By Kyle Romaniuk, Creative Director & Principal, Cocoon Branding*
Today we kicked off a Rebrand Project with the 3rd year graphic design students at Red River College.
Kyle Romaniuk, brand director and principal, Cocoon Branding Inc
This is a pilot project conceived between Cocoon and RRC to inject current brand industry practices into the curriculum and have professional collaboration in-class with the students to help them gain a better understanding about branding before graduating.
Over the 6-week project, we are scheduled to be in-class 6 days, collaborating with the students, answering questions, providing guidance, and providing constructive criticism when they pitch their rebrands and campaign concepts to us.
This initiative was triggered after many years of being surprised by the countless times we encountered industry peers, often past graduates of the RRC program, that have never been exposed to brand strategies. Many of these instances were even after they have been working in the industry for a number of years. In most cases they were given a very limited period of time, and based their solutions on current trends or a combination of their own opinion and/or that of the client, instead of understanding and basing their creative solution on the brand positioning. Even the way we approach rebrands and present a new identity to our clients at Cocoon seemed to be foreign to everybody new that we shared our process with. The learning curve was just too much for us to bear any more.
We approached a past instructor of ours and pitched the idea that Cocoon would like to share our processes and approach to branding with the design students, so they could be better designers, and maybe one day a better potential employee for Cocoon with less of a learning curve to deal with.
The instructor and department were so readily open and willing to involve us. They believe that more involvement with industry professionals creates a more engaging learning experience, and overall is better for the students.
We think it got off to a good start today. We expect to learn from the experience being as it is just the pilot, but hope the students can learn a lot from it too.
*ABOUT COCOON
Cocoon works with a broad range of clients in many different categories including start-ups and established brands. Cocoon assists in creating brands, their brand identity design, and branded experiences. Our approach promotes relevant creativity, focusing on the needs of the target audience and considering the core essence of the brand. Being a multi-disciplinary agency, Cocoon is able to conceive ideas and introduce them to the world in any way deemed most effective and appropriate – whether one or a combination of product design, advertising, online, print, retail environment.
Click here to learn more about Cocoon.
