Developing a Corporate Identity: Österreichische Schülerunion

First of all sorry to all you foreign speakers: All related downloads are in german only, so you might get stuck from a text point of view after the article. Still, you might can grab some of the graphical stuff in the downloads – your decision!

• Very Introductory Rambling
• Who? What? Why?
• The Process
• Basic Decisions
• Colors & Fonts
• Design Approach & Campaign
• Stationery, Tools & Extras
• Conclusion & Downloads

Very introductory rambling

This was my final diploma project at the Advertising Academy Vienna¹, where I studied Graphics Design in an intense 40h/week course for two years. I passed with honours and the project was complimented on being realizable as-is. I’m still quite proud of it and on this page I offer some more insights as well as downloads for interested people and as extra-content for my PDF-Portfolio. Enough of this, let’s get into stuff!

¹Actually every student could do better on the homepage-thing they got, luckily the management has no direct influence on the graphics-department – unluckily the other way round, too

Who?

The project aimed at a non-profit youth organization, namely the “Österreichische Schülerunion” (Austrian Pupils Union). This organization is built of voluntary members, themselves pupils, and organizes almost-free workshops, held by elder honorary members for other pupils. Topics covered by these workshops range from rhetorics and school legislation all the way to things like leadership and how to set up and run a student magazine.

Another huge part of the organization’s purpose is to influence school politics. In Austria there are pupils being elected into a political position and they can force politicians to review school-related laws. And the third part is the representation, where the organization offers law-related help to pupils, e.g. if they are treated wrong by a teacher, if they are having problems with other pupils, whatever comes to mind. It’s a whole bunch of idealistic young people, eager to change something, to improve themselves and to take action.

What?

My self-assigned task was to create a whole Corporate Identity for the organization, starting from the inner core values, covering all aspects (Attitude, Behaviour, Communication and, as the major part, Design).

Why?

I myself have been an active member in this organization for over six years, first as active working functionary, later on as trainer for workshops. From a marketing point of view the society has a huge problem: There’s no Corporate-anything. Some over 30 years ago someone fiddled together some badge-like thing that now is called the logo, defined two fonts (Stempel Schneidler & Square 721)and two colors (a violet around 60/50/0/0 and an orange around 0/60/90/0), both just non-working combinations in the first place. Then there are some more difficulties along the way:

• The functionaries literally change every year
• They are pupils between 15 and 18, so they’re hardly considerable “professionals”
• The organization is setup with 10 parts: one for the country, plus 1 for each of the nine provinces
• Due to the sloppy and bad design-guidelines there’s a lot being designed, every single piece looking different from every other one
• Just have a look at the main website and then click through the individual province pages (the small icons on the top bar) to see the mess

Since I knew the organization from all possible points of view (member, functionary, trainer, “dropout”) by the time of my diploma I thought that’d be the perfect point to try fitting this weirdish animal into a more practically and useful outfit.

Talking Realization

Well, the project would’ve been (and still is) realizable, but due to the nature of the organization there’s always a lack of two things:

1. Money to introduce a new CD and all the along-coming stuff to redo
2. A leadership strong enough to convince everyone to team up for such a big kind of a decision, not to mention the huge change

So the project still exists, ready-to-go, but I doubt will ever be used.

The Process

First thing to do was a theoretical approach: Research. What are youth organizations in the first place? How and why did they emerge? What’s the reason for kids to join, get active, spend their precious time working while they could just hang around? Next step: Analysis. How exactly did the Schülerunion form itself, how about other organizations, who influences the Schülerunion in which way (Stakeholder-Analysis). Then on to the more specific things: Who, exactly, is the target group? What’s the current state of the organization regarding Attitude & Behaviour, and what – taking into account the target group – should be? What specific problems are there that need immediately be taken care of? Which things have to be dealt with over time, and how can those changes be accomplished?

My intense inside-knowledge helped a hell of a lot, and I think the result is pretty much as good as it could be at the time (I gotta say that there’s currently no one else who got to know the organization as good as I did and then decided to go down the professional advertising-marketing road, so that’s ultimately a pretty subjective statement).

The second part then was to bring into form all that thoughts and ideas, writing down what to do, how to achieve it and such (I set up the final presentation as “Dr. K. No”, analyzing a person with an image-problem). And then there was, of course, the handcrafting: All those design elements, choosing a typeface, colors, inventing a new logo, doing the stationery, preparing some templates, … – you know the drill.

Basic decisions

First of all there were some strategic decisions to be made. The organization was called “Österreichische Schülerunion” (Austrian Pupils Union), the provincial organizations according were named “Niederösterreichische Schülerunion” (Lower Austrian Pupils Union), “Wiener Schülerunion” (Viennese Pupils Union) and so forth. From my point of view this is the wrong way. The organization, the main brand, is a nationwide thing, so it shouldn’t be that important which specific “department” addresses you. Therefore I changed all those names to “Schülerunion Österreich”, “Schülerunion Wien”, … – to signal unity and to clearly communicate that all of those organizations are, at their very base, one big, nationwide acting thing.

Furthermore there is the current “claim”, more a tagline: “Aktion – Service – Vertretung” (Action – Service – Representation) with the aim to communicate the three areas the organization split their services up into. I also decided to trash this – for the “consumer” it’s just not relevant which department, which section of the brand he is interacting with, nor is it of any relevance which sections the brand decided to split it’s offers up into. In my opinion a brand should communicate what they do, and how they do it, in a way so it’s relevant to the consumer. I therefore propose the claim “Gemeinsam Verändern.” (change together, not sure if it translates word-by-word, but in german this literally is the way to say “together we change things”).

This is relevant, because all the organization’s members are actually, and by definiton, members of the target group. So “together” doesn’t just mean “we, who we are members of this organization” – but “we, who we are pupils just like you”.

Finally this combination and new name-lineup combines into a beautiful arrangement², supported by a little graphical detail becoming a double-means, where the indication of the exact part of the organization becomes relevant to the “consumer”:

• Schülerunion Österreich / Wien / …
• (Pupils Union Austria / Vienna / …)
• Österreich / Wien / … gemeinsam verändern.
• (Changing Austria / Vienna / … together)

²looking at the logo now I’d work on that spacing … ouch

The Colors

Yah I know, there’s a similarity to T-Mobile there, I’ve heard that a couple thousand times by now. But there’s a certain reason for the color chosen and who is T-Mobile to influence my work on a not-in-any-way related project? Right. So looking back at the old “design” there’s two colors to choose from, orange and violet. Orange is … well, it’s orange, it’s everywhere, it’s “young”, it’s “hip”, it’s 21st century “I’m not sure where I belong, orange will do”, it’s boring and no one cares about anything orange anymore. It’s a faceless color, especially regarding all kinds “young audience”-stuff.

The other choice is violet, a more distinct color. Definitely more distinct in the youth sector. So the choice fell on that, with a little “intensification” – the “brand” needed something strong, something that more looks like action, so the violet turned into a deep purple, still a clear separation from the main “competitor” (which uses a 100% red logo) while still being a backlink to the heavily-used old violet. The supportive color is just a dark grey – one color is enough and makes it easier to recall the “brand”, especially in the way the color is going to be used among all stuff.

On font choice

Finding the right font wasn’t quite easy on this one. There are several requirements to fit: It shouldn’t be a 100% turn-away from the old typograhpy, namely the main font should still be a serif one. There’s still a lot of printed, text-only letters being sent out all the time and it’s also a main difference to the main “competitor” (AKS), who almost exclusively uses sans-serifs. (we’re talking about an organization that needs to save on spendings as much as possible, so if distinction can be supported by type-choice that chance should be used)

On the other hand we’re still talking young people here, so whichever font to be chosen shouldn’t look and/or feel acquainted. Have a look at the Stempel Schneidler – it might seem classy and old-fashioned on the first glance, but going into the details you’ll soon recognize that Mr. Schneidler was quite the visonary guy, as he built into that font a lot of features more typical to SansSerif Linear-Antiquas of the last couple centuries. On the other hand it looks a bit too playful for a serious organization, it has some very “cuddly” details attached to it, as for example with the serifs themselves, who give the typeface an overall “swashy” look, especially as the font size increases.

Reusing one of the two old typefaces was out of the question anyways, also due to the overall design approach that’s being addressed later (we’re getting closer), plus a font that can at least somewhat closely be matched on the web would be nice in times like these, for a client who will take as much an opportunity of doing stuff digital over printed as possible.

The final choice was the ITC Charter for the following reasons:

• Great readability, both on-screen and printed
• Solid typeface, low-res printing, faxing and scanning won’t do it much harm
• Very distinctice characteristics on big font sizes
• Gently “falls back” to a more subtle look & feel in small sizes
• Can be somewhat substituted by good ol’ proven-to-work Georgia on the web
• After some testing around just started to “feel right” for the project

Design Approach

Ok, I think it’s about time to uncover that “design-approach-thing” that I referred to earlier. First of all you have to know that in austria it’s legal to advertise in schools, so there’s all kinds of posters around already (I mention this because this is a pretty new law, about 10 years ago ads in schools were completely forbidden), as is the case in everyday life. And everyone is trying one thing: Catch attention. Talking younger generations probably even more than everyone else (just take in account the heavier media usage, the strange ability to watch MTV and such more than 39 cut sequences – 12 seconds that is, I’d guess – long, you know what I’m talking about).

Now the Schülerunion has to keep some things in mind:

• The organization does serious things
• offers valuable, high-quality services
• has to aquire most of the money from donators and sponsors
• doesn’t want people to physically buy something
• but wants to motivate people to invest their time and effort
• and wants to attract people who are willing to get hands-on to work

Now I don’t think you’ll get those with a fancy looking poster full of flashy buttons within some “party-travel” and “coca-cola” ads, who no doubt will look way more professional and eye-catching. So how do you advertise that? I’d say through provocation and surprise.

The surprise being: No shiny buttons, no flashy images, no colorful artsy-bartsy backgrounds, just good old plain white paper, with the only content being something most posters lack of: Meaningful words. The introductory Image-Campaign is just a white poster, the web address on the bottom left corner, the logo on the bottom right corner and some words. Two of them sticking out, the first and the last – huge typeface, primary (purple) color, provocative statement: “Scool … sucks!”. “You … Ass!”. The smallprint inbetween reveals the real message. “You aren’t happy with how your schedule looks? Your teachers don’t care while you learn stuff years out-of-date? You don’t like that situation? Well, then better try changing things, so get up and move your Ass!”.

Posters like these. They will attract attention. Probably officials are going to remove them, due to offensive language. Perfect! For austria that’d be easily enough to make the front page of at least some of the bigger newspapers. And as long as the inital statement isn’t too vulgary – which “you ass” definitely isn’t – the whole thing won’t turn into a backdraft. If not they’ll at least get people talking. Probably some will want those posters. Others might be shocked. But many will have a look at that website. And I’m pretty sure that it would be a significant boost of brand recognition. It’d be a clear signal that those guys are serious about what they are saying, by promoting their “mission” of “pushing the boundaries” by actually pushing those boundaries.

Now this is the initial campaign and the posters. It’s easier to project that design approach to everything else printed, and the big advantage is: It doesn’t try to look cool, or trendy. There are probably other T-Shirts out there being “cooler”, but how many of them can you proudly wear to show that you’re a member of something serious, something important to you and others?

A lot of those young people start to feel important – for good or ill – when contributing to the organization. They want others to think that what they do is serious, makes sense and actually can change something, which – by the way – is in fact true. A serious outfit (and I’m not talking T-Shirts anymore) compliments all those aspects and also makes a way better impression on potential sponsors than clumsy trendy youth-style stuff.

Hm I kinda digressed a bit there, lots of enthusiasm in those little details, sorry. Short: It’s a good and distinctive thing to have a clean, light and “grown-up” look, through which young, strong and provocative messages can be communicated. It’s all about the content, so why not grant it the popularity it deserves?

Stationery & Tools

Pulling all that off to the usual stationery and merchandise-stuff was the easier, but work-intense part of the whle thing. All kinds of available envelope-formats, fax-templates, letter-templates, business card templates, the basic 10 logo variations, … – it’s click & rearrange, but it’s gotta be done. Plus it’s a serious test how strong your toolbox is. If you struggle every now and then and get in trouble applying your design elements you might better reconsider earlier decisions, because in the future you’re more likely faced with more and more things to apply your design to.

Extras

As mentioned above the organization has a professionality-problem, for obvious and unavoidable reasons. So what now? The answer: Templates, strong guidelines, supportive tools. In this case the Templates-set goes from the Business-Cards, includes posters, greeting cards, basic return-cards up to grids & rules on how to fit certain elements into them on one- and multiple-sided documents. The target is to provide a toolbox as strong a basis as possible, and as flexible a basis as someone needs it. There’s going to be huge “individualism”-projects happen, but if the toolbox is persistent enough it will eventually stick around as the starting point, thus keeping some recognizable elements around – hopefully enough.

Conclusion

After all this is an experiment. Even if it would be introduced, the organization would support it from the core and invent the whole thing within one year, there’s still the fact that the next year a new team will be there. If that team doesn’t decide to carry things on everything will break down again and the Schülerunion will return to where it’s been at before: A grown, non-corporate, non-strategic, non-persistent and non-recognizable, yearly changing identity.

Donwloads

• Presentation (german only)
• Presentation Handout (german only)
• Design-Guide (german only)
• Theroetical Part (german only)