Problem
Design students spend years making work and almost never get to defend it in front of the people who actually hire designers. School critique and the industry are two different rooms, and most students don't reach the second one until they're already job-hunting.
Process
Ligature is my answer: a critique series where students apply to present and a panel of working designers gives real feedback across branding, packaging, UI/UX, and motion. The brand had one job before anyone showed up: make a student event feel like a room you earn your way into — credible to professionals and aspirational to students at once.
The name carried the idea. A ligature joins separate letterforms into one mark, and the identity runs on that logic — students, professionals, and four disciplines converging on one stage. I explored two routes, a restrained dark-academia direction and a louder experimental one, and committed to the experimental: bold color, gradients, oversized type. It still reads as professional, but it promises something forward-looking, not institutional.
From there it grew into a full kit: a logo and pattern drawn from that mark, a six-color palette, a gradient, and a layout language that holds together across an Instagram campaign, signage, programs, and a submission portal.
Outcome
The result is a complete identity for a recurring event, one that frames peer critique as a professional opportunity rather than a class requirement, and scales from a single social post to a room full of signage. What stuck with me: people decide how seriously to take an event from its design, long before they show up.
