Case Study: PY Plus
In 2018 an enhanced version of Performance Education's Professional Year program was developed, called PY Plus. This career skills enhancement course was offered to international students as a way of getting their foot in the door of an Australian workplace.
The new program was to be elite, expensive, prestigious, and a cut above the standard Professional Year program, offering extra features including a guaranteed job offer on completion.
Luxury consumables came to mind in the concept development stage. I researched branding for high - end cars and jewellery, which mostly seemed to stick to the same aesthetic conventions.
The Challenges
My new logo needed to play nicely with the existing branding for Performance Education. I discovered that there is a fine line between being too similar and too different to a parent brand.
In early iterations, the 'plus' symbol looked either...
too medical
or too religious
...or just bad (this was 5 years ago, a long time in a Graphic Designer's career).
I learned to take 'less is more' more seriously. Elements were brutally removed from early designs, including the word “plus”, which significantly made things easier. Downplaying and distorting the plus symbol also removed medical and religious references.
The Result
The chosen logo has a comfortable amount of padding between the box and the text. Its simple geometry implies stability, support, trust and luxury, all important aspects of the program.
The plus symbol at the top right was a handy, re-usable graphic.
I naturally chose the same font and colours as the Performance Education logo.
The PY Plus logo was well received by senior managers at Performance Education. It was used across a wide range of material including brochures, enrolment forms, the Performance Education website and social media channels. It was also used for presentations and flyers for migration agencies, career fairs and industry events. About 150 students enrolled in the PY Plus program in its short life span. The program ceased in 2019.
In Retrospect...
Looking at this logo years later, I'm not sure if it hit the mark. If I was to do it again, I'd probably refine the box's line thickness, or maybe get rid of the box line and make it a solid shape.
In future I wouldn’t make a logo square if its buddy is landscape - issues with scaling and proportion arose when the two logos formed a lock up.
