One of the biggest differences when you manage new companies is that you have often have to help them with their branding.
Fitting into the process
- Obviously, it needs to happen before any specific design work or deliverables can be created.
- The branding exercise is a concrete project consisting of planning, design and delivery.
- Functional planning of the rest of the digital projects can proceed after the branding project’s been initiated.
Do’s
- If budget permits – employ specialist logo and branding designer and copy-writer
- Most designers, specifically interaction designers, prefer that a specialist do the work
- If the budget forces you to use internal team members – have a meeting with the brand business owners, copywriter and the designer to discuss the requirements and constraints.
The brief
The company should have a meeting talking about the brand requirements. The project owner should have a meeting with the brand design team.
The design team will need a brief with:
- Company overview: What the company do/ sell
- Brand personality: A brief description on what feelings the brand should convey
Process
Conceptual design
The branding process involves a few meetings where all relevant business owners (e.g. marketing manager, CEO, CTO, COO, website manager), the project manager, brand design team, internal designers and copywriters.
After the brand design team received the brief they will do conceptual design.
Deliverables
- 3 conceptual logo designs
- with colour variations
- design story including the inspiration (what inspired them), identity (what it conveys) and the style
- possible taglines
- Showing how the logo looks in-situ with conceptual designs for two or all of the following:
- Business card
- Letterhead
- Website homepage look and feel
Design tuning
Involves exploring further design variations of the logos that the business owner liked and/or further conceptual design.
The final brand deliverables are:
- Logo – EPS (original layered file), tiff, hi-resolution jpg, low-resolution jpg
- Business cards for the main team memebers
- Letterhead – there may be multiples if there are international offices
- Tag lines
- Colour schemes
- Brief brand description
