About
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Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment
Helping Non-Designers make Beautifully Branded Assets
Role
Skills
Brand Design
Design Systems
Product Design
Collaborator
1 Senior Design Mentor
Duration
3 Weeks
Aug - Sept ‘25
Product Designer
Brand Designer
Context
The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment (MADE) is a non-profit video game museum in Oakland. The museum hosts programming towards a strong public mission: to inspire the next generation of digital creators.
The MADE needed a consistent brand that could support brand recognition and communicate its values.
The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment
Problem
Untrained volunteers create the MADE’s official assets, resulting in a mix of different design languages and levels of polish (shown right).
My brand book turned an inconsistent brand into one volunteers could run easily and effectively.
Before
Volunteer Work (Early ‘25)
Volunteer Work (Oct ‘25)
After
But before I could help volunteers, I had to first understand their challenges.
An Unusable Brand
Volunteers don’t know what our brand is or how to apply it
Inexperience
Volunteers are not professional graphic designers.
Little Brand Excitement
If volunteers aren’t excited about our brand, they’ll try others instead.
Insights
Defining the Brand
I turned a vague impression of a brand made by my design mentor into a formalized system that could be scaled, reproduced, and expanded.
Avoiding performative details and hard restrictions, I codified a brand by defining its use of logo, color, type, space, and image.
Solution
Tailoring a Design Education
Since most volunteers lack the experience to turn brand guidelines into finished pieces, I wrote additional content to introduce design basics.
The content was based on actual pitfalls that had come up in volunteers’ design work
I included plenty examples of Dos and Don’ts so our brand could be demonstrated visually.
Internal Design Critiques
Design Mentor
Ooo it’s coming along nicely! Maybe you could be a little more consistent with alignment?
5
7 replies
Design Mentor
Great work! It’s a nitpick, but I’d recommend rewriting to keep your title short and punchy!
9
4 replies
Design Mentor
Try cropping the image to create more interest! Nice job using different font weights!
4
2 replies
Creating an Exciting Brand
Wanting to get volunteers excited to use our brand rather than other ones, I made pages showcasing bold visual brand examples.
Time Saving Templates
Looking to fit into volunteer’s busy schedules, our brand system needed to be a time saving device rather than another hoop to jump through.
My mentor and I built asset templates covering a variety of media types and content platforms.
Eventbrite
6PM on Thursday, August 14th
AN
INFLECTION POINT
THE EVOLVING LANDSCAPE
OF GAME AUDIO
Andrew Levin
presents
89%
58%
Results
of new posts
made in October and
November ‘25 are On-Brand!
Verses just 58%
in July and August
Volunteer Work (Nov. ‘25)
Reflection
In retrospect, the most important factor for brand adoption was to get people excited to make MADE branded content.
But equally important was the less visible interpersonal work. All the time spent giving encouraging critique to one another really helps people learn quickly and feel safe to try new ideas.
Presenting my Work to the Team!
CHECK OUT THE FULL BRAND BOOK
THANKS FOR READING!
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Let’s Keep in Touch!
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About
Resume
Contact
jolichney@berkeley.edu