What’s a design without an idea? And what’s an idea without the ability to convey it to someone else? That’s why presentations are central to the one-year Digital Design experience. It isn’t enough to design something well – you need to go beyond the aesthetic, to articulate an objective rationale for the decisions you make.

So, throughout their year, Digital Design students present the things they create, experience that becomes increasingly important for students as they barrel towards the program’s culmination at an industry night, presenting their finest work to an audience packed with designers and recruiters. The process begins early.

At a recent presentation morning in instructor Maria Kennedy‘s fourth term Branding class, a half-dozen students presented projects they’d worked on for about six weeks. As is often the case, an outside perspective was brought in – for this session, it was Subplot creative director Matthew Clark joining Maria to share his thoughts on the branding work and the presentations themselves.

Students were evenly split between new brands for hypothetical products and rebrands of real-life companies. “The project is of the student’s choosing,” Maria explains. “We debate the positives and problems with their choices, but usually by class three, they’ve settled on a rebrand or a new brand.”

And for such a small group, the variety was off the charts. Ryan Smith‘s skateboard company (with a planned extension into youth arts), Ameen Roayan‘s Saudi Arabian school for creative arts, and Ira Hardy‘s new spin on the old-fashioned butcher shop rounded out the “new brand” category. The rebrands included a Canadian network TV giant (Juan Behrens), a well-respected electric vehicle company (Joseph Boutilier), and an Edmonton garden conservatory (Taylor Zimmerman).

Reinventing the Wheel

Taking on a familiar brand, one that actually exists, means a certain focus. The business is tested and the market established. A student looking to do a rebrand has all the materials to get started – and probably good reasons why he or she thinks the company could use a new approach.

Yet a grounding in the real world also bring constraints: it isn’t necessarily a designer’s place to suggest an entirely new business plan or target audience. Students have to work with what they’ve got. How do you reinvent the wheel while keeping the brand differentiated in a real-world marketplace? ”One of the fundamentals of branding is not to look more like something,” Clark said after one of the presentations.

But those challenges are, after all, where a good designer thrives. A student who wants to do a rebrand has to “bring strong rationale as to why they are doing it,” says Maria, “and what they are trying to bring out in the identity that isn’t currently being expressed.”

Joseph Boutilier set out to rebrand E-Cycle, the first provider of affordable electric vehicles in Canada. The brand is recognizable in Vancouver but could use a fresh approach. What do you do as a “green” company when “green” is a seemingly ubiquitous feature?

His solution meant an entirely new take, beginning with the name: E-Cycle becomes “Cirkit”. The challenges Joseph identified – like an out-of-the-way retail location – were more fodder for fresh design and a clever bit of copy that, at Clark’s suggestion, may become more prominent in Joseph’s future iterations: “The Cycle of Life.”

Starting at Square One

With freedom comes responsibility. Students who choose to develop brands for hypothetical companies basically need to come up with the framework of an entire business plan and marketing strategy – from scratch.

“Usually, with a new brand, the students have a lot of freedom. With that comes the challenge of creating a brand – essentially the organization – and the visual expression,” Maria says. “Usually that ends up being a lot of work, but in the long run, more satisfying.”

These projects often spring from the personal interests and passions of the students. Ameen Roayan, for example, saw a need for creative arts education opportunities in his native Saudi Arabia – there’s a school, but it’s for women only.

Ira Hardy’s project, meanwhile, was on a much smaller scale – but the brand itself was no less complex. Hardy Meats is his fictional butcher shop, founded on principles of sustainability. It’s a throwback with a modern bent that would be right at home on Vancouver’s East Side. Ira settled on a “classic with a modern sensibility” approach to the design and a colour palette suggesting flesh, fat, meat, grass and grain… which sounds a lot grosser than it is.

“A logo isn’t branding – it’s just the first thing of a million things,” said Clark at one point, and in Hardy’s case, that meant a unified brand that reflected the entire raison d’être of the business, from signage to individual stickers on each package showing how far away the meat had been raised. Both the design and the presentation had a lot of polish – the company may be fictional but you wouldn’t know it.

Presentation Matters

Six presentations, six fascinating approaches… In the end, that’s what matters most.

“It’s all about creating, and showing that a strong process utilizing the four stages – understanding, thinking, creating, and implementing – is followed,” says Maria. “And that the student has exhibited his own creativity and strategic thinking. The design is really secondary to the process in this class.”

But that’s not to say good aesthetic choices aren’t important, and in this particular branding class, you’d see six projects that are portfolio-worthy… or on their way there. Maria puts it even more simply: ”Brilliant execution is wonderful to see.”