University of Pennsylvania
Wellness starts from within.
Visual Identity, Marketing, Web Design, Art Direction
Food for thought.
When you have the opportunity to make good choices shared over good food, surrounded by good friends, you can create the perfect balanced diet for a healthy learning culture. This is what the University of Pennsylvania—a renowned, Ivy League research institution—aimed to offer through their dining program.
We partnered with Penn Dining to create an identity that could both live seamlessly within the overarching University of Penn brand, but also stand on its own to invigorate and nourish the students in a whole new way.
Eat Smart. The mantra of our refresh which naturally found its way through playful type and photography. What we were missing was a way to represent this intellect through more than just photos of food. In comes the fantastic illustrator Abbey Lossing, who helped us make the aspiration of healthy food, healthy habits, and healthy minds a reality. Together we created dreamy, playful depictions that our students, new and old, could relate to and see themselves within.
Eating Smart is more
than just food.
It’s food you’ll
feel good about.
Building upon the stable foundation of red and navy that is the heart of the Penn brand, and the beautiful illustrations of Abbey Lossing, we almost had the recipe just right. To round it out we added some vibrant colors, a suite of refreshed typography pairings, open air layouts, and a playful voice and tone to bring new life to a program that has sees 2,500 new students through their doors each year.
A full plate deserves
a balanced diet.
There are a lot of hard decisions to be made in the college experience, and we wanted to make sure “Where should I eat today?” wouldn’t be one of them. To ensure Eating Smart, would also be Eating-Made-Easy, we rounded out the exercise with a brand new website and content strategy, inclusive of interactive maps, digestible dining plan descriptions, and mobile-friendly, “quick-I’m-hungry-now!” dining listings.
Studio: J2 Design | Creative Directors: Brian Jacobson and Cara Cox | Design Rollout Support: Sam Cush | Copywriting: Kelsey Perkins
Illustration: Abbey Lossing | Photography: Unsplash + University of Pennsylvania – Penn Dining | Web Development Partner: 4x3, LLC