As a Senior Designer at KQED I was tasked with managing the lifecycle of a rebrand for KQED Education. This was a complex task, as “KQED Education” was itself not a brand; rather, the project involved designing a system that would visually unify a handful of evolving programs and products that existed in a complex ecosystem of varying formats, audiences, use cases, and intent. The goal was to establish a cohesive look and feel that was unique, flexible, and leverage the equity of the KQED brand within the Bay Area education community.

Limitations and challenges

This project was constrained by a mess of tight timelines and evolving needs, as the entities that fell within this rebrand were in varying stages of development. The “what” of the rebrand was an incomplete picture, which left a lot of guesswork when it came to mapping out what the facets of the system would be. We also lacked resources for audience research and testing, so the design process was driven by a dismantling and reconfiguring of existing systems, as well as close collaboration with KQED Education partners, who had a deep investment in the members of the community that these programs reached, and were tapped into their general preferences and behaviors.

Another major limitation that drove the outcome was that we were not starting from scratch. A stand-alone website had just been developed for Youth Media Challenge (YMC) that was driven by a product-centered design system with a considered look and feel. The website was in the final stages of development, so the new Education brand system would need to strategically incorporate the recent branding work that the product team developed for the website. We also had to consider maintaining cohesion with the KQED brand.

Logos

The first step in unifying the entities within the brand was to design a KQED branded lockup treatment which could be applied to all of the programs and products. After conducting an audit and study of the existing KQED sub brand ecosystem and expansive explorations of different expressions within the KQED brand fonts, we landed on a treatment that championed legibility and felt appropriate for both youth and adult audiences.

Colors and graphics

Color strategy and graphic motif system were developed more or less in tandem with our deep dive into the architecture of the brand. Working closely with Education partners, we sought to understand what each entity was, how it sat in relation to other entities, and who the audience / participation group was. We needed to understand what united these disparate but overlapping programs and products, and identify the most salient differentiators (i.e., Youth Media Challenge needed to have a certain cool factor to appeal to youth, while KQED Teach needed to be branded more closely to the general KQED brand to leverage the brand recognition among adults).

We decided to assign color palettes for specific audience groups that would overlap across the entities, rather than developing five distinct palettes. Building off of the color palette newly designed for the Youth Media Challenge website and leveraging existing KQED colors, we were able to develop a palette that had continuity and flexibility. Because of the scrappy nature of the project, we did a fair amount of guesswork when it came to selecting new colors, and would tweak them throughout the first two years of implementation.

In designing the Youth Media Challenge website, our product team established an image treatment that visualized the idea that the program opened up pathways for students. This theme -- “pathways” — resonated well across internal teams, so we used as a starting point this from which to build a larger graphic system for the rebrand. We were able to make sense of how to visualize each program using the same metaphor, and designed different variations of “pathways” for each entity.