Brand Process Intensive

Brand as a process, not a logo

I designed and taught two branding intensives at IIDC in Shanghai, running concurrently. Most branding is taught backward — start with the logo, hope a strategy shows up later. Both of these started from the other end, and both ended the same way: every student left with a full, portfolio-worthy case study.

Branding Process ran like an agency. I built lists of fictional brands across a range of industries, each student chose one, and then took it through the sequence a real brand actually goes through — positioning and strategy first, essence and personality, then mood boards, then a visual and verbal identity built out of that foundation rather than decided up front.

Digital First Branding moved the same discipline into product. Students ideated a digital app or service, then developed the brand and the thing itself in parallel — competitive analysis, user journeys, feature sets, and an interface whose look was an argument, not a decoration.

The structure was deliberately steep — Bloom's taxonomy, know through evaluate, compressed into weeks, much of it in the students' second language. They opened by dissecting brands they already loved and ended in one-on-one critiques defending work that was now their own. Alina Wheeler's Designing Brand Identity anchored the reading; the rest was studio hours, homework turned around overnight, and the kind of critique that makes a weak idea obvious to the person who made it.