Overview
Context
Image Credit:
Jefferson Y. Sheng, 2022
Brandon Vallejo, 2025
Anthony Lee, 2023
Problem
Insight
Solution
Image Credit:
Canon EOS: me
Film photography: Max Mielcarek, 2024
Outcome
Takeaways
I redesigned the official logo and visual identity for Columbia University Pops Orchestra, a 100+ member student ensemble that has been the heart of Columbia's pop culture music scene since 2014. The new identity replaces a decade-old borrowed icon with an original visual language rooted in universal musical symbols and Columbia blue, which members now proudly wear on merchandise and represent at official university events.
Role:
Visual Designer
Media Coordinator
Timeline:
5 months
Aug 2023-Jan 2024
Tools:
Adobe Illustrator, Lightroom, Procreate, OBS
Collaborators:
Columbia Pops Student E-Board
Student Musicians
As Columbia University’s premier pop music orchestra, Columbia Pops has been performing student-arranged music from anime, film, and pop culture since 2014. The group organizes seasonal concerts and performs at official university events year-round.
Columbia Pops commits to having fun & community-building. With over 100 musicians from across Columbia's undergraduate and graduate schools, the group has built something rare: a high-talent ensemble where personality, kindness, and community come before perfect skills and prestige.
For 10 years, Columbia Pops carried a logo inspired by Totoro, the iconic Studio Ghibli character that perfectly captured the group's warmth and approachability. It made perfect sense in 2014. But as the organization grew into a credible fixture of university life — performing at new student orientation, holiday tree lightings, official galas — the logo's borrowed identity created a real risk. A beloved community had outgrown its borrowed identity.
Relying on someone else's IP wasn't sustainable, and a decade of informal logo variations across platforms had left the visual identity fragmented and inconsistent. Hence, the challenge wasn't just designing a new logo. It was finding a visual language that could carry 10 years of community feeling, without losing the spirit that made people fall in love with the group in the first place.
To understand what a new identity needed to carry, I sat down with 35 musicians and 16 members of the student executive board, hearing their stories based on 1 simple question: What makes Columbia Pops unique?
The answers ranged widely, but a clear theme emerged. People didn't lead with the music; they led with the community. They talked about how much they'd grown as musicians through collaboration, about the energy of showing up every week, about weekly boba runs and feeling genuinely supported. The logo needed to hold all of that: not just a music group, but a tight community that co-creates music together.
“My childhood training made me perceive music like a task. But through this community of people who are here to have fun, I truly started enjoying music-making.”
Rather than designing something entirely new and unfamiliar, I first studied the visual languages of internationally renowned orchestras to find what musical symbols feel instantly recognizable and carry weight. From that research, I extracted a set of musical marks that anyone (musician or not) could connect with. To ground the identity in Columbia, I kept the blue palette that members already associate with the organization and the university. The result is a logo that feels familiar enough to not feel like a departure, distinct enough to finally be its own.
The new identity is now live across Instagram and YouTube, printed on merchandise and t-shirts, and worn at official university events. As the Media Coordinator on the executive board, I facilitated online implementation, designed posters, and photographed members as they performed across campus. Watching our musicians represent the new logo at performances made the impact tangible — the redesign didn't just solve an IP problem. It gave people something to be proud of.
Enhanced Visibility
Instagram follower increased by 34% in 10 months
Attracted 26% more collaboration with other organizations
Attracted Ethos-Aligned Talent
Incoming musicians cited the "professional but welcoming" image as key factor in their decision to join
Deepened Member Investment
Current musicians reported feeling greater pride in representing the organization
Translating feeling into form requires a research foundation
A community’s spirit doesn’t come with a style guide. To turn ten years of warmth, belonging, and shared experience into a mark that people immediately recognize as theirs, I had to study how the world's most enduring music organizations use visual symbols — and understand why those symbols carry weight.
Design for emotion first
Treating community members as co-creators — not just end users — meant the final identity wasn't imposed on them. When people see the new logo on a t-shirt or a stage backdrop, they recognize something of themselves in it. That recognition is the real deliverable.
Spring 2024 East Coast Pops Summit @ Columbia, in collaboration with Pops Orchestras at Harvard and Yale
Videography cr. Carl Keng Seng. YouTube management by me.