Eight weeks, four real deliverables. Students don't just learn theory — they design a logo, a visiting card, a certificate and an advertisement, studying real brand work before making their own.
01 · Roadmap
Each week builds a skill the following week's practical project depends on.
Grid, balance, contrast, hierarchy, and building a CMYK/RGB swatch board.
Type anatomy, pairing display and body faces, kerning and leading by hand.
Studying iconic marks, then designing an original logo for a fictional brand.
Applying the week‑3 logo to a print‑ready, double‑sided business card.
Building a small icon set in the brand's style for later projects.
A formal award layout — border, seal, signature lines — for print.
A single promotional piece that sells one idea in three seconds.
Assembling everything into one style guide, plus final class critique.
02 · Hands‑On Work
Real brand examples students study before designing their own version.
images/ folder next to this HTML file
(e.g. images/logo-adidas.jpg). Drop your own JPG/PNG files in with matching names
and they'll appear automatically — until then, each tile shows a placeholder with the expected filename.
Before sketching their own mark, students analyze how famous logos use shape, color and negative space to stay recognizable at any size. Gallery below is a true masonry layout — once real images are added, each tile sizes to that image's actual dimensions instead of being cropped into a fixed box.
Assignment: design an original mark + wordmark for a fictional brand of your choice. Deliver three thumbnail concepts, then refine one into a final lockup with a monogram‑only variant for small sizes.
Reference cards across styles — corporate, creative, minimal, luxury — show how the same information can feel completely different depending on layout and material.
Assignment: extend your week‑3 logo onto a double‑sided visiting card — a bold front carrying the mark, and a clean back with name, title and contact details. Must include bleed, trim and safe‑area guides.
Formal layouts have their own rules — borders, seals and signature lines — different from the free‑form logo and ad work earlier in the course.
Assignment: design a formal award certificate using the icon set from week 5 for its seal or ornament. Must work in both portrait and landscape, and print cleanly in black‑and‑white as a fallback.
Studying ads from major brands and local sale posters side by side shows how the same "sell one idea fast" principle scales from a billboard to a phone screen.
Assignment: design one advertisement — print poster or square social ad — for your fictional brand. It must sell a single idea (a sale, an event, a launch) and read clearly in under three seconds.