Best of Behance: Branding & Illustration

The Industrial Designers Society of America is a long standing organization for designers to get industry news, meet other designers, and most importantly apply for IDEA – The International Design Excellence Awards. These are awarded by designers, for designers. The way we now work across disciplines and across the globe needed to be reflected in IDEA’s brand. It was clear that the organization needed to revisit their identity and voice in order to reflect a collective vision. When I began working on the IDEA identity I wanted to keep the recognition and equity built from their original Memphis inspired lettering, but make it more legible from a distance, celebrate collaboration and identify new ways to flex their visual system. Now IDEA is dramatically different than when it started, but still recognized for its inherent integrity. The magic is in how these shapes or letterforms come together, just like a design solution is a beautiful puzzle, where each piece can stand on its own, but where they work better together. The color scheme is influenced by the Memphis design movement and its wild iterations of cross discipline collaboration. With the ability to separate and combine the colorful letters, the brand identity is also flexible allowing it to change as the design industry changes over time.