This year for my Year 12 FMP I worked on Global Academy’s Student Station called ‘Youths Choice’ I was given the brief to complete a new set of branding guidelines and posts for our social media and other formats. I worked closely with the Station Manager on this project as well as using the existing resources from their brand. This mainly consisted of their logo guidelines. Originally, I was deciding between three different projects, creating a radio station app for an established Christmas Radio Station called Radio Christmas, or transforming one of the existing Youths Choice studios into a visual studio to allow students to easily create content for Youths Choice’s social media accounts. As mentioned I ended up choosing the branding guidelines and posts for Youths Choice. This was the most appropriate for this FMP as the Radio Christmas app was already in the process of being developed and they had stricter copyright and NDAs (non-disclosure agreements) for them, meaning that I wasn’t allowed to share any of the backend or mock-up work that I was doing and I couldn’t show the front end until we did the promotion for it. I also chose against doing the Studio Transformation as the parts ended up taking too long to arrive, we had ordered some video friendly microphone arms from Yellowtec’s brand M!ka though with covid delays around the world they where going to take over a month to arrive. The original plan was also to include some playlist updates as they where behind on this, however when we ended up getting round to the practical side of this we decided that this was outside of the scope of this project and so decided against doing this. I dd leave in my research as an idea of what I would have done however I simply didn’t have the time with the scope of this project.

Throughout the first two weeks I was working on my proposal for UAL as well as sharing some of this with the station management to make sure that the scope of it wasn’t too wide and so was achievable in the time frame given for my FMP as well as collecting current brand assets that I could use to create the guidelines such as the logo and basic colour ideas.

The next weeks I was doing my research into the main codes and conventions of what needed to be included in the branding guidelines as well as the posts. I discovered that ‘Branding Guidelines are created for brands that want to have a constant identity. This means that anyone who wants to create content with their logo or name internally or externally knows how it should look. As well as looks Branding Guidelines help establish all parts of your brand from your logo and colour scheme to your fonts and tone of voice’. I then did some research specifically into colour theory, logo placement and tone of voice. These helped inform my decisions about what I was going to do, specifically I found Monzo’s tone of voice guidelines and their idea of swapping formal words for normal words.

Along with my research into branding guidelines I did research into new music posts as the Youths Choice team specifically wanted some of these to help drive their audience towards their website to listen in to their live broadcasts. During this I discovered that it’s important to post these as videos with the songs artwork and stations branding clearly visible. I looked into Capital, BBC One and Kiss for this info. As well as this the audio used fits in with their respective on air branding to further drive their social media audience on air.

The next three weeks were spent on Production. This involved creating a few mock-ups of the branding guidelines and posts and seeing which ones that our audience and focus group liked the most. The branding guidelines that I created has been annotated in my weekly reflection for further feedback on why decisions were made. This was also when the scope was reduced from creating a new playlist for the station ‘on air’ and rather creating some posts for their social channels as this was closer to the digital ideas of the branding guidelines. I applied the same research that I did from the new music posts to these new posts. This saved me valuable time towards the end of my FMP when this was decided. It was also obviously important that the new posts and post templates fit in with the branding guidelines as to not contradict myself! – I think I achieved this well

Overall I didn’t face any significant issues with my FMP other than trying to choose what I was going to do at the beginning and having to change my FMP because of the delivery times of the mic arms. The only other ‘Issue’ that I think I faced was changing the scope of the project last minute with the addition of the posts and no longer doing the playlist update. Luckily as I had done research into posts and created post templates as part of the branding guidelines process. I think that the reason I mainly stayed away from issues is because I’m already very well versed in creating similar content for other brands as well as me having a good idea of the Youths Choice audience already working with them lots. I have also received very positive feedback from the Audience and Management alike and I’m able to see the engagement and views of their social media going up as I create more engaging posts with audience interaction posts!