Applied ML, CMU

Creating an abstract brand identity and a hyper-interactive landing page for a college community.

Brand

The Applied Machine Learning Club at Carnegie Mellon University focuses on providing opportunities for students to learn and apply machine learning techniques to real-world problems. They collaborate with local companies and faculty to work on the challenges they face, and also organize sponsored events with academics and professionals to share their insights from different machine learning disciplines.

Role
Identity Design
UI / UX Design
Web Development
Year
2019
Sector
Education
A red, black and white coloured mockup showcasing CMU Applied Machine Learning Club's responsive website and logo

Visualizing an Abstract Concept

Our goal was to create a brand identity that represented the idea of machine learning and artificial intelligence without resorting to cliché visuals like robots, brains, or circuits. We explored different concepts ranging from typographic wordmarks to abstract logomarks that visually represented aspects of machine learning.

We landed on a concept that depicts an abstraction of the idea of developing knowledge or information from data. After multiple iterations exploring different forms, typefaces and colour schemes for the chosen logo concept, we arrived at our final logo and the brand’s overall visual identity. We created an identity system with different variations of the logo for monochrome, grayscale and full-colour use cases in both light and dark backgrounds.

An Animate Landing Page

The community needed a web landing page where people seeking information about them can find details like their mission, projects they are working on, their sponsors, upcoming events, core team members and their contacts, etc. Even though the content flow was fairly simple to wireframe for, we wanted the web experience to stand out both visually and interactively. Basing off of the graphic used in the brand identity, I designed a webpage concept that will use the mouse pointer’s position to create a dynamic matrix of dots that respond to mouse movement.

The website was built using Webflow, a feature-rich online website builder that allows adding custom code wherever needed. Using custom CSS and JS, I was able to implement customized interactive elements like a reactive array of dots, a floating navbar and a modified scroll behaviour.