Logo and Website for a unique and playful Design Agency

At FH Joanneum one of the main objectives during the 4th semester is to found a “virtual“ Design-Agency. To do so we gathered up in small groups and began thinking about the rough direction in which we wanted to head.

The initial team-building session went pretty quickly as we all already knew with whom we wanted to work with. Our team consisted of 6 people, namely Barbara Gundl, Jakob Listabarth, Lukas Kollmann, Thomas Mirnig, Felix Pichler (Make sure to check out their portfolios too!) and myself. As our skill-set was very wide we decided to focus on Corporate- and Webdesign. We all knew our strengths , so it was kind of a no-brainer to decide who was responsible for what.

First things first

Within the first few weeks we had to plan the strategy and other business related things e.g. finding a target group, financial planning and of course the Corporate Identity of our company. These decisions formed a solid base for the future projects we wanted to tackle.

Given the fact that we were a homogeneous bunch of creative and funny people, we wanted to reflect that with our identity. We came up with the name „Wundertüte“, which is the German translation for “jamboree bag“ or “grab bag“.

>You never know what you’re going to get, but you’ll love it.

Individual solutions and concepts for every client was our premise. Combined with our mission statement “We make Ideas visible“, we made sure that our clients would get what they wanted, even if they didn’t exactly know what they were looking for.

So there we were, Wundertüte, a collective of young and aspiring designers just waiting to get our hands on anything related to Branding in combination with Webdesign and Development.

Establishing a design system

The next step was to come up with a Corporate Design. We all started thinking of different combinations of colors and typography that would reflect the core values of our brand. After a few design iterations based on feedback from all of our Professors at University we found the perfect Identity for us as a company.

The Logo

My personal take on the Logo was to create a strong mark that would work on its own. I decided to use a slightly modified version of the font “Brandon Grotesque Bold”. Its modern character and the small x-height helped creating a distinguished logo mark. It acts as a contrast to our fun and playful nature by not showing what we are all about at first sight. Just how a Wundertüte works in real life.

The colors

We chose two shades of blue for our main colors, appropriately named Wunderblau and Wunderhellblau. Blue was our choice because it stands, again in contrast to our playful nature, for calmness but also for trust and friendship and the slight turquoise tint represents communication. The Wunderblau is used as our main color whereas the Wunderhellblau acts as an accent-color.

We also developed a striped pattern to serve as a background for some of our stationary e.g. Business Cards and Letterhead.

Confetti was chosen to accompany our fun nature and to loosen up the contrasts created by the clean type and the calm colors.

The Website

After we had all settled for our Corporate Design it was much easier to put together a Corporate Website according to our own Design-Manual. My Job was to design and develop the Website with the help of Felix and Thomas (the three of us formed the infamous Team-Web of Wundertüte).

We used Wordpress as a Content Management System and decided to build a responsive and retina-ready Site. The use of large images and minimal typography set focus on the content and by putting everything onto one page we eliminated the need for unnecessary hierarchical elements. You can see the site live right here.

The Project

The biggest project on which we were working during the semester was a website for the creative co-working space Sechserhaus in Graz. You can check out the live Website right here and/or read a more detailed case study about the creation process.

Summing up

Working together with a bunch of creative people from different fields of design definitely helped me gain invaluable experience concerning working in an interdisciplinary design team. We all could share our expertise and learn from each other. The overlap of our mixed skills made it possible to let go of old-fashioned design workflows and gave us the opportunity to establish a more modern and fresh approach to Corporate and Web Design. This did not also mean that we were able to build better products but also helped me personally to gain a lot of insight into how to work in a small and flexible team in the design industry.

>We celebrate Ideas. > >We celebrate beautiful things. > >We celebrate the moment.