Founded in 2019, the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing is an innovation-driven multidisciplinary center—educating students on the latest advances in computing and artificial intelligence—and their tie across industries.

Before solidifying the group’s full visual identity, MIT approached FAY to lead the soft launch, designing an event-specific identity and microsite for a three-day event celebrating the announcement of the new college. The solution needed to acknowledge these multi-disciplinary efforts in a monumental way—highlighting it as the first College in MIT’s history.

The college aims for the study of AI to be woven into all curricula, with the college ‘sitting above’ six constituent schools. (In this way, the college forms a root system that extends to the six schools beneath it, sustaining and nourishing new forms of knowledge as part of a single ecosystem.)

FAY brought this analogy to life with an MIT twist: a custom-drawn circuit board, the engineering equivalent of a root system. The metaphor-pattern flexed across launch identity platforms, from screen-based graphics, animations, printed and digital collateral and a microsite.