James Olichney

About

Resume

Contact

Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment

Helping Non-Designers make Beautifully Branded Assets

Role

Skills

Brand Design

Design Systems

Product Design

Collaborator

1 Senior Design Mentor

Duration

3 Weeks

Aug - Sept ‘25

Product Designer

Brand Designer

Context

The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment (MADE) is a non-profit video game museum in Oakland. The museum hosts programming towards a strong public mission: to inspire the next generation of digital creators.

The MADE needed a consistent brand that could support brand recognition and communicate its values.

The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment

Problem

Untrained volunteers create the MADE’s official assets, resulting in a mix of different design languages and levels of polish (shown right).

My brand book turned an inconsistent brand into one volunteers could run easily and effectively.

Before

Volunteer Work (Early ‘25)

Volunteer Work (Oct ‘25)

After

But before I could help volunteers, I had to first understand their challenges.

An Unusable Brand

Volunteers don’t know what our brand is or how to apply it

Inexperience

Volunteers are not professional graphic designers.

Little Brand Excitement

If volunteers aren’t excited about our brand, they’ll try others instead.

Insights

Defining the Brand

I turned a vague impression of a brand made by my design mentor into a formalized system that could be scaled, reproduced, and expanded.

Avoiding performative details and hard restrictions, I codified a brand by defining its use of logo, color, type, space, and image.

Solution

Logo Color

Use either a black or white logo

Pick the one that keeps the logo easily recognizable against its background and matches the rest of the piece.

Use our logo in either black and white so that it reads well against its background

Place the logo directly on images

DON’T

Type

When creating layouts, varying type weight and size can quickly establish visual hierarchy.

Headlines use Black or ExtraBold.

Subheadlines and Key information use Bold or SemiBold.

Body text uses Medium or Regular.

We don’t use extremely tight or loose line height.

(the vertical space between words)

The same applies to letter spacing.

(the horizontal space between letters)

Thursday, April 3rd

7 — 7:45PM

A talk by
Chris Platz

Headlines are short: only a word or two

Subheadlines should communicate succinctly what the event is all about

Key information can be bolded or colored in order to help it stand out

Body text holds event details and should be your smallest font size

Images of People

9:41

VIDEO GAME

MUSEUM

VISIT OAKLAND’S

twinsterphoto/stock.adobe.com

theMADE.org — Near 12th St. BART

INFLECTION POINT

THE EVOLVING LANDSCAPE
OF GAME AUDIO

Andrew Levin presents

SHOW OFF

VINTAGE VIDEO GAMES

VOLUNTEER

Aug 22 — 24

Museum of Art and
Digital Entertainment

The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment is a video game museum in Oakland. We’ll have two booths to share our playable collection with our community at the upcoming Chinatown StreetFest.

Help us choose exhibits, play games with visitors, and inspire the next generation of game creators.

Images of people can receive anywhere from zero to four visual treatments:

Removing the background

Adding a white outline

Adding a light gradient to help with text readability

Turning the image to grayscale (done by changing saturation to zero)

Light black gradient applied on top of image

Background removed + outline

Background removed + grayscale

Background removed + outline + grayscale

Brand Pages

Creating an Exciting Brand

Wanting to get volunteers excited to use our brand rather than other ones, I made pages showcasing bold visual brand examples.

Using Our Logo

No logo

Signage inside the museum can be simplified by omitting the logo. Guests already know where they are!

Logo only

Always consider the context you’re designing for.

On social media, for example, we may be space constrained, and our full name and other information appear in our profile.

Wordmark

Our logo alongside our name is called our wordmark.

Posters around Oakland, for example, benefit from the most information, so interested viewers can understand who we are.

FIRST-PERSON

SHOOTERS

EXHIBIT

9:41

921 Washington Street
Downtown Oakland

July 30th
(The last Wednesday of every month)

6:00 PM to 8:00 PM

Museum
of Art and
Digital Entertainment

MOVIE NIGHT

WARGAMES

(1983)

PLAY

TYPE

Highly Visual Pages

Time Saving Templates

Looking to fit into volunteer’s busy schedules, our brand system needed to be a time saving device rather than another hoop to jump through.

My mentor and I built asset templates covering a variety of media types and content platforms.

GAME

DEV

SHOW

CASE

Wargames

Movie night

July 30th

6PM to 8PM

Eventbrite

Instagram

TONIGHT
Wednesday, March 12

6:30 — 8PM

TRIVIA

GAME

VIDEO

GAME DEV

SHOWCASE

Friday, June 6th • 5 — 8:45PM

Show off or play local games

6PM on Thursday, August 14th

INFLECTION POINT

THE EVOLVING LANDSCAPE
OF GAME AUDIO

Andrew Levin
presents

Wargames

Movie night

July 30th

6PM to 8PM

@ The MADE

FREE with

10$ suggested donation

89%

58%

Results

of new posts

made in October and

November ‘25 are On-Brand!

Verses just 58%

in July and August

Volunteer Work (Nov. ‘25)

Reflection

In retrospect, the most important factor for brand adoption was to get people excited to make MADE branded content.

But equally important was the less visible interpersonal work. All the time spent giving encouraging critique to one another really helps people learn quickly and feel safe to try new ideas.

Presenting my Work to the Team!

CHECK OUT THE FULL BRAND BOOK

HERE

THANKS FOR READING!

Let’s Keep in Touch!

About

Resume

Contact

jolichney@berkeley.edu

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