NICOLE PLANTE
Comic-Con is an internationally renown convention held every year in San Diego, California (my hometown). My task: create a branding strategy for an existing festival or event.
A branding project for school and just a passion project to satisfy my nerdy self.
Deliverables: posters, mailers, badges, and mobile app.
Who is the target audience?
What are their spending powers?
How can we understand who will be using the app?
Before designing the assets, you gotta do some research.
I like to launch most of my projects understanding 1. What's the competition? What are the competitors doing? and 2. Who are we designing for?
I landed on working with bold, bright, primary colors and iconic images. Reasons? I want it to be like an old school comic books and make the posters recognizable from afar.
For the brand, I went through several (pretty awful) iterations and landed on the chat bubble with different comic elements in the logotype.
All in all, I like the result but I'd make the subtext a bit larger and include a custom, all-access pass for VIPs.
Also, it might be a good touch to put in a picture instead of the avatar placeholder to show how it would look with an actual photo.
One of the problems that I wanted to tackle was making access levels immediately recognizable. Also, since the convention is across multiple days, the P is premier night, 1-4 are the other nights. The blacked out day represents their day for access.
I made about four different flyers and this one below is my favorite. I combined halftone dot art with the same bold silhouette, in this case, a skyline fit for Gotham.
It's such an opportunity for Comic-Con to leverage their buying power with their users and provide an easy way for them to access the events and plan their days.
So, I chose to have a linear toggle for days, ways for users to find locations, and purchase merch online.
After talking to some users, they appreciated having navigation or scheduling information in their pocket.
I put the social media links on the nav bar to emphasize it like a website but I'd like to place it a bit more elegantly. While I chose to go black and yellow as the major colors (which correlate to some two-color flyers I made as well) I'd like to play with a different light color scheme as well.
When I look back on the project, I'm pretty pleased with the outward branding, but I would like to gather it all into a design system deliverable as well, which is important for a branding revamp.
© 2023 Nicole Plante