Pitch Week 2023
A Junior Brand Identity design course event where students pitch visual identity systems to a panel of professional designers.
Pitch Week 2023
The Spring of 2023 marked the second annual Pitch Week (PW) within the Junior Brand Identity course. This event serves as a culminating experience within the class for design students to practice pitching a semester-long visual identity system project to a panel of reviewers. Throughout the course, these designers researched, explored, and ideated a strategic and identity-driven visual identity system for an individually-defined design opportunity.
PW 2023’s “clients” consisted of Small Towns throughout the state of South Carolina under the population of 25,000 people with an emphasis in Place Branding. The cities selected included: Abbeville, Beaufort, Camden, Cayce, Cheraw, Conway, Edgefield, Georgetown, Lancaster, McCormick, Pendleton, and Walterboro.
These place branding projects explored the topics of tourism, community development, cultural remembrance, economic development, and governmental design. Each student conducted open-ended exploration, seeking design opportunities and challenges within their assigned communities, determining a research question to ultimately frame their design brief.
The panelists for this year included design professionals, design educators, and senior design students. We’d like to publicly acknowledge and thank each of them for their contribution to our program:
- Cody Bridenbaugh, Owner & Creative Director at Harvest
- Jane Dorn, Design Professional and Design Educator
- Wellington Payne, Partner & Designer at HighFive
- Tim Speaker, Design Educator
- Herb Vincent Peterson, Design Educator
- Caroline Fields, Senior Design Student
- Lindsey Gatlin, Senior Design Student
Evaluations by the panelists covered four items: the overall pitch presentation, design of the slide deck, design of the visual identity system, and the concept of the visual identity system. The highest scores were awarded Gold and Silver awards with an additional Honorable Mention chosen by the panelists. Fellow students within the course also participated in evaluating presentations using a separate rubric offering peer recognition. The following students were recognized for their work:
Isabelle Rigsbee
Camden, SC : Gold Judge’s Award, Peer Review Medalist for Pitch Presentation and Pitch Deck
Julia Hewitt
Beaufort, SC : Silver Judge’s Award
Lindsay Blumenfeld
McCormick, SC : Honorable Mention Judge’s Award
Elise Matthews
Lancaster, SC : Peer Review Medalist for Identity Design
Emily Miller
Cayce, SC : Peer Review Medalist for Identity Concept
Pitch Week 2024’s client theme is “Local Arts Organizations” and is coming soon, but unfortunately not open to the public. Stay tuned for updates via Instagram.
