Kimberly Cordaro

During my senior year, my class was asked to go into a store and choose a prominent brand and one of its products. I chose the Sunsilk line of haircare products, specifically focusing on their Waves of Envy Conditioner. The second phase of the project was to rebrand the product line using a different target audience. I chose to focus on the teenage girl - I began by drastically changing the color palette and overall appearance of the product, based on extensive research I’d done on the teenage market. Through rigorous design process and experimentation, I finalized the design of my labels and chose to split the Teenage Haircare Line into three categories of hairstyle - straight, wavy, and curly. All text and imagery were created through additional research on both the product and its competitors. I subsequently “sold” the product to the design panel, which consisted of four professors and the head of the Graphic Design program.
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In my junior year of college, we were tasked with creating a branding standards manual - one that contained everything a "real" manual would - from things like trademarks and proper usage to promotional sale items. I decided to brand myself within the field of psychology, which was my minor, and remains a passion of mine. I developed an extensive branding system and the final result is the implementation manual - example pages of which can be seen here, alongside the main logotype I also created. My brand was called mind + body, and the concept is simple - if the mind is healthy, the body can be healthy as well. In order to represent cognitive progression and development, as well as simplicity, I utilized a sans-serif typeface, rigorous psychological research, meaningful colors and creative consistency.
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For more than a year's time, I immersed myself in research for my senior capstone project, wherein I combined my minor, Psychology, with my Graphic Design major. The final product is a documentation of fifteen psychological disorders of varying severity, chosen from the DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). Using key terms found in the DSM-IV through extensive research, I drafted icons for each disorder as a whole. The simplicity of the book's layout and design provide a stark contrast to the complexities and the stigma associated with mental disorders. The table of contents, seen at the top left, shows the final icons in the order in which they appear in the book, and the full layout for each disorder is shown on the right (using PTSD as an example). This project was exhibited in the Ohio University Art Gallery from May through June of 2009. My display included a spread on the wall, two books available for viewing, and third book open to a spread.
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