Uni-Phi Visual Brand
Uni-Phi Project
"Keep your community together"
We designed the Uni-Phi app which helps manage fraternity/sorority house work, events, payments, and more. For the visual identity design our main goal was to reflect the name and to create something that supports the tagline "Keep your community together", as well as friendship, unity, philanthropy, etc.
Sketches and doodles
At first we spent approximately 16 hrs sketching our ideas on paper. Every day we had a short follow-up with colleagues to collect some feedback. It took us about 8 hours to polish the graphics in Adobe Illustrator.
We tried different versions of how letters U and P can come together in a simple graphic which is relatable to the values we wanted to communicate: something related to the Greek life, crest as a symbol of honor, community, etc.
... and then we found the right direction
We finally settled on this sketch, because it entailed everything we wanted to communicate out to the world. It is simple and solid as a graphic asset, it has a heraldic character, but also represents a friendly face. We agreed to develop this sketch as our primary proposition and another typographic one as our backup solution.
The second runner-up
The backup proposal literally described the unifying character of the Uni-Phi brand. Even though the concept was pretty obvious, we loved it's playful character and the various ways it could be applied to different materials.
Scattering the brand around
Instead of just showing the wordmark, we focused more on using the typographic elements to create the brand character.
Customizable colors
We chose dark purple and orange as our primary brand colors, but we also wanted to support all the other color combinations which define different fraternities or sororities.
Main proposal: The happy community
The first proposition enabled us to play around with the design more, but we felt that the next one could definitely suit the client and the product better.
The smiley face carrying the brand
Our second proposition was this simple yet really cool smiley icon, which also represents U and P merged into a face. In this case, we decided to keep the materials as plain as possible to make the smiley more recognizable.
Colorful smileys
Here we also wanted the smiley to support all the other color combinations for fraternities or sororities.
Simple feedback from the client
Sometimes it can be hard to get the right feedback from the client. At times, clients want something completely different. Other times, they want to merge different ideas into one. Sometimes, it's just hard to get useful information from them. When we got this in our inbox along with the screenshot of the second proposition, it made us really happy.
Get the whole picture
Since we were just talking about the brand without showing the actual mobile app and website, here is a short walkthrough to see the branding in action.
Customizable mobile app interface
Every fraternity and sorority house can personalize their app by adding their insignia and colors.
House management
Each fraternity or sorority gets a customized administrative website for managing the house information, events, memberships and other.
House admins can also add their crest and colors to the interface.
Discover the app
To promote the app we also designed a simple landing page with an overview of the product features and their benefits to fraternities and sororities.