Winterline Global Skills Program is a skills based educational company based in Kendall Square in Cambridge, MA. This was their first season of the gap-year program, and they sent a group of young adults across the world, learning skills that ranged from defensive driving with BMW (a partner company), to cooking in Thailand, to wilderness survival in Colorado, USA. This spring, the students graduated. While speaking with their marketing associate, he communicated that the students personal growth through these experiences was tremendous. I was particularly moved by their stories and wanted to explore this notion of seemingly incongruous skills and experiences coming together as a united whole.

During this course, Branding and Identity Design, at RISD, I experimented with this idea of seemingly unrelated experiences being interconnected. This evoked the idea of threads being woven together to form a patchwork.

Key Words

Below was the initial exercise I did to capture the breadth of experiences and synthesize them into fewer, more manageable key words in order to truly capture the essence of the Winterline Program. Another point to note, is that the students attending the gap-year program are between the ages of 18 and 21, meaning that as a brand, they must communicate trust to the parents and guardians of the young adults. Additionally, Winterline is aiming to position itself as a high-end experience. Part of the tension in developing this logo was maintaining a playful yet serious and responsible tone.

It's about the variety of skills and experiences weaving together to make a more self-aware and critical person.

Logo

The final logo is represented below in two versions, one which is purely symbolic, and one with the text reading “Winterline Global Skills Program” below. In these logos, the various key ideas have been woven together to create a stronger image, representing solidity in diversity.

Incidentally, in this final version of the logo, a subtle “W” with a horizontal line extends out to the right at the top of the logo, creating a symbolic “W” for winter and then a connected line, geometrically capturing “Winterline”. 

The logo is inspired by the concept of weaving disparate skills and experiences together into a stronger whole. Below, are the 6 figures that weave together to create a stronger and more durable Winterline. From left to right and top to bottom, the squares represent:

Colors

Initially the logo concept was to weave different textures over each other. In that instance, exploring a variety of colors for the logo was particularly fitting. Although the phenomena of a winterline is comprised of oranges and reds, after refinement of the logo, blue continuously appeared to communicate a trustworthiness in the brand visuals.

Typeface

For the typeface, I explored the types chosen by Ivy League institutions (Columbia, Cornell, Brown, Harvard, Yale, University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth, and Princeton). Given Winterline’s positioning as an elite and high-end educational experience, I wanted to draw from these institutions, while communicating a modern approach to education. When looking at the Harvard Business School type, they selected a rather vertical and strong sans-serif font and paired it with a serif font to add a more traditional component. As a business school tied to one of the oldest academic institutions in the country, the balance between modernity and tradition seemed like a good jumping point for finding Winterline’s typeface.

I explored a variety of sans-serif fonts that ranged from more rectangular to mimic the rectangular nature of the logo, to more square to carry over the idea of the squares that comprise the logo. Ultimately Source Sans Pro captured a legibility and feel that landed well within the modern sphere but had certain characters that alluded to a more traditional serif font - namely the Q. Because Source Sans Pro has a large range of weights, it could easily communicate many different written expressions. Therefore, there was no need for a second typeface.

Assets

We decided to include a postcard since the students travel during the program without a fixed address.  This way we could encourage the students to stay in communication with their family and friends in a retro-playful way.