Jasjeet Plaha | Designer

Branding for Newton Edge

Newton School | October 2023

Newton Edge is a new online coding course launched by Newton School.

This project talks about the branding principles I formed for the new product and key illustrations I made that went live on the first launch of this course.

Edge had a few key offerings & features, which makes it different from other courses running at Newton School, and its competitors:

It had a curriculum focusing on advanced coding topics.
The Learning experience was going to be assisted by AI.
The course wasn't available to all audiences, it was supposed to look premium and exclusive for elite students.

My contribution

I was the sole creative working on this project. My tasks involved designing things at multiple abstractions. From a bird's eye view, this included the overall branding, tone of voice, the mascot for AI Chat feature and interface styling on the website and course platform.

Brand Values

This came from constantly questioning- ”How do we want to place Newton in the lives of our users?” Pondering on this over and over, and looking at the direction our business was taking, I boiled down how Newton should appear and feel.

Design Principles

This was going to be a rather hard and long journey for our users. The product had to be a tool that the users would want to stay connected with throughout this journey. Considering all this, I boiled down to some first principles for our design team to follow.

Worldbuilding & storyline

World-building allowed me to create analogs for Newton’s position, and the tools and people we have placed in our users’ lives. A rough storyline of what’s happening in our world gave me more context to draw every illustration.

Outcome

For the logo, I fiddled with the ✦ symbol, which was seemingly becoming more acceptable as a universal symbol for AI. Apart from this our core visuals included Neo, the AI mascot and elements like spacecrafts, isometric structures, and line diagrams. Supporting Illustration Elements included backdrops like terrain grids and spotlights to give these core elements more meaning and finish.

Website Sections

Group projects

Key ideas users should know about projects at Edge

Core visual to communicate AI assistance in different scenarios

AI Interview Nudge

Curriculum Navigation Design

Different Diagrams for representing core topics of the curriculum

Core visual representing placement phase as it is seen through the portal

Visuals that communicate supporting features

AI Mascot

Newton AI’s transformation into a character was all about making it feel as real as any sentient organism. To give its form and behavior meaning, I approached it like a fictional character in our movie.

Neo had to be a graceful and humble supporting character to our students. He is like a celestial being who has come to guide young developers & make them capable of solving real problems with code.

Neo resided in the corner of our student interface. It didn’t have to be the center of attention in the experience, but it demanded some acknowledgment. This meant simplifying Neo to the specific details I needed to communicate his response, and design interactions accordingly.

I used Rive to implement all the interactions on the platform

FTUX Modal

Module Illustrations

Modules were a set of topics in the learning path of our students. I abstracted out the ideas for each topic and represented them through isometric visuals.