Feb 6, 2026
Gen Z leadership
Martin Lezhenin
CEO
Maria Andrianova
Art Director
Anaging from A to Z at Whale Studio means leading a team of A-grade talent, with our CEO being a true Gen Z representative.
Curious how that works? Check out the article by Founder & CEO of Whale Studio Martin Lezhenin on building a team where age is just a number and creativity knows no limits.
One of those courses, Physical Motion, produced a student project called Emotion in Motion. The brief had nothing to do with brand guidelines or colour palettes. Instead, a group of eight students were asked to develop a functional CGI tool for Sant Joan de Déu Hospital, a paediatric medical centre in Barcelona, to communicate emotions that are particularly difficult to identify and express visually. In collaboration with Franc Studio and under the supervision of professors Paula López-Nuño and Sarah Coral, the team developed a series of human-like figures whose composition and appearance transform in response to different emotions.
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It’s a project you wouldn’t expect to find in a branding programme, and that is precisely the point. Paula, who directs Master Beyond Branding, explains that the programme was founded on several specific positions: that brands shape culture, that branding education has relied too heavily on logos and manuals, and that the discipline’s language needs revising. She gives a concrete example – shifting from speaking about “targets,” a term rooted in product-based logic, to speaking about “communities,” which acknowledges a brand’s buyers, fans, haters and observers, each holding a different relationship to it. Over time, the programme has grown more ambitious. “We’ve become increasingly interested in shifting the perspective of the programme toward something closer to a speculative innovation lab,” Paula explains, “where we not only teach about beyond branding, but also develop with students what this new paradigm for branding can be.”
We develop with students what this new paradigm for branding can be.
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The non-visual courses – scent, sound and physical motion – are central to that shift, and each addresses a specific gap in how branding is typically taught. Scent explores how something deeply connected to memory can shape the bonds between people and brands, pushing beyond the narrow frame of olfactory marketing. Sound asks how brands can become more intentional and present across their ecosystems. Physical motion starts from the observation that in contexts where logotypes lose relevance, a physical gesture can do the work of a logo. “Studios that develop branding projects already incorporate principles that move beyond tradition,” Paula notes. “Many think of brands beyond a manual, a logo, a typeface and a system, and already acknowledge impact on a cultural level – but they rarely include design areas that are not visual.” The programme pushes students into those areas, giving them tools that a lot of education doesn’t.
That willingness to look beyond visual identity also runs through the Digital Ecosystems course, which produced a project called Foreign Roots. Created by Eduardo Paso Viola, Ahmad Hammoud and Tom Catan under Professor Camilo Roa, the digital platform draws a parallel between resilient plants that thrive in unexpected environments and the experiences of immigrants who resist, survive or adapt to life in Barcelona. Users discover these plants while encountering immigrant stories, and the platform’s navigation mimics the experience of walking through the city – non-linear, intuitive and shaped by what you encounter along the way. The interface becomes the storytelling device: how you move through it shapes what you find.
The ambition is that this kind of exchange extends further, and that the work produced within Master Beyond Branding positions design as a meaningful contributor to people and the planet.
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