Brainstorming and Branding: Creating an Identity

I was thrilled with how our focus group at Google went. Our talented participants were really enthusiastic about our concept and gave us lots of fantastic ideas. We were happy to hear how useful they’d find a web series giving advice on the many ways to get into STEM careers, and we felt inspired to take on the responsibility to help them and others like them. The buzz was infectious so it was easy to keep the momentum going and take the next steps to form our YouTube channel. We needed a name. It was time to carefully craft our brand and passionately push it into the world.
Informative, collaborative and supportive.
You won’t be surprised to hear that name discussions occurred over sushi; soft crab dragon rolls to be precise (please see previous post if this sentence confuses you). We came up with a series of terrible puns, strenuous alliterations and even words we deemed ‘cool’ but that had zero connection to our mission; we were stuck. Four pieces of nigiri later and we decided that we were trying to be too clever. We took it back to basics and thought solely of our mission statement and about the atmosphere we wanted to create; informative, collaborative and supportive.
As Jenny picked up the last maki the word ‘sofa’ entered the mix. In seconds ‘The STEM Sofa’ had got us both excited. ‘Sofa’ implies the informality of the channel and gives a feeling of togetherness that is really important to us. It also demonstrates the interview style of the episodes, portrays a sense of warmth and helpfully begins with ‘s’ to make the name catchy.

The next day I woke up early to design the logo. As a designer logo design is something I have battled with on many an occasion. It is not the quick, simple process you think it’s going to be. But this time was different. The graphic came to me pretty instantly and I sketched it out in minutes. The strong shapes and block colour convey the strength and potential of our viewers and the impact they can have on the world. Its unsymmetrical appearance represents the widely different, zigzag paths we all take to get where we want.
Logo created, social media set up — it’s time to get filming. Finally.
