Forethought Rebrand

Solo Project / Branding / Iconography

Overview
I worked a design internship over the summer of 2023 at Eduphoria, a company focused on building analytic tools for educators. My main project at Eduphoria was a rebrand of one of their tools, "Forethought.”

Goals
The previous design did not encompass the ideas that Eduphoria wanted the tool to convey. The new iconography must adhere to the design principles that were already in place, while at the same time symbolizing the tool itself.

Introduction

Forethought is a curriculum editor that helps teachers create lessons. My design head brought me a project to help revamp the current tool. They wanted to rename and redesign the icon for it. I was provided with four possible names, so I got into Illustrator and started messing around with ideas.

The current Forethought icon. The stars were the main thing I wanted to keep for continuity.

Beacon

The first name I designed for was "Beacon.” The first idea that came to mind was a spotlight. I wanted to convey through the iconography that this tool would allow teachers to shine a light on where their lesson plans could improve.

The first rough. You can see the perspective lines I used to ensure everything lined up.

Here I play with different widths of spotlight. Still very rough.

Changed the shadow because the large cut-out was jarring. Starting to come together

Final icon. Stars were enlarged for better readability and spotlight now seems to come from directly above.

Alternates

I was pleased with how the first one worked out but I came up with some alternative ideas just in case: Light bulbs and light houses.

Its not very fleshed out, but you can see where my head was at.

This one I liked more cause I could keep the star, but it was still a little basic for me.

Envision

With Beacon done, I moved onto Envision. For this one, I “envisioned” some sort of viewing device. My first idea was a telescope.

First draft. Did not look like a telescope enough and also resembled a blueberry.

Final icon. Successfully kept the main elements of the original while remaining fresh and new.

Alternates

Again, I came up with a couple more ideas. These were OK, but were ultimately either too busy for an icon or too simple.

Tried my hand at making a graph line.

Had the idea to do a radar. This ended up with too many lines intersecting. Too busy.

Unity

The next one, “Unity,” brought to mind things like puzzle pieces, so that’s what I went with. This one and the next one were good exercises, but I found that the names themselves didn’t lead to that many creative solutions. So these were my least favorites, but I’m still glad I tried them.

First draft. Very rudimentary.

Too square and didn’t read very well when placed on screen.

Better shape, but didn’t have the nice light blue that was in the original. Also a very common icon.

Final icon. It was ok, but I think a more creative solution would have been better.

Harmony

Here are the last ones for the name “Harmony”. Like unity, this name is very vague and it was hard to come up with creative ideas for it. Never the less I tried and landed on the idea of a stack of rocks that you might find on a river bank.

My first draft looked like a big blob so that needed to be fixed.

The final icon.

Final Takeaways

I really enjoyed this challenge. This was my first experience designing something for a company and while they didn’t end up moving forward with the rebrand, This was still a very valuable experience for me.