Make Work
Client: The School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Art Direction: DJ Catrow
Collaborators: DJ Catrow, Yoonshin Kim
The SAIC MakeWork Council was started in 2015 with a mission to help enterprising students kickstart and succeed in their business endeavors situated at the intersection of art and technology.
It offers mentorship to SAIC's student entrepreneurs and awards seed money from the MakeWork Venture Fund to select students and alumni who present their cases for funding. The council comprises alumni from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and friends from Chicago, San Francisco, and other cities across the United States.
During my time at Studio 424, we were tasked with coming up with the name of the council and creating a new identity system for the brand. After much research and brainstorming, the name MakeWork was selected. It has a double meaning—it embodies the idea of making and creating work in art, and also of success, of making an idea, product, or business work.
From this idea of “making work”, I saw the potential for a dynamic identity system that could showcase or highlight the central idea or work. Many sketches later, the frame idea was born, a concept that works perfectly as it adapts to what is showcased and allows for endless iterations and configurations. The flexibility of this system makes it easy to highlight the diversity of SAIC students’ work and ideas.
