Spring 2018

At the beginning of the semester we worked to develop an understanding of what the Werth Institute is and what exactly it was that we were going to provide our client with. After deciding that we would create a logo, brand guidelines, social media guide, brand identity and a PowerPoint template for the Werth institute we began working on logo designs. We all collectively worked on various logo ideas and then presented them to the client. Once the logo options were narrowed down we were then able to delegate tasks for each of us to work on. While we each had our own assignments of things to do we collaborated on ideas and offered one another input and feedback.

One specific part of our final deliverable that we all worked on together was creating a tagline. Some difficulties that we faced throughout our work for The Werth Institute was deciphering what exactly it is and what they are offering to students here at UConn. Since this institute is new and we have not personally experienced it yet we looked at what other prestigious universities are doing to market and build a brand for their own entrepreneurship and innovation institutes. After giving our final deliverable we felt that we successfully completed what they had asked us to, however the client did have a few critiques so we needed to make a few final adjustments before sending over our final project.

Our client came to us with the problem of branding and brand identity. They were a new entity and they were starting from scratch in terms of who they were and what they wanted to look like. They wanted us to come up with a vision for the Peter J. Werth Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. This included many things like a logo that fit together well with the UConn logo and different color themes. They wanted a branding style sheet to guide the institute in the future and powerpoint template for them to use when giving presentations about the institute. Social media was also important to them, so they wanted different social media tags and hashtags to use to promote themselves. Lastly, they wanted taglines or a mission statement for the Werth institute to catch people attention. A main concern that they had was students calling it the “Werth Institute” and not shortening the name to anything.

After our first meeting with our client Cathy Rocha on February 1st, we were able to gain a better understanding of the project objectives and from there, we made a structured plan to follow as a team. For our first task (creating the logo) we worked individually and drafted ideas of our own in which we visioned for the logo. We then shared them with each other and collaborated off each other’s ideas. We narrowed down our options, and presented them to our client during a meeting on February 27th. We learned that our client liked the logos made by Anna which included the oak leaves. From here, we were able to better assign roles for the remaining tasks. Anna worked on adjusting the logos based on our feedback, while the rest of the team collaboratively worked on creating a tagline for the Werth Institute, which was narrowed down and concluded by Allison. Once the logo was finalized, Anna put together a style guide. Ming focused on creating a social media plan including proposed hashtags and advise on when to post content. Hailee and Diana focused on creating the brand identity, while Meagan created the powerpoint template. However, throughout the entire project we all worked together and shared our thoughts and ideas on each individual task, ensuring our team had equal input and consisted of collaborative concepts.

After figuring out what exactly our client needed from us, we worked collaboratively to brainstorm rough ideas for logos and other design elements such as color palette and font choices. We each made rough sketches of logos which we then narrowed down and recreated digitally. Once first drafts of a logo were done, we worked individually on other things needed by the client such as taglines, brand identity, social media guide, etc. We communicated with one another about the progress of our specific task throughout the semester to ensure everything was being done properly and efficiently. This made it easier to get everything done by our deadline and ensure everything was consistent.

During this process we encountered a few obstacles. One of the biggest ones was client communication. We would have liked to have met with our client at least one other time during the semester to get feedback but they were unable to do so. There were also multiple occasions that our client did not respond to our emails or took a very long time to do so. We dealt with this by giving them multiple options to choose from for everything we created which minimized the amount of back and forth between ourselves and the client.

Another issue we had in the beginning was confusion on what “The Werth Institute” was. They are a relatively new program with no brand identity which is what they needed our help for. We solved this issue by communicating with the client and researching what The Werth Institute was, what they are trying to accomplish, and what similar institutes at other universities have done. At the end of the semester, our client was satisfied with our final deliverable with only a few minor adjustments needed.

Overall the team did a great job at working together, communicating and making sure that the work was split up in a fair way that allowed each of us to create a critical piece of the project. The project provided us with several learning opportunities when it came to client feedback, logo creating, logo presentation and taglines. Each member brought new ideas to the table during our class sessions and we were able to build off of each others ideas. I think that it took us a little while to fully understand the client and the brand that we were helping create an identity for. Once we had more of a grasp on the goal we were able to work quickly to come up with a final deliverable. If anything could have been done better, it would have been our timing for the final meeting. Perhaps if we had been able to move the final client meeting up a week or two we would have felt less rushed to make the last minute changes that were needed according to the client feedback.

Project Team
Allison Betlej
Diana Francis
Anna Jannott
Ming Montgomery
Hailee Parenteau
Meagan Ryley