Stepping into (MDG)Space

The story of rebranding my college student group’s identity

MDG Space, formerly called Mobile Development Group, is a group of software wizards who enjoy crafting spells with design and code to engineer robust and innovative solutions. It started out in 2011, specifically as a tech group for app development on the IIT Roorkee campus.

But now, we’re involved in many domains besides App Development, and we actively foster the Open Source Culture and other tech-based know-how within our campus and beyond.

Transitioning into these new areas demanded a rebranding from “Mobile Development Group” to a less domain-specific name to refresh our vision.

🎨 I led a team of developers and designers to take the initiative for this transition. We successfully created a new name for our group, “MDG Space”, thus expanding our group’s domain to a new ecosystem of technologies under the extension of “.mdg”.

Jobs to be done

1. The initial job was to redesign our old and redundant website. But, as we dug deeper into our roots, we also realised we needed a brand and identity change. So, we had to make the website from scratch!

Change doesn’t happen just by thinking about it, a rebrand meant a change in the group’s vision and a new motivation to work in new areas.

2. The next job was to establish a design system for our social media account and design the group swag(t-shirts, stickers, etc.)

🖌️ My Contributions

I started out by crafting a new logo and identity for the group. Since the “Mobile Development Group” acronym “mdg” was close to everyone’s heart, we wanted to retain it.

Some group members even suggested that mdg could mean Mobile Development/Design Group (as if I’d settle on this!)

My explorations with “mdg” in a logo

While making the last logo on this page, it hit me. I could treat “mdg” as an extension of each project our group creates. Just like .pdf, .png, or .jpeg

For example, the group had made an app called “Appetizer” in the past. Thus we call the project, Appetizer. mdg. Thus, I finally created a logo for this concept. We took our past forward with us at the time of change!

Designing the group’s website was very tricky. This was my first web design project, and well, I made the first iteration without a proper scale (don’t ask me why!), and voila, everything was 4 times magnified!

Our Figma file got cluster-o-phobic after just a month!

But, because of this damage, we (Akshat, a senior, and I) controlled it by creating components and using auto layouts everywhere. The project became a good practice for cleaning my hands on auto-layouts and variants!

We created local text and colour styles that helped us bring consistency across the website pages

👩🏻‍💻 The website is live. Go check it out!

See our announcement teaser here: https://fb.watch/rP49lZ21Ud/

1. One of my favourite parts of our website is the project showcase! Do glance at it :) 2. Another interesting piece to work on. Detailing out this timeline took a week and a gigantic Excel sheet!

The project also taught me how important it is for designs to be technically feasible. We undertook many compromises on the development and design end to finally ship a functional website.

The final flows of the website- https://mdgspace.org/

🖍️ Branding and Swag

Since we agreed on calling our lab “space” for the initial theme, we went with techy astronauts (our group members) creating stuff in “mdg space”

We also printed these graphics on our group’s tee. All in all, we ended up creating a new direction for the group for future batches to join MDG Space at IIT Roorkee!