One of the final design classes offered at Northeastern is Graphic Design Synthesis. The class is described as being the culmination of all your years in school, a time to bring together everything you’ve learned throughout your design classes and co-ops. In this class you are asked to create a complete brand for a UNESCO World Heritage Site. This branding project will include a logo, word mark, letterheads, envelopes, business cards, physical signs, and more.

The very first step in this semester long project was to explore the hundreds of UNESCO World Heritage Sites and start to imagine the different initial visual ideas that are inspired by them. The first two sites that spoke to me were the Historic City Center of Prague and Yosemite National Park. My grandfather grew up in the Czech Republic and went to college in Prague, so exploring that city through design was an exciting opportunity for me. I grew up going into Yosemite National Park every summer as a kid and I personally see it as one of the most magical places on earth.

Focusing on these two very different locations, I jumped right into seeing how these sites could be portrayed. To help with these initial logo sketches we were asked to create a word bank of visual words to inspire us. As I started to sketch, it was clear that I had stronger visual images connected with Yosemite so I continued onto second rounds of sketches for that site.

After pencil sketches, I moved to Illustrator to refine my strongest ideas. Yosemite is home to some of the largest, grandest, most extraordinary natural structures and I wanted to be able to capture that in a simple singular form. Half Dome, one of the parks most recognizable features, has always been the symbol that I, and many others, visualize in my head when I think of the park. Because of this, it was the image I most wanted to capture for the logo. I also took the time to explore other organic shapes and elements that are found within the park like pine cones and waterfalls.

Having such an iconic professor such as Douglass Scott meant we were given incredible guidance and also a sneak peak into some of his personal collection of letterheads. He brought dozens of incredible letterheads into class to help open up our minds for how our brand could be presented on something as functional and physical as a letterhead. As soon as we started to have a logo and word mark for our site, we were asked to immediately see how it looked on a letterhead and business cards. Diving directly into putting my work into context was a scary but helpful step that lead to important changes and edits.

The first mockups of how the logo could look in context forced me to start and make decisions about the brand. I had to start exploring colors and typefaces and textures. We were encouraged to change and edit constantly because nothing was final. Using this type of try-as-you-go process was pragmatic because of the fast paced timeline of the semester but also it challenged me to experiment early and to narrow down design choices along the way.

As I started to have first drafts of each branded item, week by week, I made edits to the brand guideline I was slowly creating. I wanted to create a brand that spoke to the voice of the park and that balanced the history and the present day feeling of the space. Using a natural texture as a main element of the brand was important to me because of the organic and natural essence of the site. I also wanted to make the brand feel approachable and accessible because it is an outdoor space but also understood the formality that comes with being a National Park.

The word mark and logo for this brand was one of the parts I struggled with the most. One of the requirements for the project was to have something copyrightable about the word mark and to have a logo that would stand on its own and lock up well the word mark. I played with many different types of typefaces but landed on a slab serif because I felt like it was a nice balance between the friendly soft nature of a sans serif but did not have the immediate formality that a serif typeface has.

After months of critiques and edits, packing up my life in Boston to finish this project and my last college classes online, the final brand and all the collateral was finished in my childhood bedroom! The final result was a cohesive brand that was successful from ads in magazines to physical signs placed in the actual site.

The logo is strong and approachable with a simple edit to the title of the i in Yosemite with an arrowhead shape to represent the native people that lived in the valley for centuries. The logo uses the o from the name and the familiar shape of Half Dome. The colors were toned down from my initial choices to reflect the calm sense experienced when in Yosemite. The natural texture background paired with the tree ring pattern was used to bring dimension and life to the overall uncluttered calmness of the other brand elements.