A well-executed brand strategy removes barriers between users and the users' ability to make a mental and emotional connection with a product, service, or entity.
Clearly defining and communicating design process is empowering. It enables us to align expectations, work collaboratively, think creatively, focus on deadlines, and produce the highest quality deliverable for every client, every project. Here's the process our team follows when designing a new brand:
We'll start by walking through a series of questions to make clear the intended outcomes of the branding project. This includes the thorough collection of style preferences, pre-conceived visions of the designs, hard project requirements, deadlines, etc. We'll align expectations at the beginning so there aren't any surprises down the road.
The identity worksheet makes the target audience, current customer problem and brand solution clear and concise. We'll leverage these insights to move carefully and logically towards emotional and visual design decisions.
A brand's personality will be the deciding factor for how users will visually, emotionally and logically connect with your product or service. Defining the personality makes clear how you'll communicate with customers. We'll identify personifying traits that one would expect to find when interacting with your brand solution.
A moodboard is the bridge that connects the logical side and the visually creative side of a brand design exercise. We'll use the personifying traits established in the brand personality and look for visual samples from various sources that embody and convey these traits. From this carefully curated collection of visual samples, we'll have refined channels of inspiration to direct the final brand outcomes.
We'll assess and scout out a few core directions the brand design could go based on the brand moodboard results. We'll prescribe several directions with samples of color, imagery, font style, and icon style giving an overall feel for each possible option.
We'll review the concept directions and choose the one we feel best embodies the solution and personality traits of the brand. This includes iterating on the design and exploring alternate directions of the color, imagery, font style, and icon style samples.
Once the final brand design is agreed upon, we'll go off and add copious guidelines to the new brand assets and designs. These guidelines prove to be helpful in ensuring the brand maintains its integrity and consistency as it get circulated inside and outside of the core organization.
The last step in the process is to deliver all the associated assets guidelines and documentation to the client. This includes all requested export sizes, formats, and documentation on the "how tos" and "how not tos" of applying the new brand. Now's the time to share your new brand with the world!