A brand built to ignite creativity.

We’ve launched an explosive re-brand for Media Design School — the number one digital design school in APAC. The new brand comes as part of a significant design to tech shift for the school, which has seen their course offering expand to include NZ’s first bachelor degrees in AI and Cloud Computing.

Based in Auckland, NZ, MDS is home to students from all over the world, boasting hordes of award-winning alumni in many areas of creative technology, from video game design to virtual and augmented reality, to 3D animation and VFX.

They are part of the Laureate Education network and work in close partnership with Torrens University, Australia’s fastest growing university and a brand we have been helping to build over the past
2 years.

2020 • Transform Awards

Best Visual Identity in Education — SILVER

2020 • AWARD Awards

Brand identity (Medium business) — FINALIST

RE-IGNITING
THE CREATIVE SPARK

MDS Logo Reveal_0001 from Julien Bertouille on Vimeo.

Founded in 1998, Media Design School has some of the best design programs in the Southern Hemisphere. Twenty years after their inception, they approached us to refresh their brand so it could shine as brightly as the creative output coming from their students.

Coming to us originally with the intention of simply ‘tidying up’ their existing brand identity — the project literally exploded into excited discussions of ‘what if?’.

A progressive design school deserves a progressive attitude, in look and in personality. The time had come for the ‘creative spark’ to break free of its previous two-dimensional straight jacket and burst into a hyper-real world.

Spark Style Animation_0002 from Julien Bertouille on Vimeo.

The first school in New Zealand
to recognise the growing influence
of emerging creative industries

Multiple states

We’ve developed a series of sparks to represent each of the courses offered by the school. Five key disciplines inform the design system and provide a base for endless iterations. With a variety of patterns, angles, colours, textures and lighting setups, our sparks are ever-evolving — shifting and changing with every new communication.

The five disciplines:
Graphics / Games / Interactive / Motion / VR & AR.

Open to interpretation

Something that every art and design school prides themselves on is the output of their students. We’ve always believed that the most exciting work comes from the freshest faces in the room, which is why after the initial release, the 3D spark was handed over to the students to continue it’s creation — a blank, pointed canvas for new points of view, allowing the brand to continue to develop year on year.

Skins and textures are mapped onto the basic model which, when captured at different angles feels like a new iteration every time.

Tech inspired type

Px Grotesk from Swiss foundry, Optimo was chosen for it’s obscure balance between it’s rounded human construction and it’s contrasting, hard edged angular personality in characters such as the lower case, a, f and y. It straddles the line between classic and cutting edge, just like the school itself.