I am brand

Graduating students in BA(Hons) Graphic Communication and Design for Multimedia from the University of Wolverhampton were asked to respond to themselves as a brand. The result is a yearbook available for download from the i am brand website.

Foreword:
In the modern world of media sound-bites and political show-boating, how you are perceived is almost always more important than who you really are. Think of a brand like Nike and you rarely consider anything else other than the instant gratification communicated to you by their own advertising machine.

The most important assets of any business are, to the consumer, intangible – the name and/or brand marks, symbols, and slogans. It is these graphic marks and their underlying associations that convey and dictate to us our perception of worth, quality, familiarity and associated lifestyle connotations.

These unique visual assets, which create in the mind a brand perception, are the most powerful conveyor of identity and worth. Are brands almost free from the products that they represent? Is the brand a graphic mark that has the power to grace any product with it’s mysterious and powerful associations?

Victoria Beckham once famously indicated that her ambition was to be more famous than Persil Automatic. This desire might help us to understand that fame is to do with being recognised rather than anything else. She is famous and therefore recognised beyond her target market – those who buy her records. This is the power of the brand.

‘I Am Brand’, is a yearbook that forms part of the 2007 Final Show; celebrating our graduating students from BA[Hons] Graphic Communication at the University of Wolverhampton. It is a personal time capsule; a reminder of their time spent studying here at the University, their friends, their ‘enemies’ and those strange people who never spoke to each other in three years!

The student contributors aim to collectively propose a contemporary statement about the twenty first century obsession with the designer label by creating a brand that that represents them.

Each student has also showcased three further examples of their work and included musings on their time spent here and on their aspirations for the future.