Ziqi Liu’s Innovative Award-Winning Design Approach to MFIT Rebranding
Understanding brand identity is essential to keeping a brand fresh and innovative in the competitive market. Rebranding is a technique that allows companies to engage with new demographics and remove obsolete images and other brand identity elements. Designers typically use rebranding in response to external circumstances, such as pressure from competition, shifts in consumer dynamics, and the changing industry landscape.
Ziqi Liu is a professional UI/UX and graphic designer with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Graphic Design from the ArtCenter College of Design. Situated in Pasadena, California, Ziqi regularly experiments with typefaces, code, patterns, and various layout arrangements to present the most enticing voice for her projects. Her designs are human-oriented, meaning she wants them to resonate with her target demographic and give consumers a meaningful experience.
Ziqi recently implemented a groundbreaking design that recognizes the synergy between coding and design. She leveraged the two elements to create a modern, cohesive brand identity for the Museum at FIT (Fashion Institute of Technology). While the design aspect of brand identity is traditional, adding code into the mixture advances the capabilities of prototypes and initiatives.
The Museum at FIT is a specialized fashion museum showcasing over 50,000 garments dating back to the eighteenth century. Curators honor the museum for its award-winning exhibitions that feature innovative designs and how various cultures represent fashion. As a subset of FIT, the museum promotes research, creativity, and a journey of lifelong learning, which are critical elements of the university’s educational mission.
Using Adobe Creative Suite and Processing, Ziqi opted to shape the Museum at FIT’s brand identity using a fusion of web design and generative design. Seeking inspiration from traditional clothing button patterns and methods, she depicted them as a geometric motif, meaning that the patterns are interchangeable and flexible. She used a visual modular system to transform the museum’s brand identity into one that represents a youthful dynamic.
To Ziqi, buttons are metaphors for unity and the harmonious blending of contrasting elements. Just as the museum embraces diversity, inclusivity, and creative thinking, Ziqi’s design is inclusive of traditional and modern methods, which she effectively distributes throughout her rebranding project.
While the Museum at FIT focuses on the fashion community, Ziqi needed to create a solution that resonated with the fashion industry’s vitality. She overcame this issue by leveraging the Processing tool to implement code-driven design. Because of the innovation of Processing, she could create many unique patterns that symbolized the dynamic heart of the fashion sector.
Her design uses simplicity to deliver a powerful message in the rebranding process. Ziqi used unique arrangements of circles and crosses and tested her design with differing colors. The Processing software allowed her to define parameters for her circles and crosses and generate distinctive patterns. With each iteration of new patterns, she specified the colors she wanted for her ascending and descending circles, which were the basis for her modular system.
