stickers are made to be used in action instead of as decoration; the collateral pushes the core idea of an open platform within the brand.

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Iterations on the logo, narrowing into the final concept.

Right: pattern iteration In Situ

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Examining color, typography, and motion more closely

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OPEN TO INTERPRETATION UNIVERS 65 BOLD

OPEN PLATFORM AVENIR BLACK

OPEN TO NEW IDEAS

FUTURA BOLD

OPEN TO CONFLICT FOUNDERS GROTESK BOLD (Final Choice) 21

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Criticism

What criticism did you receive from your peers and faculty about your project? Did you agree or disagree with it? What did you learn from criticism?

The critique for this process was extremely helpful, and hopefully will inform future investigations of this brand in the future. For successes, our color treatment and final mark were praised for being well considered and applicable to our concept. It was also clear how our concept turned into a brand; since this was the goal of this speculative project, our team was happy that this aspect came through so strongly. Other parts were more critically looked at, the primary one being the style we used in the gifs; the track path reveal we chose was a style that wasn’t as meaningful to our concept because, as modern users, we’ve become very used to that motion. The gif also suggested something building / unifying into a single thing, which strays away from our idea of modularity.

With only 2 ½ weeks for this project, our group definitely rushed into some final decisions for the collateral. The criticism we received was great feedback, and something we would explore much more deeply with a longer timeline. With the constraints of the project, we’re generally happy with how Gen Open played out as a full brand identity.

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Final brand, including logo mark and collateral with applications.

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Collaboration

What criticism did you receive from your peers and faculty about your project? Did you agree or disagree with it? What did you learn from criticism?

I found the group dynamic to be a valuable experience, especially considering the lack of group work we experience at school. My approach to the process changed considerably; we spent more time discussing and exploring the original brand concept, and the iteration stages generally felt quicker. We also divided up work so that only one person was in charge of each piece of the project—in order to do this successfully, we had to fully agree on the goal and style of Gen Open. In some ways the collaboration made this project better, because we gained a broader variation in ideas through every step of the process, allowing us to explore this concept deeply in a very short amount of time.

However, I think my biggest takeaway is the necessity to establish goals and instigate decision making in collaborative work. In a group of fairly equal peers, I think we were originally hesitant for any one person to call the shots or make final choices; this tended to slow down our process, and keep us iterating longer than we likely needed to. Our group really excelled when we were willing to make decisions, give honest feedback, and give ourselves a concrete timeline.

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