Brand discovery for an AR/VR application for the hearing impaired
Expanding the Learning Experience of ASL
Lingua is a brand discovery project for a client in the American Sign Language learning platform. The main tasks were to discover, expand and elaborate on the brand identity of this newly founded company.
Branding was created and evolved to support the look and feel of the companies goals. We kept in mind the mission, their goals and to ease the learning process for the users.
I was the lead designer and was in full control of design decisions as the project progressed.
Purpose
This was an assignment that was self motivated and a complete concept for a faux company. The intent of the project was the expand my skills as a graphic designer and to implement the brand into real world assets.
It started with a simple gesture and expanding this easily recognized gesture to a global brand.
Genre
We were open to any type of company that we wanted to cater to. With exposure increasing to those with communication disabilities, Lingua was designed and developed to represent a solution to those challenges and how we can ease their brand into the world.
Parents with children that are deaf or mute need a more efficient and effective program that will assist them in learning American Sign Language.
Lingua will be at the forefront creating solutions to meet these needs. This non-profit organization will assist parents and other individuals using an array of currently available technology to help curve the learning process.
Kick off
After deciding that this was the problem we were going to solve, we dove into the research of how many people, in the United States in particular, live with some form of hearing loss. We were very surprised by the numbers.
This gave us greater motivation to help those find another solution that could benefit them that the old methods could not. Expanding on the VR/AR development that has taken place in recent years, this was the method we were going to educate these individuals on.
The application had to serve two users: The parents and guardians of children with hearing disabilities and the children themselves.
With many other tools in the market that serve this purpose, our next step was to look at our future competitors and evaluate what they do right and more importantly, what they are doing wrong or how they better use newer technology.
The Competitors
We wanted to see what was out there already and take some points of what they were doing right and what they could improve on. From this baseline assessment, we could get a feel for our users, what they were looking for and what they could see in the future.
YouTube
YouTube is a great source of information for millions worldwide. A number of popular channels offer detailed courses that are free, and have great benefits to those using them today.
The one lacking aspect is the immersion that Lingua can offer. We will immerse our users to a friendly and self-paced program that can cater to a number of different backgrounds.
We searched across multiple channels and the one with the most views was from a professor named Dr. Bill Vicars. His lessons are thorough and his content covers hundreds of hours. He currently stands at over 200k subscribers.
Even with Dr. Vicars success, the platform he is hosted on doesn’t immerse the viewer completely. There are many other outside factors that should be considered when learning a new language, especially if our target audience is in their early-to-mid 30’s.
Web Services
The internet is the most influential piece of technology and has a number of resources at our dispossal. It is the greatest database ever formed and holds a number of services for our audience.
ASL Pro
A free dictionary of Sign Symbols and pattern courses that our audience can take advantage of, but offers no real-world scenarios that we can provide.
The immersion factor we can provide will guide our users from amateur to a very fluent individual.
ASL Pro, as informative as it is, isn’t up to current technology and design standards. Lingua would provide a more visual provoking and welcoming environment for our users. We would guide them to the proper resources without all the clutter of an old templated web page.
Mobile Apps
We took a look at ASL Coach, a basic approach with appropriate images to show hand symbols. It offers the foundation to start ASL, but lacks the deeper learning we are striving for.
ASL is more than hand signs and we require a full arm and posture alignment to fully understand the language.
ASL Coach is a good entry level education tool, but lacks a number of possibilities that it could deliver. We explored the free application and found its library very limited and sentence creation lacking. The lack of emotion and story telling for the user to grasp is also lacking from our perspective.
Our Direction
After analyzing the competition, we saw that the industry was dated and needed a refreshing and modern feel. From this point, we wanted to ensure that the brand could be robust enough to stand with other well known brands.
Persona
We needed to build the brand around a face that we could relate to and to emphatize with. I wanted him to be friendly, welcoming and thoughtful person. Some of my key notes:
He is male
He lived in a large metro city
He would be married
He would have a child with a hearing disability
He was generous and loving
He could afford new technology
He was in the age between late 20’s and early 30’s
From this we created Dave.
Personality
Dave is timid, reserved, but has a big heart. He cares very deeply for his family and especially his young child. He will do anything to help him better understand him and vice versa. He works a blue collar job and is considered apart of the middle class.
Creating Dave
Going back to our original data collection, we found that 2 to 3 children out of 1000, are born with some form of hearing loss. Out of all those children that do have hearing loss, 90% of them are born with parents that both hear and that have no history of hearing impairment.
The troulbe doesn’t stop at child birth as more than 15% of children with no birth defects to hearing will have their hearing deminish into adulthood.
Keeping this in mind, we built a persona to aim our design approach.
In an article studying hearing loss, Declining Prevalence of Hearing Loss in US Adults Aged 20 to 69 Years, three medical professional wanted to discover the rate of hearing loss in adults. They found that the greatest groups of hearing loss came from non-hispanic white males in the 20-69 age group; the most in the much later years.
Background
Taking what we found in our research, we decided that a metropolitan with a high population is where Lingua should launch its Beta Program. We could have our users come in for a guided experience and a base of operations with ease to transportation and logistics.
We ran a search for densest population and found that New York City was the prime candidate, followed by Los Angeles and Chicago. We would cater to non-hispanic whites since they had the greatest loss of hearing of any group and it so happens New York City also has the largest number of non-hispanic whites.
Out of 8.6 million residents living in New York City, roughly 200,000 of them would face some kind of hearing loss and that number would only grow as the city expanded. With a large number of resources available to New York, this would be where our main persona would live.
The Mark
This is where the base of the brand identity began. All of our design decisions would go into supporting the mark.
Logo
With any brand, a mark needed to be designed that can represent the company. It needed to hold the same values as the company would adopt and be easily recognizable. Lingua will be at the fore front of this technology and its logo should stand with it.
It’s OK
I did a number of word explorations, use and meanings and came to the conclusion of visual and hearing recognition. There needed to be a word that can be easily signed and easily spoken and both had to be easily recognized.
The word “OK” is the most used and most accepted word in the world and this is where I started the low-level exploration. This posed a number of questions:
How would we represent this?
What logo type are we pushing?
Was there already a brand using OK as a logo?
What does our competition do?
What will separate us from them?
Exploring more into the ASL forms, we discovered that the sign “OK” was what everyone, hearing loss or not, already adopted. Due to media exposure and culture, everyone already had been signing it without even knowing it.
This was where I would explore and lean on with the logo.
Inspiration
Taking the sign for OK was where we leapt from, but it needed a flat form. We wanted a 3D final form, but still needed to be flat if decisions were changed later. Going back to early history and some of the most known shapes, we looked at Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Consisting of flat basic shapes, the ancient Egyptians created a full catalog of figures that represented what ASL users do today. We thought this was a great pairing and connection of what Lingua was striving for.
Exploration
The form factor began with simple shapes with 4 base silhouettes. A large circle took place for the palm and the second would represent the fingers. Combined, we would aim to create the OK hand sign.
Out of the 4 grew two with more depth added. The original forms would remain and would build on top of them, editing as we moved along.
The left group was decided to move forward and greater detail was added. To keep with the 3D shape of hands, we wanted the logo to not be 2D and added shading and gradients.
After the final choice was selected, we wanted it be as strong as a iconic mark and a combination mark with an accompanying type face. We decided this because we wanted to be in full control of the logo, in its infinitely possible location and uses.
We added a brief measurement of our target goals on the logo. It was important to understand how it would be contained in an application sense, in case we decided to go mobile and for web uses.
Color
With the logo complete, the color was the next step to discover. The emotion of the company will be placed on this decision. Color brings many emotions into everything and can change the personality instantly just by changing its hue.
Value
The primary color was the dark green with a dodge of blue. This colored, as you’ve seen, has traversed its way into the logo and into other primary branding opportunities.
The Final Mark
The combination of shapes and colors
Going back to our previous decision on shape, we needed to trace and recreate the mark in a digital space. From here, we moved onto the three shapes that were created in the exploration and transferred them using Adobe Illustrator. From these three vectors, skewed, transformed, and elogated to test and further explore the final mark.
Color Pairings
Adding color to the vector gave us more exploration options and what would take precedence. We placed the mark purposely on an application type button to help ease use for later. The logo needed to work in small formats as well as large.
The Final Logo
The mark was decided and finalized, but there needed to be a use case if it needed to be paired with type. This combination mark was created from a base font familty and skewed, distorted and vectored to present a respected and easily legible font-family.
Here we have the horizontal and vertical format.
Typography
Legibility and readability were very thoughtfully considered. The font needed to be easily readable on multiple formats and uses. I wanted something modern and something that had many fall backs in case an edge case would present itself.
Brand Use
Any logo should be respected. I decided to provide a set of rules and measurements for any future use of the marks and brand. The following will show the proper use and misuse of our brand.
Please Do
The Lingua logo should be well respected, as its mission is very valuable to the people behind it. We offer these rules as guidelines for those seeking to represent our company on their platforms and uses.
The aspect ratio of each shape should be adhered to and the logo provided adequate padding for breathing room.
Please Don’t
These are some of the examples of which you should not portray the Lingua OK mark.
A. Do not change the color of the base hue
B. Do not remove the gradient fill
C. Do not skew the shape whatsoever
D. Do not rotate the position of the fingers
E. Do not rotate the body
F. Do not distort the fingers
G. Do not change the indent of the palm
H. Do not change the value of the gradient
These are all considered false marks and should be removed immediately.
Brand usage
To test the brand against others, we placed it along a number of mockups. These are a few collections of the mockups and how the brand is properly used.
Mobile
To test the logo, we placed it against other established marks. For the mobile example, we put it in an Android OS.
This test was to determine if the logo could stand apart and be as unique as its mission and products.
Banners
Various testing mockups we’re also incorporated to test the branding. Here we can see a hanging placard with one of our marketing taglines. Against a white background, the logo stands out and the shade of our cyan creates trust and is eye catching.
Advertising
Another test example from the marketing campaigns that were assembled. This targeting the parents that do not understand if a child is having a hard time hearing.
Even against a mid range hue, the logo still accomplishes what it is set to do: create an eye catching, easily recognizble mark that is parellel with the companies values.
Street recognition
The real test of the brand was behind a storyboard based user test. I took a number of users and did a small presentation of a street marketing interaction.
Marketing IRL
One of the first exposures of Lingua will be shown in a traditional marketing campaign where foot and vehicle traffic are the heaviest.
In an open environment, I thought a simple approach would be best and in the form of a game is how the users would interact. The game is speaking to another individual without the use of sound. Placed between two panes of glass, the users would face each other and do simple sentences Lingua would provide.
This simple test would expose how difficult it is to sign and give further exposure to hearing impairment and how dependent we really are to hearing. This simple approach would be one of the first instances of the Lingua brand and to generate social media buzz that would hopefully follow after.
In conclusion
Lingua was a project I really put effort in. I always think of ways of how design can help people and how that empathy can help me grow and help the project.
Lingua was completed in roughly six weeks and overall it was a success with my peers and with the users that tested it. The concept of the logo was the highlight of the brand discovery process and I really enjoyed graphically enhancing the sign word “OK”. It unique, recognizable and can be quickly placed in multiple mediums.
What I would change
Gradients are heavily involved in the look and feel of the mark and with any gradient shape, its difficult to place them on different colored backgrounds. The mark would be lost on black and I have to create a new set of brand rules to support an all white logo.
This could be done quickly, but at the time, it wasn’t considered. There should have been more use cases with different background, textures, and more product mediums.
If I had more time to discover if the rules that I placed were strong, there would be more mockups, prints and electronic ad space testing.
Final words
Overall, I am very happy of how this brand exercise came to be. There are a few things I would change, but nothing that couldn’t be covered in a few days. The brand can stand proudly with any other in the field.
I hope you’ve enjoyed your time with this discovery and I hope it inspires you to draft, design and test your own brand projects.
