Crafting a Scalable Visual Identity for a New Visual Communication Design Program

Have you ever run into a branding problem where a logo looks fantastic on a massive billboard but turns into an unreadable smudge on a smartphone screen? When I was working as a consultant helping transform a traditional health institute into Universitas Aisyiyah Bandung, I faced this challenge while designing the visual identity for its new Visual Communication Design program. Traditional static logos no longer met the demands of digital platforms, especially as internet usage surged during the Covid-19 pandemic. We needed a visual identity that could scale effortlessly across everything from large outdoor signage to small mobile screens.

Setting up a new creative study program meant looking closely at how other universities built their visual identities. By analyzing peer institutions in Indonesia, it became clear that many existing logos struggled with digital consistency and lacked clear institutional affiliation. At the same time, the rapid shift toward remote digital activities made responsive design an absolute necessity. We needed a visual identity that could scale effortlessly across everything from large outdoor signage to small mobile screens.

The Process

The design process drew from geometric principles rooted in Islamic art and architecture, using proportions and mathematical harmony to create a visual language that could remain consistent across different configurations.

Here are the three logo configurations I designed for different screen sizes :

• Maximum configuration for wide desktop screens featuring the full symbol and wordmark
• Medium configuration optimized for tablets with balanced proportions
• Minimal configuration stripped down to just the core symbol for small smartphone displays

By choosing vibrant orange for energy, neutral gray for balance, and sophisticated black for structure, the final design balances traditional cultural elements with modern digital needs. More importantly, the three configurations allowed the identity to remain recognizable across different contexts and applications without treating each screen size as a separate design problem.

Beyond the Initial Identity

The identity was ultimately presented as a recommendation for the new program. At that stage, I could evaluate whether the system worked across different sizes and applications, but there was another question I could not answer yet: Could the identity truly represent the program itself?

I was involved in the program from its initialization, including designing its vision, mission, to the curriculum itself, so I had a clear understanding of what we wanted the program to become. However, a study program is shaped by more than its initial structure. Its culture, character, and relationship with its students develop over time, and I could not know what those would eventually become while the program was still taking its first steps.

That made the identity an interesting kind of work to me. I was not simply designing for an institution that already had an established character. I was creating a visual system for something whose character was still being formed. Whether that identity would continue to represent the program as it grew was something only time and the people within it could eventually reveal.