Ng Humanities House
Brand identity and prototyping for a themed humanities dorm at Stanford.
The brief
Ng Humanities House is an upperclass humanities-themed dorm at Stanford. Ng partners with visiting scholars, the Stanford Humanities Center, and other organizations to foster an appreciation for the humanities on campus.
Timeline
February 2020, 4 weeks
Context
Solo project for design course
Tools
Figma, Adobe Creative Cloud, Procreate
Redefining the visual language
The goal for this redesign is to refresh the identity of the dorm in order to better resonate with residents and visitors, reflecting and establishing the tone of the dorm community. With that in mind, I took inspiration from our unofficial dorm mascot, Howell the owl, and created an informal, sketch-like logo mark that embeds Ng into the design.
Serving the residential community
As part of the refresh, I developed a prototype extending our weekly social calendar email into a mobile app. HappeniNgs consolidates our social calendar, space reservations form, theme workshops, and messaging capabilities to one app, empowering residents to have all the information they need at their fingertips.
Promoting to the global scholar community
As Ng hosts its fair share of visiting humanities scholars, I also developed marketing materials like a website and pamphlet providing a brief history of the dorm, its amenities, and community experience. The cut out vertical strips of the brochure take their cue from the third floor windows that are a focal point of Ng’s architecture.
Key takeaways
One language, many contexts
To ensure that the design system was flexible and easy to learn, I built robust brand guidelines to fit a variety of social and academic contexts.
Co-designing with a community
My experience as a resident at Ng wasn’t the only one; I sought to include the perspectives of residents, RAs, and faculty alike to best reflect the idiosyncrasies of Ng.