Making the brand

With a smile on her face, Rose Parsad, owner of the Center of Healing and Rejuvenation, sat patiently and with an air of excitement inside the Art Building Monday evening.

She watched as seven students gave presentations that could revitalize how people view her business. The presentations created a new brand identity for her business, including all-new logos and other print media.

Students of Art 321—a required class for all graphic design majors—were requested to develop a brand identity for a specific client. The client base comes from five locally owned small businesses that are a part of Micro Enterprise Services in Oregon (MESO), a nonprofit organization providing support for growing businesses.

MESO’s clients offer a wide range of services from child care facilities to music-publishing service.

Program director of MESO, Nita Shah, said she was “stunned at the work produced” and is grateful for Portland State’s participation.

Selected students from three different Art 321 classes were given the opportunity to pitch their ideas of a new brand identity to J&Q Barbecue, Jimmy’s Cleaners, The Center of Healing and Rejuvenation, Discovery Gardens and Big Body Towing.

Each client will then choose one of the brand identities created and use it as their new promotional material. The students produced a set of proposed “deliverables,” also known as brand expressions, to make up a full brand identity.

These deliverables included a visual identity, a mark or logo, street presence concepts, ideas for interior design, fliers, stationary, Web sites, advertisement and more.

“The presentations were awesome,” said Sheila Watson, owner of Discover Gardens. “I can’t just choose one of them. I want them all.”

According to Nicole Gerraro, a 27-year-old senior graphic design major, the classes have been working on this material for about three to four weeks, designing and preparing for their graded presentation.

Gerraro said it was her “most nerve-racking experience yet” within the program. But grades alone are not what this whole program is about.

“Through supporting and strengthening our local micro businesses, we support and strengthen our community,” said professor Liz Charman.

Not only the community benefits from this experience, but each individual student in the class does too.

“The students gain experience and confidence. [They] benefit from solving a large-scale visual communication problem. That addresses branding and critical promotion needs that include very specific constraints,” Charman said.

Charman added that those constraints are determined by the realities of each business, including their situation and budget. She also said the class learned how design thinking can affect a local micro business’s bottom line.

As for Gerraro, she hopes to become a designer for Nike and prefers package design. Even so, she said she enjoyed the project, which has the potential to not only help students, but make a difference in the lives of business owners as well.

“The project was a huge benefit for us and we got to experience a taste of the real world. In the future I would only have two days instead of three weeks to prepare,” she said. “It has been really fun.”