MORA: Project Branding

Logo.


MORA, a miniature, biomimetic robot, and I spent a lot of time together. We traveled from a lab in Harvard to a new robotics lab at Olin to the OCEANS conference in Charleston. For all of the public appearances we had lined up, MORA needed an image, a brand.
In the wonderful class called Tell the Story of What You Make, I embarked on creating a story for my fish, creating a box, evolution poster, and assembly manual. These artifacts became both a documentation form and a style for my future work in writing a paper and creating a poster for a technical conference.

Evolution of the MORA Brand

Box

My dream was to have MORA become a swarming platform that anyone could buy and play with. This is the first pass design for a box containing all of the necessary parts.

The first and second pass designs of the box, even when including more serious colors and specifications, made the robot look like a kid's toy.

I wanted a more sophisticated look for my robot fish and used CAD drawings, more muted colors, and Helvetica Thin font to achieve the desired effect for the final piece.

Assembly Manual

LEGO instructions inspired the first pass how-to guide for assembling the fish.

Using CAD drawings helped make the guide look more sophisticated, but it wasn't fully conveying all of the necessary information.

The final assembly document was inspired by the S900 drone manual. I love its clean but detailed look! Check out the assembly guide in full here.

Process Poster

For Olin's Expo, I wanted to create a poster illustrating the evolution of my robot that strayed from the classic scientific poster.

With the second pass, I wanted to create a clearer hierarchy of information, guiding the observer in how they should progress through the poster.

In the final version, I omitted the large fish, which played a lesser part in MORA's evolution, creating the right amount of space for the other fish models. The splashes of color really helped the poster come together. See it in full here.

OCEANS Conference

System diagram.

Illustration of the buoyancy system.

Diagram of propulsion via magnet-in-coil actuator. Check out the other diagrams and graphs in the full paper here!

Final poster for the OCEANS 2018 Charleston Student Poster competition. I really wanted to create something that challenged what a scientific poster is generally regarded as - sterile and inaccessible to the general audience. See it in full here.