I developed a design narrative by analyzing the client's likes and dislikes via a mood board, which informed several logo concepts. After iterative feedback, I finalized a logo tailored to NIM’s non-profit, governmental, and educational focus and applied it to business cards, letterheads, and invoices. I also created branch-specific logos and designed a versatile invoicing solution that dynamically generates invoices from real-world data, leveraging my computer science background, and transformed custom icons into a "NIM Icons" font in normal and heavy weights. Finally, I produced templates for cover letters, social media posts, and presentation reports.
Final logo with different lockups
Drafts
For ideation, I generated more than 50 rough drafts based on the design brief provided by Heather. Recognizing her likes and dislikes and the ideology of the company, we iterated over multiple designs to make and break new logos until we ended up with the final logo as shown above.
My goal was to incorporate the letters metaphorically into the flaming, revolutionary goals of NIM. Thus, I iterated through different flaming icon variations. I also looked into other ideas of growth, simplicity, and exclamation marks (something Heather loves using)
Reflection
What went well?
Being the sole designer, I had the complete freedom to approach the ideation my way, however it also came with responsibilities of making decision, navigating ambiguity around a new project. The burden of decision was high as compared to a mockup company, I was working with a new company whose logo would be at the forefront of every negotiation. This pushed me to bring elements of ux design, such as competitive analysis and analyzing brands based on mass perception.
Besides these, I had an excellent opportunity to learn about font designing and integrating my computer science background to build dynamic designs
What could be improved?
There were a lot of conflicting areas in design, where one would be fancy design serving the visual purpose, and the other would be a simple design serving the functional purpose dictated by the conservative markets. I would like to tackle this problem with research and by understanding the market better.
What possibilities emerge?
This project opened new directions in terms of design style. It gave me a chance to explore how design and development can be integrated to create a more dynamic design. As such, I would like to bring more pragmatic and functional scripting to visual design. I also loved working in a startup environment, because it gives me a lot of horizontal scale at work and I can work on different areas of design and development, which is a great learning experience.