The Branded Career Day

Despite not having a current career, I was asked to participate in Liam’s preschool Career Day. I tried really hard to politely talk my way out of it—after all, I happily sacrificed my career in advertising and marketing to stay home to raise my precious little boys—but when I stepped back and thought about the opportunity to be part of Liam’s school for the day, I just had to say yes.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I love advertising and marketing. And I especially love anything to do with branding and graphic design. (It just doesn’t seem to get much attention from me these days…) So, my simple lesson plan began with a brief discussion about graphic designers and how they use shapes to make pictures and logos.

We talked about how logos are used to help establish brand recognition.

The students were able to recognize several logos and see how they are used on packaging, specifically cereal.

Then we put our newly found logo skills to the test and made a logo for a 5th Birthday party. (After all, every preschooler seems to be obsessed with Birthday parties, right?) Each student had his own paper to draw our logo: a circle, small square and a curvy line to make a balloon, then a number 5.

Next, we used our preschool skills to assemble our cupcake toppers and shape our branded stickers.

We used our logo stickers to help establish our 5th Birthday brand on all our party essentials: hat, balloon and cupcake.

After singing Happy Birthday to ourselves, we devoured our cupcakes. Delicious. After all, in marketing we know name brand is always better than generic!