National Alliance on Mental Illness
Brand guidelines for the National Alliance on Mental Illness created with Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop
Scientific Visualization Using 3D Animation (ARTIS 408), Professor Anson Call - Iowa State University
Task
For this assignment, I was tasked with creating a set of "mini" brand guidelines for a non-profit organization of my choice. I chose the National Alliance on Mental Illness, otherwise known as NAMI. I created all-new logos, color palettes, and brand elements for the organization, then created a presentation of brand guidelines containing the following:
Logo (both color and black/white)
Brand colors (primary and secondary)
Typography (display and body)
Brand elements (patterns, iconography, etc)
Apparel designs
Sample social media posts
Any other applications that made sense for NAMI
Challenges
Logo design—I know this is very weird coming from a graphic designer, but logo design is NOT my thing, so this part of the assignment was extra challenging for me! I've been designing logos like crazy since starting the graphic design program at Iowa State, so I know what I'm doing, but it's still definitely outside of my comfort zone compared to other areas of graphic design.
Social media posts—this is another type of graphic that I'm not as comfortable with, not from lack of practice but simply because it's not my thing, so I struggled with this part of the assignment, as well
Final Result
Although I'm not nearly as comfortable with logo design or social media posts as I am with other aspects of branding (website, merchandise, etc), I still was able to produce a clean logo and some decent graphics for social media. I'm ultimately really happy with the results of this project, even if it was something more outside of my comfort zone than others—I'm probably the only graphic designer in existence who hates logo/branding assignments, but I had a lot of fun working on this project!
