Magical Ice Cream Company - Brand Identity

For this class project, I designed a logo and brand identity for Magical Ice Cream Company, a fictional vegan/dairy-free ice cream brand. The goal was to create a mark that felt fun, handmade, and high-quality — local, small-batch, and a little whimsical, to stand out from bigger competitors like Ben & Jerry's and Van Leeuwen. I started by hand-sketching a few variations of a circular badge concept, working out the lettering placement and detailing before moving into Illustrator. Once in Illustrator, I also explored a ticket-shaped badge, but it felt too rigid for the "magical" tone I was going for, so I shifted to a cloud shape instead. For the logo, I used a script typeface and turned the dot on the "i" into the Space Needle as a nod to the brand's Seattle roots. I also kept a secondary circular badge version from my sketches, and mocked up a pint packaging design with a "Unicorn" flavor — cotton candy, raspberry, lemon, and butterfly pea flower — as my own creative addition to show the brand's personality in action.

Tools: Illustrator

Final thoughts: This project taught me to think about branding as a full system, not just one mark — the logo, badge, packaging, and color palette all needed to work together. Moving between different directions, from the sketches to the ticket shape to the final cloud badge, also taught me the value of stepping back and asking whether a concept actually fits the brand, not just whether it looks good on its own.