Digital Credentials Institute

Innovative brands like DCI look to steam-line and update how educational accomplishments and professional skills are validated and presented. Sending a paper transcript or copy of a certificate is costly and takes time, but sharing a digital badge takes seconds. This digital image contains metadata of the skills acquired which are validated by the institution that distributed the training or education.
It does take a minute to explain, so how can you visually describe this brand in one small image?

Before DCI was what it is today, it was just a small piece of what was being developed for the corporate training area of Continuing Education. A way to solve the problem of how to more easily validate what someone lists as their skills on a resume. The badge designs then were simple, a teardrop shape pointing up and to the left, with text in the middle. Since then the badges have needed to evolve, and so too did the shape, becoming part of a more complex design system. I enjoy the idea of referencing a brand's roots in designing a logo, so I played with that off-center teardrop shape while exploring the typographic play of the acronym DCI. It's a beautiful thing when the letterforms have common shapes between them! Even more so when the teardrop seamlessly works its way into the counter space of a lowercase d. In the center of that, I placed a bit of Madison College branding as a reference to where and why this all started. The pathway paired with the torch-like appearance of the lowercase i reads as: follow the path to your greatest achievements! Overall this logo gives aspirational vibes with a sharp corporate look.