Rules and Elections Re-Branding

RNE previously didn't have a logo of its own, and this created a lot of confusion due to a changing visual identity from year to year. RNE's website, circa 2005, featured a navy blue color scheme that didn't seem to match much with the rest of the dominantly red Rensselaer Union identity. The redesign that occurred in 2008 moved to a red on black theme that also didn't centralize the brand around a single logo. I decided that the first step was to design a logo-mark that could be linked to the Union's own arched logo but also stand on its own.

To design the RNE logo, I went through a number of iterations involving the incorporation of a check mark (like one you might see on a ballot) with the Union arches. I finally arrived at a design and presented it to my colleague, Haris Khan, the current RNE chair. He was happy with the redesign, and we decided to move forward with attaching it to all of RNE's own materials. One element of the new logo that actually seemed to broaden student appeal was the similarity of the check mark to a square root symbol. At a tech school like RPI, where the geeks are in no short supply, some math usually doesn't hurt.

The RNE logo found nearly immediate use within a Guide to Student Government made to help introduce first-year students to the elections process and to various parts of student government at RPI. After that, I created a color scheme and various branding elements for the new RNE website at . I also brought over the red style and logo-mark to a revamped Elections Handbook, and recreated all of the various elections forms. I have a background in information architecture and form design, so the form redesign was not just aesthetic in nature - I put a fair amount of work into revising the way information was presented to users.

Along with the new RNE logo, I specified the Helvetica and Helvetica Neue font families as the defaults for all RNE-associated materials. I use Helvetica World for most typeset text (although Book Antiqua is used for large amounts of readable text in paragraphs and such, as it is a lovely serif font that makes the text easier to read). A couple different weights of Helvetica Neue are used for headers and supporting text.