NaSTA is the National Student Television Association, and I was the elected marketing officer from April 2014 – June 2016. When I took over NaSTA was ready for a refresh. The previous two marketing officers had resigned midterm due to other commitments and as such the brand has difficulty establishing itself.
Incomplete history of NaSTA logos
As you can see from the above image, the NaSTA brand has changed a few times over the years, when I took the helm it was the orange rounded TV you can see near the end of that time line. The logo was fine, the simple vector shape and the Coolvetica typeface work well. The colour, the fonts over-usage and tone however were not being well received. Part of the problem was by coincidence, NaSTA’s recent chairs had all beckoned from NUTS (The former brand of Nottingham) and with the awards being held in Nottingham in 2012, there were perceptions that NaSTA was becoming dominated by a particular social circle, and the unintentionally matched orange based colour scheme did nothing to help this.
An amalgamation of the pre2014 brand
The old brand consisted of either a white logo on orange or orange logo on white. One issue was the Coolvetica font was used across the board and gave the association a child-like quality when matched with the nickelodeon-esque colour scheme you can see above. Recurring motifs running across the brand either the radial colour bands used to separate the base colour from photographs and three vectors which were used with a 40% opacity to fill in some white space behind text and cropped photos.
Having taken office it was time to move NaSTA into a brand and style that matched it’s ambitions of being respectable in the eyes of the television industry. The old style was scrapped and as a first action a new colour was chosen. Research showed the most common colour for a station brand was blue, with the SRA using green and the SPA using an odd combo of pink blue and yellow, I decided upon a deep red. It was similar enough to the orange that it wasn’t a complete departure and different enough to set it apart. The particular shade was actually the colour of my old editing suit in Essex and thus the rich NaSTA red was born.
NaSTA brand as of 2014
To complement the red, black and white became a go to secondary pallet. To stop the red looking to flat, and to mix it up certain deigned pieces like social particularly on social media a radial gradient was added. Some white textured backgrounds snuck their way in to the rotation as constant red backdrops made everything look similar so a regular rotation of motifs were employed to kept it fresh.
Here’s some mailchimp e-shot images to show the use of vectors in digital marketing, and the colour scheme in action.
Finally in the refresh came a matter of fonts. Coolvetica had to be scrapped, in my opinion it was too cartoony for usage across the board and on top of that it wasn’t a default font, as such couldn’t be viewed unless the font was installed on your machine without embedding. Century Gothic was chosen as a replacement as it’s a nice, clean, san serif font which was being used on the website (and still is I hope). To match this new professional look, Century Gothic bold was used for headlines, or in design work; Revolution (with Century Gothic bold as the Lower case ‘a’ of NaSTA as it was an uppercase fonts) for emphasis.
NaSTA website 2012
New NaSTA website 2014
NaSTA as a brand will always evolve, the only things that I can guarantee won’t change are the little ‘a’ and a big ‘NSTA’ but consistency makes a brand recognisable by students and professionals alike. While everyone will want to put their own mark on it, I hope what I did across the two years give NaSTA’s brand a good foundation to progress from.
I will post a more in-depth post about the design work I did over the two and a bit years I was NaSTA marketing officer, but for now I will leave you with the basic guidelines I put together which can be found here;
NaSTA Brand Guidlines
You can find more about NaSTA at
www.nasta.tv
perrybox.wordpress.com 