VILNIUS UNIVERSITY
DEBATE SOCIETY

What is VUDS?

Vilnius University Debate Society has existed since 2004 but had been inactive since 2019 until its revival in 2022.

Before the inactivity, the Debate Society had not only been helping interfaculty communication, friendship, helping people better articulate arguments and speak publicly (or fight the fear), but had also participated in many prestigious tournaments (European and World Universities Debating Championships), victory Vilnius Open 2007, finals Baltic Championship Helsinki 2008 and SSE Riga Inter-varsity, first place World Universities Debating Championships 2009 year In Ireland with English as foreign language category, also first place at Kyiv Open 2009 tournament. 

What did they need?

New cadence — new design... 

This January, Olena Pankevych (now the Social Media Manager of VUDS) reached me and asked me to prepare some design solutions for the organization to make it modern and attractive for newcomers. As I have experience in debates, developing the design systems for debate tournaments, and respect for Vilnius University I agreed to help the team.

What did we do?

We had a lot of discussions with Olena, thinking about key visual elements, the role and the history of the organization, and also engaging the factor of the University. 

Finally, we decided to use the official colors of Vilnius University and rethink the role of debates in student life. We are also concluded to choose the new slogan: "With sword and word", and visualize the Vytis's swords from the logotype of the University. 

For social media, printing, and merch we also did two logomarks:

The most challenging part was choosing the fonts. We stopped on two of them from Google fonts: Sofia Sans and Playfair Display. 

Official documents now also have a new design. For background we decided to use our new elements: The book, swords and a logo.

After that, we began to make the templates for pages on Facebook and Instagram:

Today, you can see how the team uses these templates on the official web pages of the organization on Facebook, and Instagram.

The final part of my work was making the visualization for posters and merch and also teaching Olena how to deal with all this stuff. 

For me, it's a great honor to develop the design system, for such a great organization at wonderful Vilnius University. Thanks to the whole Lithuanian nation for supporting Ukraine in a such difficult time. Destroying Russia together!

With sword and word!