Whether you’re gearing up to re-brand or beginning the journey of developing a new brand for your business, there’ll be some guided steps we’ll go through in order to begin the Creative Design Process.
The first step I ask clients to do is to fill out a Branding Questionnaire. This reference is extremely resourceful and helps streamline your thoughts, ideas, mission, target audience, values and vision into one place. This identifies who your business is and what makes it unique. Within the Branding Questionnaire, clients are asked to create and share a private Pinterest branding inspiration board with me.
Creating A Pinterest Inspiration Board:
Below is an sample private Pinterest inspiration board created for InterPLAY Learning Academy. Adjectives that were used to describe this business are playful, confident, bright, clean, educational, friendly, encouraging, interactive and relational, to name just a few. We focused on a color theme that was geared towards a younger academic audience, for both males and females.
Design Inspiration Board:
After reviewing the clients Pinterest board, I’ll begin to mix and match some of the photos from the board directly into a secondary brand inspiration design board. Here, a color palette start to takes on a more solid choice form. I chose more saturated hues of blue, orange, green and red which ‘pop’ off the page and visually and tie-in well together representing energy, excitement, fun and friendliness.
Logo Concepts:
Using the brand inspiration board as a guide, various logo concepts are created. Owner and Founder, Dana Johnson, had shared with me that their desire would be to eventually offer academic programing for not only elementary ages, but also for middle through high school students. Attention was paid to this factor so that their branding could identify with a fun, engaging, yet clean and legible visual. In the concepts, I chose to have the word ‘Play’ stand out by variating the color hue used in each letter. To make sure the concept was not too visually ‘busy,’ I grounded and balanced the concepts through the use of gray and black for the word “Inter” and “Academy.”
Logo Revisions:
After the initial logo concepts are drafted we work through feedback while making tweaks and edits. In this particular brand, slight name changes were made, where they eventually landed on InterPLAY Learning Academy for their brand.
The final choice design combines typeface components from the first and third original draft concepts to complete their logo. Both landscape and portrait logo versions are created for clients as part of design file deliverables. This ensures that a logo will always work, well no matter if it’s advertised within a landscape or portrait medium.
Branding Collateral:
Once a logo concept is established, as a designer I never want to leave a client with just their logo. Why? Simply because the logo is really just the beginning! A business should not rely on a logo alone for it’s brand, and that’s where brand collateral comes into play. Serving as the bookends to a business, branding collateral utilizes the logo within resources, advertisements & promotional materials and anything that helps get your business name & services out there. I ask my clients what they are using within their business that helps them in their day to day interactions with customers. Then, as part of the branding package, they select 4 collateral items to be designed.
For InterPLAY, I created several collateral elements (Facebook avatar & cover, business card, apparel & desktop launch mockup) that bring this bright brand consistency into full realm.
