Inside the Brand Identity Design Process
How we build powerful brands
Picture this: You’ve just partnered with a design studio to create a logo for your brand. It's exciting but also risky, right? We get it. It’s a sizable investment, and the creative process seems vague and undefined. While designing visuals implies a certain degree of creativity, it’s also bound by a well-defined process and rules. Form AND function.
At the studio, we apply a simplified version of the Double Diamond process, designed for speed and reliability. With over 100 clients in our books, we’ve sharpened each step so that each deliverable performs at its best.
Here’s an overview of our brand design process that boils down to 3 steps:
STEP 1: DREAM
Discovery Session
We sit down for a chat. You share your vision, your brand story, and what makes you and your company tick. We listen. We ask questions - lots of them. And then we go deeper. Together, we explore your target audience, competitors, and brand values. It’s about understanding the essence of your business and your customers.
Based on this session, we’ll figure out how to communicate with your audience, push their buttons, and help them identify with your mission, ideals and moral compass. The goal: finding your brand ambassdors, making you more accessible to your true fans.
Design Concept
We retreat to our creative studio and start brainstorming. Sketches, moodboards, and initial concepts come to life - they’re meticulously designed to outline the look & feel of your brand. You get the first peek at how your ideas translate into visuals.
Your thoughts are crucial during this stage. We review the concepts together, discuss what works, and refine what doesn’t. It’s a collaborative dance until we get it just right.
STEP 2: DESIGN
Colors and Typography
Once we set the tone, we’re halfway there. It’s time to define every aspect that makes up a brand. This includes color palettes, typography, and all the elements that help your brand fit every occasion and make it distinctive and memorable.
Logo Design
Designing your company logo is a beast of its own and requires its own 3-step process creative process.
1. Initial Concepts
We present up to 3 concepts based on our discovery and brainstorming sessions. We think of them as three directions to take your brand when it comes to the logo. Our goal is to provide a variation of stylistic choices that fit the brands overall look and feel, and represent your vision best. However, this is an iterative process - you provide input on what resonates and what needs tweaking, and it’s up to us to set the stage for the next step.
2. Refinement
This stage is all about collaboration and fine-tuning the design. Based on your feedback we refine the chosen concept, adjusting colors, fonts, and details until it’s perfect.
3. Finalization
We finalize the logo, ensuring it works across all mediums, shapes and sizes so that it’s versatile and fits everything from business cards to billboards.
STEP 3: DO / DELIVER
Deliverables
A brand isn’t simply a logo. It’s a set of carefully coordinated elements of design, packaging, and advertising, that forms an idea of the business or product in the minds of your audience. A strong brand enhances the company’s equity and distinguishes it from competitors. But to reach into your fans’ hearts you need to reaffirm it consistently across every possible customer touchpoint.
During this step we build on the foundation set in the previous two to expand and enhance the versatility of your brand. This can include anything and everything from a business card to a billboard, from a social media image to an animation.
We’ve saved the technical bit for last so you can see every material imaginable we could add:
Logo
File Types: Print, Digital, Image
Colors: Full, Monochrome, Black & White
Componentss: Symbol, Logotype, Tagline, Combinations
Orientation: Horizontal, Vertical, Icon
Brand Guidelines - a complete set of rules for branding and visualizing the brand including:
Visual Identity Guidelines
Logo sizing and placement
Color application and combinations
Typography and font application for every type of text
Illustrations & Patterns
Templates examples
File format reference sheet - what file format to use for every type of media or surface
Stylesheet - one-pager for easy referencing
Brand Identity Guidelines
Mission & Vision statements
Elevator pitch
Product/service names, definitions, and hierarchy
Key value propositions
Writing style guidelines
Brand voice guidelines
Image/Photo selection and placement
Video guidelines
Do’s and dont’s when applying the brand
Visual identity guidelines (see above)
We’ve put a lot of hard work into providing you with every piece of material you would need to set your brand off to a good start. If you don’t see a specific digital or print material you’ll need, feel free to reach out and we’ll do our best to create it.