Welcome to
bright minds
Bright Minds began my sophomore year as a assignment. The original brief was to design a mental health poster and zine for college students. While that early work met the requirements, looking back during my senior year, the project felt unfinished. The purpose was vague and it lacked a grounded, real-world context. Rather than letting a good concept sit in a drawer, I decided to rebuild it from the ground up as a comprehensive branding exercise.
objective
Elevate a sophomore typography project, shifting its focus from a vague student awareness campaign to a structured, real-world nonprofit brand.
strategy
Redefine the target audience. This pivot reframed the brand strategy toward an optimistic, accessible visual system supported by institutional messaging and educational workshops.
outcome
A cohesive identity system spanning digital social campaigns, physical workshop touchpoints, and dynamic brand motion assets.
The decision to redesign this project came down to a strategic opportunity. The original version focused on self-directed care for college students, which the brand clashed with. Shifting the target audience to a K–12 demographic would allow the brand to be proactive, giving children mental health tools early and leaning into an already youthful brand.
This pivot expanded the brand infrastructure to support a full ecosystem of parents, schools, and educators instead of just the individual student. Reframing the audience this way forced me to balance a total strategic overhaul with a tight production timeline, treating the project with the strict constraints of a real agency rebrand.
The poster I designed from sophomore year.
The sophomore project used an clean and polished illustrative style aimed at young adults, but it lacked a real brand system. When the target audience shifted to a K–12 demographic, the visual language needed a youth-oriented focus that still maintained professional credibility for parents and educators.
The logo evolved from Benjamin the Brain, the original mascot character. While the character had strong appeal for kids, the brand required a mark that could scale within institutional school settings. I simplified the illustration into a clean, abstract brain motif. This new mark keeps the friendly spirit of the original character but functions as a scalable symbol for a nonprofit.
Bright Minds would operate as a school-supported nonprofit instead of a direct-to-consumer brand. This strategy split the deliverables into digital awareness for adults and physical touchpoints for students.
For the digital side, I built a suite of responsive social media content for Instagram and Facebook centered on clear mental health statistics and resource awareness. For the students, the brand functions through in-person educational workshops hosted at schools. Any merchandise designed for the brand exists strictly to fund these programs rather than drive retail profit.
Example post on Instagram. By providing real facts about mental well-being in our youth we encourage parents to engage with our posts to help spread awareness.
Finishing each post with a strong CTA (Call to Action) and delivering Bright Minds mission.
Finally a example for a Story post.
just a poster now a brand
To show how Bright Minds functions in a real environment, I created physical product mockups. I used AI to generate the base imagery, applied the brand assets over the top for accuracy. Finally after all the mockups were done, I animated the logo in After Effects and recorded original guitar audio to give the brand intro video an authentic human touch.
A few of the products Bright Minds would sell. Fidget toys, water bottles, and other school supplies for K-12 children.
Besides this Bright Minds would also sell products like hoodies that are purley to help support the brand and allow it to continue its mission.
Bright Minds showed me how a strategic overhaul can turn an isolated assignment into a scalable, purpose-driven brand. By challenging my early design decisions and tightening the target audience, I moved the project from an abstract exercise into a viable nonprofit concept. This project taught me that you can successfully elevate past work into something tangible and impactful, as long as you are genuinely passionate about the topic and are committed.