Work-Shop Design Studio

Olin College Shop Rebrand

Identity Design, Graphic Design, Content Strategy

2017
Client: Olin College of Engineering
Services: Identity Design, Graphic Design, Content Strategy
Collaborators: Christopher Swift

We worked with faculty, students, and staff at Olin College to design an organizational identity for a new kind of engineering shop space. Over the summer of 2017, a coalition of faculty members, current students, and staff at Olin College of Engineering gathered around a big project: reimagining how their fabrication space operates. The team had a progressive vision that hinged on transforming the Machine Shop form a production-oriented space into an open, friendly, and supportive environment with room for productive failure, play, and collaboration. We partnered with the team to help give a consistent organizational identity to that vision by working together with the team to authentically represent their values, goals, and operations in graphic form. The result is an organizational identity system and collateral set that was collaboratively built from the ground up, co-owned by all, and continues to be used by faculty, staff, and students alike.

THE LOGO SYSTEM

Through conversations with the Olin team, we developed a brand voice for the shop that revolves around an authentic, equitable, and accessible experience for all. The “equity, authenticity, access” mantra steered us in all of our subsequent work. The logo itself tries to subvert the typically precise and analytical representation in engineering drawings by using playful linework and recombinant parts.

The Practice Piece

The form of the logo captures a shop experience shared by all students at Olin. In every student’s first weeks at the school, they are asked to produce a “practice piece” by performing three basic operations on a piece of steel: drilling a hole, making a jigsaw cut, and rounding an edge. Each student’s execution of this piece is unique, but the shared experience of making the part ties the community together. It felt like a perfect microcosm of the organization at large.

Individuality with Unity

The individual elements of the combine in different ways, representing both the individuality of each shop member, and the shared set of values, principles, and practices that they’re committed to as a group.