Oswin Project – Digital Branding for a charity (2013)

Background

The Oswin Project is a multidisciplinary group that came together in 2011 to improve ex-offenders chances of finding long-term employment on leaving prison. The Trust supports ex-offenders in North East England, by sourcing paid employment and apprenticeship opportunities in the construction and hospitality industries.

Oswin's aims and objectives:

  • To ensure that clients receive the maximum benefit from their placements,
  • The Oswin Project also supports its clients with mentoring and supervision.
  • It is envisaged that by the end of the client's apprenticeship period, which could be up to two years, they should have an excellent chance of securing long term employment. 

Challenge

In order to help raise awareness of the projects aims, encourage support and engage with the wider community, students and staff at Northumbria University worked with Trustees to help define their visual identity, communication strategy and produce design collateral requirements.

Work requirements

  1. A Design Document that demonstrates your project research and development printed and in PDF form. It will contain two parts:
    1. The visual design development of the identity system.
    2. Information architecture for the website – analysis of website goals, user experience, content, structure, and visual design development.
  2. Visual identity system including examples of stationery and brand guidelines.
  3. Evidence of working website/s e.g. personal website and Oswin Project website.
  4. A3 portfolio sheets

Process

In terms of design process it was a fairly traditional waterfall model: 

  • Briefing and research, concept development, design protoyping and presentation 
  • Its important to note that we has 32 design students who were less that 18 months into a multi-disciplinary undergraduate programme.
  • The clients also had relatively little exposure to design and so had a traditional view of design as a product or artefact rather than as a service or proposition. 
  • The simple project structure masked a complex and congested programme of learning for the students where they were being introduced to key new subjects such as branding, advanced web publishing and social media workshops just in time for them to produce work for client presentation.

Tools and methods…

  • We used orientation meetings to help scope out requirements and also Q&A sessions with students to get them on-board.
  • We undertook Branding, Web Design and Social Media workshops with students helped bring them up-to-speed with required tools and design methods.
  • We used crit and feedback sessions with students and trustees to help shape project outcomes.
  • We took students for onsite visits to the pilot project building site to see work at first hand and share design work with the first ex-offenders.