The TUMO Center for creative technology is a revolutionary education centre based in Armenia, France, Lebanon and Albania, with new locations soon opening across the globe. Its mission is to challenge the way teens can learn hot topics such as software coding, gaming, design and robotics. At TUMO, students have access to the latest technologies and are able to learn and explore a multitude of programs in autonomy: I wonder what possibilities it could have opened up for me if I had the opportunity to attend as a teenager!

Every year TUMO invites the best professionals around the world to share their skills during a series of highly engaging workshops. I’ve been lucky enough to be invited three times so far for my branding workshops, and last June I decided to involve my good friend and business partner Zen; after all, design and tech is what we do @Factory 39 and sharing is caring!

During my past workshops, we’ve explored how to brand and what makes or breaks a brand. We used this knowledge to brand human emotions (check the projects here) and understand how naming, colours, shapes and typography can play with our feelings.

Last time we focused on how brands and music genres can work together and Zen created a workshop on building web applications using Ruby and Ruby on Rails.

Branding Music genres.

How does rock feel? What typography sounds like Miles’s Davis trumpet? What colour is Electronic and which one is Heavy Metal? As every branding project, the creative journey starts with a problem and in this case a curious one: how can we use brand identity to communicate values specific to a music genre? We used the same approach we’ve been using on every project at Factory 39: Diagnose - Prescribe - Create.

After understanding what a brand is (and no, a brand is not a logo) each student picked a music genre and researched the main values and brand attributes to drive the visual identity. We created unique and relevant names following the “Don’t call it that” exercises and started to collect and stick materials on the wall for our mood boards (we are all big fans of printing+sticking, as it always generates ideas and sparks conversations!). We sketched, sketched again and then sketched some more until we were happy with our concepts and developed the full brand identity, including a selected Spotify playlist for each concept.

Check out the brands we created here: https://tumo.org/project/branding-music-genres-with-martin-zarian/

Living in a world filled with emerging web applications an important skill to master for any aspiring web developer is the use of a major web framework. Ruby and the Ruby on Rails framework have been a staple for building reliable web applications in the industry for the last decade and a great starting point for students. But every web application needs a purpose and ours was e-commerce!

Starting off the workshop with learning the basics of Ruby as a language and an overview of the basic concepts of object-oriented programming, students built a command-line driven e-commerce app. While great and efficient for developers to use day to day, we agreed that it wouldn’t have made a compelling product to ship to a customer. Therefore, we progressed into learning some of the core concepts of Rails and how the framework and the Ruby community in general, with its myriad of helpful libraries (Gems) can help us in putting the concepts of our command-line tool into a functional e-commerce web application that can accept orders and make money!

Participating in TUMO's learning labs last year was one of the most rewarding experiences we have had as a team here at a FACTORY 39. The work the program is doing is genuinely revolutionary and the type of education students are able to get from industry experts is unrivaled in terms of producing tomorrow's experts. We look forward to further collaboration with TUMO and who knows maybe one day introducing a similar program to a country like Cyprus.

Check out the code of the different applications students built here: