Team:Calgary/Branding



OVERVIEW

Oviita's Branding Style Guide

Our branding style guide is a reference tool that explains how we present Oviita to the world, helping us maintain consistency in how we look, feel, and sound. Our brand is the face, personality, and values espoused by Oviita, and our guidebook is an important tool for ensuring that we are recognizable and trustworthy to the public.

When we were meticulously constructing our branding style guide, we applied the same iterative design principles that form our engineering process. We began by first understanding the values and personality that define Oviita, before developing guidelines for our voice identity and visual identity that espouse these values and personality. At every step of the development process, we incorporated feedback from our presentation audiences, wiki users, key stakeholders, and the general public. Continue reading to see the documentation of some of our branding choices and the story behind them.


BRANDING CHOICES

Our Values

By combining what we stand for with the desires of our target audiences, we established four core values that guide all our decision-making and inform the way that we share our project:

SUSTAINABILITY

By ensuring our product is resource-efficient and simple to grow, we envision our product to be a sustainable source of vitamin A, promoting autonomy and self-sufficiency amongst those communities impacted by vitamin A deficiency.

HUMAN-CENTERED AND ITERATIVE DESIGN

By consulting with community stakeholders, experts, and organisations, we strive to utilise a human-centered and iterative design process in order to refine Oviita as an adjunctive solution to vitamin A deficiency.

INTEGRATION

In order to ensure that vitamin A deficient communities are willing to take ownership of cultivating our yeast, Oviita must take into consideration local infrastructure, resources, and sociocultural values. By also ensuring that Oviita can be adapted to the differing realities of various vitamin A deficient regions, we strive to make Oviita capable of integration into any region in need of vitamin A.

HOLISTIC APPROACH

As an adjunctive solution to vitamin A deficiency, we envision Oviita to be a part of the global effort to mitigate vitamin A deficiency. In particular, Oviita aims to take a holistic approach by addressing multiple contributing factors.

Colour Palette

When selecting a colour palette, we wanted the colours to have a connection to our project, and convey universal associations, such as warmth, energy, professionalism, and trustworthiness. The palette shown below was selected as our brand colours, as reflected by their appearance across all of our deliverables.

Figure 1. The colours and hexadecimal codes of our colour palette.

Typography

When coordinating our typography, we wanted fonts with high readability, and that conveyed maturity and sophistication while still being approachable. We also wanted fonts that could be varied in casing, weight, and size in order to convey a hierarchy of information in a clear and visually pleasing manner.

For our page titles and primary headers, we selected Public Sans, a sans serif font to be used only in uppercase. For all other headers and text, we selected the sans serif font Questrial, which can be manipulated in various ways to convey different levels of importance.

Figure 2. Public Sans and Questrial, our two fonts, and the various ways they can be utilized.

Wiki

As one of our most accessible deliverables, the wiki is seen by individuals from a wide variety of backgrounds. For this reason, it was imperative that our wiki was designed in an accessible manner, with intuitive navigation, high understandability, and an engaging voice. These aims are reflected in every wiki decision, from the organization and placement of navigation bars to thoughtful and deliberate word choice.

Project Logo and Name

As the most recognizable facets of our project, we wanted a project logo and name that was both meaningful and memorable. Our name, Oviita, was inspired by the details of our project. The “o” in Oviita originated from the slight orange tint of Y. lipolytica, and the “viita” originated from the Vitamin A basis of our project. Continuing with this same line of inspiration, our logomark consists of small orange circles that represent Y. lipolytica growth. These circles are all interconnected in order to represent the community-based nature of Oviita. Finally, the name Oviita was included beside the logomark in a sleek and visually engaging font to support the recognizability of our logo.

Figure 3. The Oviita logo was designed to be clean and recognizable, with visual ties to the details of our project.


Accessibility

Graphics

We wanted the small details of our project to be understandable and accessible to people of all backgrounds. That’s why we designed engaging and simple graphics, such as the ones below, for use in all our deliverables.

Figure 4. This graphic was used as a visual motif throughout our video presentation and wiki to help audiences understand how all the parts of our project meld together.

Figure 5. This graphic was used to illustrate how our Gibson Assembly process works. Large gene cassettes with multiple transcriptional units are assembled in a "destination vector" containing an antibiotic selection marker. Gibson 1 and Gibson 2 refer to unique homology sequences required for Gibson Assembly.

CONTRIBUTIONS

A Branding How-to

Creating a branding style guide can significantly enhance the appeal of a project by making it engaging, recognizable, and consistent to all audiences. Despite this, branding is often one of the most overlooked aspects of iGEM projects. We understand that developing your own branding style guide can be a daunting task, so we designed a downloadable template to help future iGEM teams get started with their branding process. Check it out below!

Click here: Branding Style Guide How-to