During the summer of 2017, I worked as an UX Design Intern at Amoona Studio Inc., for two months. Amoona Studio Inc. is a small web design and graphic design company based in Waterloo, Ontario. While I was there, I designed a branding package for the company and redesigned their website.
Branding packages were entirely new to me and I was delighted at having a new experience to learn from. Since the company was a very small startup, I found myself the only designer—which meant I had to learn everything from scratch and teach myself proper time management.
The logo came first. Personally, I hated designing logos. It used to be one of my weakest abilities, especially since designing a good logo seemed incredibly hard to me. However, at the end of designing the new logo for Amoona Studio Inc., my views on logo design were forever changed.
Before I jump into any new project, I always spend time doing research first. Even though I have designed logos for projects before in classes and felt like I knew the ins and outs of logo design, I knew that I didn’t know everything. Therefore I read articles on Smashing Magazine, looked at inspiration from Pinterest and Google, and immersed myself in the world of logo design.
I was attracted by simplicity, circles, and most of all, the uniqueness of a good logo. I felt like a good logo should be recognizable and easy to spot, but if it looks like every other logo out there then it misses the point of showcasing the uniqueness of the brand.
In my exploration, I focused on those three factors to generate ideas. I explored as many ideas in Adobe Illustrator as possible, taking into consideration that this logo had to be visible and clear no matter how it was presented. One key symbol I created for the Amoona Studio Inc. brand was playing around with a moon symbol, and I added that into some of the explorations of my designs.
I presented my best nine logos, that I thought would work in any setting possible. A clear mistake of mine was forgetting to put in the Amoona Studio Inc. through all of the logos, even though it could have been added without disrupting most of the designs. I offered to go back and fix my mistake, but the director liked the logo with the dark background the best and chose that one.
Next up was exploring colour palettes and fonts. There was no set limit on colour or fonts, so I quickly became overwhelmed by all the possibilities I could use. Colour and font were very important on how the new logo would be perceived. I explored as many options as I could and put all the fonts and colours together in a single document.
The document I created initially was extremely confusing and if I had the chance to change my decision on how I presented this document, I’d split up the colour and font into two documents. Instead, I combined them into a big document with twelve different fonts I thought would suit the brand and 48 different colour palettes. I also missed the fact that the background colour and font colour could be switched around, creating nearly 96 different colour palettes.
However, I learned my lesson when the director expressed confusion at my document. I decided to be more intentional about how I was presenting my design work later on. Then, I was requested to create a logo that had a blue gray and an off white colour combination with the font “Monad”. This became the final logo pairing that would solidify the rebranding package.
The next step was the envelopes and the business cards, which continued the same process as the logo in Adobe Illustrator. I researched for inspiration and educated myself on how to create a good envelope. I also used Canva as inspiration for templates, because I felt this was a much faster way of immediately seeing what I could do with envelopes and what I couldn’t do.
Business cards were somewhat tricky. I had designed my own business cards before, but I had never used Adobe Illustrator to do so. But I taught myself fairly quickly and enjoyed creating a pair of business cards, reflecting the duality of the logos.
Watermarks and letterheads were next, and followed a similar process. I quickly learned that the logo was the hardest and longest part of the branding package, and everything else that came after would be easier. The branding package was finished.
Next came the redesign of the website. To explore and redesign the pages, I used Adobe XD. The same colour palette from the branding package would be used to redesign the pages, so the look itself would be very simple to begin with. Two factors went into the design: simplicity and modernity.
I explored a lot of different homepages and designs, which I then narrowed down to the finals. The user would start at the homepage and be able to access the many sections of the site through the menu or the photos on the homepage. They would be able to view all the projects that the company had worked on in the past. They would also be able to access all the graphic design and web design services that the company offered, with all the information on the page.
Because the internship was so short, I didn’t get to explore the redesign of the website as fully as I’d have liked to. As a result, the designs themselves look very much like a template, a possible redesign option. Had I stayed there longer, I would have fleshed out the design more and added photos and text.
My time at Amoona Studio Inc. was short lived but I fully enjoyed working there and gaining the experience of designing a possible branding package and designing a version of the overall design of the website. I felt like my abilities to teach myself new skills improved immensely and I became more efficient with my own design process within my future projects.