Work of Digital Design student featured on new social enterprise support platform  

A GCU student has created branding for an innovative social enterprise platform - after impressing clients as part of a design module.

Fourth year Digital Design (Graphics) student and freelance designer Chloe Doyle created branding for global community Social Shifters - a platform designed to support those with enterprise ideas around social and environmental impact.

Chloe told us more about how she got involved. She said: “Social Shifters have an array of free e-learning tools which you can use to develop your ideas and take those ideas to the next step. It’s a great supportive platform!

We had our ‘Design For Change’ module and the first four weeks of it involved a live client brief. It was a group task, so I worked alongside two other students, Millie and Andrew. Social Shifters was the client, and they asked us to design a youthful campaign but they were very open to what we could do – it could be a campaign or a re-brand, anything we wanted!”

She added: “They really wanted to target a younger audience and that’s what we focused on for our branding. It was a four-week project and it was intense, but really fun! We worked back and forth with James and David from Social Shifters and they were really engaged with our ideas, so we were able to make something that they really liked.”

After completing the project, Chloe’s brand ideas were chosen after impressing the staff at Social Shifters – something that meant a lot to her. She said: “I was over the moon! As soon as I saw the email about it, I sent it to Millie and Andrew and squealed.

As a student, having that sort of praise from industry and hearing them say: “That design is amazing, we want to use it” is honestly more than what you could ask for as someone who is still studying.”

After working closely with the brand, Chloe highly encourages anyone to get involved with the Social Shifters platform. She said: “Social Shifters is a really exciting opportunity for anyone! They don’t even need to be necessarily interested in social and environmental change, but simply want to know more about it and they’re not sure where to go to get that information.

It’s a really inviting platform and has loads of useful information about social and environmental change. Someone might have an idea of how they can help with that, but might not know where to go next with it. Social Shifters is the place to do that!”

Interested in getting involved? Take part in the Social Shifters Student Innovation challenge and be in for the chance to win £1000, as well as 1-2-1 coaching to help get your ideas to the next stage. Sign up to the challenge.

Find out more about Social Shifters on their website

By Rachael McAlonan

Got a SCEBE or GSBS story? Email me at Rachael.McAlonan@gcu.ac.uk or connect with me on social media here