Refreshing The Brand Identity Of A Contemporary Jazz Event

Visual, UX, UI, and Interaction Design
Project Goal
Design a refreshed brand identity for the Jazzdor event. Including experimental art direction, event merchandise, and a microsite.
Context
The following work is an academic project that was done with 3 other awesome designers (Pranav Sharma, Lucio Chen, Cassandra Graves).
My Contributions
Art direction, researcher, visual design, UI/UX design and prototyping.
Tools
Adobe Illustrator, After Effects, Figma
Timeline
June - August 2021 (2 months)
How I learnt from Armin Hofmann and define the project scope
I believe “designing” is always about learning from the best and bringing the knowledge to the process. And the project needs to define its scope. The team studied the pioneer of Swiss Design - Armin Hofmann, his reliance on the fundamentals of the graphic form such as point, line, and shape while conveying simplicity, complexity, representation, and abstraction subtly.

With days and nights of researching and analyzing details on Hofmann’s works, I worked as a researcher and graphic designer with the team, explored three design qualities from Hofmann’s work, and pushed the project forward with numerous visual experiments. Below are the selected posters designed based on the design qualities:
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1.
Abstracting the notion of the form (The core quality that we brought forward)
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‍The deep care and reverence towards semantics is something that Hofmann does in an intriguing manner. He uses abstraction to find deeper connections and develop meaning. While the forms can be overly abstract, when set in the right context and to the right audience, connections are formed easily.

2.
Treating type as geometric shapes and symbols



‍Geometric shapes are treated as symbols to signify the subject matter and story, not just exploring the potential of these fundamental elements but pursuing beauty and harmony.

3.
Manipulating the positioning of elements for an engaged reading flow

Treating reading flow in a unique way where people can still understand information by using proximity and aligning clusters that are well structured and legible.

Making the decision, reframing the project, and looking for the best, most promising path to pursue.
The soft skills of the design process are critical to me as a designer and when giving up ideas is hard, so I’m here with the team to analyze each direction rationally and help the team push the project forward.
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For the first line of exploration, I went back and revisited our abstraction quality and looked at some more inspiration. Since the team had an idea of abstracting musical elements to tie back into Jazzdor without becoming cliché, I built this art direction that focused on a minimalist aesthetic and typographically driven content.

Nature is full of clear geometric shapes and forms that can be pushed further with abstraction. Combining this with simple low saturated images, we create a simple but eye-catching aesthetic with clear contrast, stability and hierarchy.
The use of thin fonts makes the type stand out and shine within the space. The bright red creates contrast and adds excitement while the circles compliment the space and guide the eye.
The idea of abstracting an element could be cliche if it didn't research properly. Therefore, I designed multiple posters with the same art direction and considered the pro and cons of each poster, which finally led us to a poster that used the grid of a music sheet. And the red dots represent the pattern of conductor hand movement.
Bringing the art direction to digital sites
The soft skills of the design process are critical to me as a designer and when giving up ideas is hard, so I’m here with the team to analyze each direction rationally and help the team push the project forward.
‍
For the first line of exploration, I went back and revisited our abstraction quality and looked at some more inspiration. Since the team had an idea of abstracting musical elements to tie back into Jazzdor without becoming cliché, I built this art direction that focused on a minimalist aesthetic and typographically driven content.

With deep research from hoverstate, Behance, and brutalist websites, I gathered lots of inspiration from different designers. I designed different looks of website mockups from interface to interactions, and all these works can’t be without the help from my team.

Appreciating the dedication and craftsmanship of Jazzdor musicians as well as providing them with support.
Again, the lateral process was the key. The team measured each direction of the website and decided the most promising direction to pursue.
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The final website focuses on a post-event content strategy about musicians frequently affiliated with Jazzdor and Jazzdor communities. The primary target audience is previous Jazzdor attendees and new attendees looking for inspiring musicians.

Content highlighted includes performing artists, their works, including music pieces and albums, and Jazzdor partners and communities.I also created a new art direction for the final websites based on the experiments from the three directions.

With a typographic-driven approach, the thin type treatment, clear grid structure, and spacious layout all contribute to creating a sense of lightness and simplicity.
We wanted to explore the idea of the craftsmanship that a musician has to engage with to create the perfect composition. The mouse drawing interaction allows people to take a tiny step in the artist’s shoes.
This is then paired with smooth hover interactions that allow users to navigate the microsite easily. The clean and typographic-driven interface allows for both great expression and easy way finding.
Key Takeaways
Design thinking is about lateral process

The designer’s thinking process shouldn’t be linear, where we often taught by using IDEO’s human-centred design process. The idea is not wrong, but it is too idealistic. When I brought open-ended questions in my process, there was no difference between good or wrong answers. It is about which answer can provide a more promising direction and what I can learn from other left-out answers. The lateral thinking process allows me to take different approaches and make design decisions to bring the most promising outcome.
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Make decision and let the thing go
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When moving forward through my design process, many good ideas are being left out. I believe those ideas were no longer essential to the project when pushing the progress further. It was hard to make decisions, but making decisions and giving up on ideas is necessary to move the project forward. It was not just giving up ideas by using my perception; it was about bringing quality decisions when valuing the trade-offs in each possible direction.
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