Hey, this is what Elisava’s Master Beyond Branding students are making

Most branding programmes just focus on logos, visual identity systems and brand strategy. Master Beyond Branding, a one-year postgraduate programme run by design school Elisava and Barcelona studio Folch, teaches those too – but it also puts students through courses in scent, sound, physical motion and more. Starting in September 2026, the programme is available in two editions by location: Barcelona, taught in English, and Madrid, taught in Spanish. The work that emerges from its more experimental modules helps explain why the programme carries the esteemed reputation it does. 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. 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.”