IDENTITY DESIGN
JAZZDOR STRASBOURG BERLIN
Project Name: Jazzdor Strasbourg Berlin Identity Design - Microsite & Graphic Assets
My Contributions: UX Design, UI Design, Visual Design, Interaction Design, Researcher, Notetaker
Solo or Group: Group
Length: June 2021 - August 2021
Digital Tools Used: Figma, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator
PROMPT COMPANY: JAZZDOR STRASBOURG BERLIN
Throughout the latter half of the Summer 2021 semester in my User Experience Design course, our group ideated, designed and prototyped an entirely new visual identity for Jazzdor Strasbourg Berlin - a contemporary jazz festival held in Germany and France. Since their event aims to present jazz through a modern lens and support the uniqueness of Euro jazz and artists, it was crucial for us to truly envelop the identity of current Jazzdor and elevate it with an entirely new visual outlook.
PROMPT DESIGNER:
ARMIN HOFMANN
Another crucial aspect to this project was learning from Swiss Design pioneer Armin Hofmann and fully understanding his core fundamental values when it comes to his works and designs. Our group spent days anaylizing three crucial design qualities from Armin Hofmann which were:
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Abstracting the Notion of the Form.
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Treating Type as Geometric Shapes and Symbols.
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Manipulating the positioning of elements for an engaging reading flow.
After developing assets for Jazzdor using each quality in a lateral manner, our group decided to move forward with creating our final identity design with the first quality Abstracting the Notion of the Form.
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Some other crucial designer inspirations included Studio Helmo and Wim Crouwel.
Asset Gallery
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What Did I Do?
My main contributions over the entire course of the project include:
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Poster and Asset Design
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Slide Deck Design
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Microsite Design
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Interaction Design elements for Microsite
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UI elements for Microsite
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Notetaking and Feedback analysis
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Team Organization, Meeting Organizer and Debriefer
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During the first portion of the project, my main focus was in researching Armin Hofmann and Ellen Lupton. I spent multiple sessions researching and analyzing Armin Hofmann's work from throughout his years of designing, mainly focusing on his works from the 1950s and 1960s. By deep diving into his work, I was able to discover the many intricacies of his design philosophy.
For example, I noticed that many of the shapes he used in his posters signified something bigger, such as a sculpture in his Kunsthalle Basel Jacques Lipchitz poster or the collection of chairs in his Harman Miller Collection poster. While these forms were recognizable they were also simplified down and abstracted, so an individual could appreciate the poster without all of the needed context. After deliberating with my group about this information, we finalized this design quality as "abstracting the notion of the form".
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During the second portion of the project, I organized the project timeline and scope and continued designing and interating on our second design quality, treating type as geometric shapes and symbols. My main inspiration was Armin Hofmann and Wim Crouwel, drawing from their posters Modernist Huygen Frederike, Good Design (1954) and Kunsthalle Basel (1961). The main design qualities I focused on were treating type as geometric shapes, sense data and repetition and change.
After each developing assets for Jazzdor using each quality in a lateral manner, our group decided to move forward with creating our final identity design with the first quality Abstracting the Notion of the Form. This was because overall it was the more flexible line design wise, and overall the design qualities translated much better to digital UX/UI design assets compared to our lines 2 and 3.
When developing the final microsite and project assets and as our group revisited our Abstraction of the Notion of the Form design quality, we analyzed how best we could further adapt the concept itself digitally and physically. One aspect that was important to us was to tie abstracted musical elements into Jazzdor but not becoming cliché. After much deliberation a minimalist visual and typographic approach was taken. Minimalism helped to accentuate the abstracted forms without much visual clutter in imagery or colors.
Our initial poster was adjusted to have the typography imitate the appearance of sheet music and the red dots reflect a conductors hand movement. I then took assets that would be relevant to a Jazzdor event, such as a take-home tote bag and jazz album case, and adjusted our design to fit these new forms.
For the microsite itself heavy research was done and inspiration was gathered from hoverstate, Behance and brutalist websites reflecting our minimalist and simplest themes. Our group designed many different mock-ups based on the various inspiration gathered, such as a website navigation similar to sorting through an album case or with scrolling news headlines highlighting new artists. One interaction in particular that stood out to me was user drawn navigation, where the navigation follows the user and the user clicks and or drags to create their own menu.
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The final microsite design focuses on a post-event content strategy about musicians that are frequently affiliated with Jazzdor and it's communities. The primary audience is previous Jazzdoor attendees and new attendees looking for inspiring musicians. The content highlighted includes music pieces, albums, Jazzdor partners and communities. The art direction was slightly adjusted to adapt for web typography, to best suit for web readability and accessibility.
Challenges Faced
One main challenge that occured during the second portion of the project was us focusing too narrowly on our client, Jazzdor Strasbourg Berlin and what they did as an organization. Halfway through our design iterations, I had realized we were designing using Jazzdor's company qualities and not our original design qualities. This resulted in our designs becoming much less fleshed out, cliche and without a real sense of purpose. Halfway through our design iterations. Based on this realization, we organized a meeting with our teaching assistants to properly reframe our focus and quickly got to work reiterating on entirely new designs. Even though we had less than 24 hours to reframe our scope, we were able to come together quickly and present an A quality presentation to our professor and teaching assistants. From then on we then had a meeting early every week to discuss the current project scope and regular check-ins to make sure we hadn't gone off track of what was most important: our identity design and design qualities surrounding it.
Reflecting Back
This project truly solidified my skills in UX, UI and graphic design and my desire to continue in the industry. By working with such a capable group and having knowledgeable and experienced experts help guide us through our design process, I was able to learn many crucial design skills quickly and efficiently. My ability to communicate clearly, simply and openly also resulted in better feedback for our project and better reception at the end.