About DRIP
DRIP (Distance Resources to Improve Pedagogy) was an internal initiative at the Naval Postgraduate School to provide online learning resources to professors and instructors. The instructional design team started the DRIP workshop series in response to the rapid and unexpected changes in learning technology due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Workshop topics included Zoom and Microsoft Teams basics, hybrid teaching techniques, and tutorials for NPS’s online learning management system.
Solving the client’s need
From March of 2021 through July of 2023, I worked as an onsite contractor for NPS in their Graduate Education Advancement Center. My team also included the instructional designers involved in the DRIP workshop series. They requested I design a logo for the series to improve recognition among the faculty. The logo needed to work in email, print, and web formats.
I chose to keep my concept designs minimalist, and to mimic the graphic-and-text coupling commonly seen in other NPS on-campus logos.
Concepts
Since this logo would lean heavily into typography rather than artwork, I chose to skip past pencil-and-paper sketches and instead went straight to Adobe Illustrator.
For consistency and cohesiveness with other on-campus NPS logos, I used the fonts specified in the school’s style guide:
- Trajan Pro
- Minion Pro
- Gill Sans
- Myriad Pro
Graphical motifs were mostly drawn from the idea of dripping water, wireless and remote connections, and digital connections.
The client selected the top-right image for the primary DRIP logo.
Olympic logo variant
One of the DRIP workshops during the summer of 2021 had an Olympics theme. The instructional design team asked me, mostly joking, if I could make them an Olympics-themed logo to match. The design challenge captured my interest quickly, so I mocked up a set of Olympic Rings in Adobe Illustrator and started playing around with them.
It wasn’t hard to adapt the letters to (mostly) follow the circles of the rings, all things considered. The biggest challenge was making sure all the colors overlapped correctly.
The instructional design team was overjoyed, and the logo earned some laughs and smiles when the workshop aired.