Plau is a major Brazilian type foundry and branding studio, which designs custom typefaces and rich visual identities for brands, sells retail typefaces and offers educational workshops about branding and typography. The workshop Identitype, which promotes brand archetypes as a tool for designing logotypes and visual identity systems, is a successful case of education in graphic design in Brazil.

As an exercise along the Identitype workshop, students are encouraged to design a logotype for a fictional company attending a briefing with determined requirements. Each student must conceive a logo according to the business type, target audience, brand archetype and the purpose of the redesign process, whether to internationalize the company, pivot or expand its activities. However, sorting new briefings among students was still a task done by hand and restricted to the workshop timespan. It was important for Plau to optimize this task and make the students challenge other briefings after the workshop.

Brandcooker is a lightweight web application prototyped in Figma, developed with HTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP, and designed to address this issue. It offers a simple interface to generate random branding briefings for Identitype attendants with four difficulty levels, each adding new requirements to the final briefing. Inspired by Erik van Blockland’s Typecooker and available in Portuguese and English, Brandcooker is a handy tool where students can create and share new briefings, insert quick notes and get printer-friendly briefing sheets.