Breaking Down My Brand Identity Design Process 2024 🔥

this video is all about how I went from this idea to this final design Instagram makes creating a brand identity look easy fast and very satisfying but what happens behind the scenes of creating one of these Brands and even just a logo well I can tell you that if not weeks but months I spent designing and crafting brand identities and in this video sponsored by Squarespace I'm going to walk you through one of my client projects from last year all the way from the start to the Finish now my process works like this I will normally get an email and Naomi will come and tell me we're working with someone we'll work on the price negotiates contracts assigned and then we'll do a meeting and that meeting is the first one we do it over the phone or over Skype or something like that who uses Skype we use Google meet after the contract has been signed the deposits been paid we've discussed it with the client that we want to work with them on the project we will do a meeting we met with the guys over at May by rally who have tasked me to design their logo for them and help them with their brand identity now you might be thinking that's a bit weird because May by rally is a creative agency well this is actually more common than you think and I'm going to explain why throughout the video the first call is all about Gathering intelligence I always see creating brand identities like being a detective where we kind of have to Snoop around look at patterns of behavior you have to see what the client really wants and translate that correctly using our expertise our taste and design Direction into a final product and overall that is a service that we provide so it all starts with the brief nine times out of 10 they will not have a brief so what do we do well every designer's dream is to have a brief that is basically like what chat GPT would generate this big long list of things that it needs to have but that is never the case normally we work with brief so what do we do in this situation I use an app called milanote or you can use fig Jack um but Miller note allows me to create a brief very fast based upon questions and things that we've had in our conversation normally I will record all the calls I have with clients so I can like write the information afterwards the brief goes from all about who they are what they do and what they're looking for and the metrics of success which is huge so for maor rally it was a creative Agency for specifically athletes people in the outdoors I've written down a bunch of information here in the brief that isn't all correct now because it does change when we create a brand identity we're not just creating a one system rule we're creating a tool kit that can like change over time so I wrote here as a direction and about the client that the aim is to amplify Personalities in the digital space so that's online social media and we looked at the brand values and their missions now again these all change over time so I wrote what I believe would be good for me to have but accurately reflected what they do have now remember this is a bit of a different project because they are a creative agency they know what I know however I've got a different perspective so everything in the brand values bit probably needs tweaking but I've written you know creating quality you need work they treat their clients with respect and differently to other creative agencies and I wrote that their mission the overall mission as a company is to establish themselves as a key player in the creative field for outdoors and athlet Their audience individual athletes sport teams artists outdoor Brands and the goal of this project is to design a badass logo type to understand and make known Rally's target audience is what I've written as well because that is huge if the logo doesn't actually represent Their audience it's going to be a flop now you can do your brief like this if you like you can write it down whatever you want to do but I prefer whiteboarding them down because you've got all these different modules that you can just visually place in there it's easier for for the client okay next step Mo boarding now this part of the process is a bit different a move board essentially takes the vibe the atmosphere the feeling the mood of a current project with different images it can have logos in it it can have like random images like you see here and this all goes towards the vibe that we're going for with the brand obviously you see here there's no logos there's a bit of typography up here in the Love is All You Need part but all these images represent what rally is about it gives off a feeling it's intrinsic in us as humans and that's why we have move boards we do this to align ourselves with the creative Direction now this is one way we do it as an agency here we will create the mood board and sometimes we'll send it back to the client or in another call will give them the m board so they can be aligned with it as well however this kind of m board doesn't work so well they might be a bit hit and miss with this but what this m does well is it gives us nice color schemes you see here we've got this nice image there we've got this nice image here we can actually pick out colors that we see in these mood boards here for our brand and that's what we eventually did we created this nice sort of green color another step in this is actually creating a mind map this is part of my moo boarding stage I write their name or what they identify is as the middle part here and out here we write things to do with the company now this could be construed as nouns it could be anything I've just written you know a letics flag creative space the outdoors now the flag came around because I was thinking you know it's sporty there's a flag and obviously the client said as well during the first conversation they wanted to have a flag in their design so from that point of doing the Mind map I have a bunch of words that have helped me out with this to show my mental scape with this I go ahead and create some ideas here now I'm not showing you everything that we have with the client because I don't think they want you to see absolutely everything this is actually a different version of the inspiration board that I did within our online course where I go through this project in a hell of a lot more detail called logo launch check it out down below but essentially here we create some ideas or we get some inspiration online now a lot of people don't like to do this but I do collecting images of other logos icons and things like that can help you really identify what you like about a certain icon obviously we're working with a lype so what do we do this is part of it and one thing that struck me was the flag ideas how do we get the flag inside of the logo if we're creating a logo type it will need to have a flag and Logo itself or could the RB in the flag or the flag be on top of rally having this inspiration here means that we're not creating designs in a vacuum we actually have a place of inspiration like I love the type inside of this I love the fact that it all connected in this lowercase serap thing it's very friendly which works well it's old school this new dribble logo that they brought out really nice monoline script has a bit of an edge to it at the top and the angle going up is nice and friendly but the one that I really liked was this damn good one you can see it was really big strong works by itself however there was no identifying marks of a flag but I did see that we could add a flag in here if we wanted to on the top or the bottom this this one here is a bit of a joke one but I put one in there for when I'm showing the client to really see their reactions to them now this is quite different to what we do at the end however the bay shapes looked cool obviously some flag ideas here here and here this is the one that really got me going I love the idea that this one was actually morphing by itself and this is where we took one of our largest parts of inspiration for this project because this design here is really nice now one that everyone needs including myself is a website now Squarespace is sponsoring this video because as creative people like yourselves it doesn't matter what stage you are in this creative Journey you need a place to call home online and that's where your website is Squarespace is brilliant for everyone not only because they have thousands of award-winning fully customizable templates but also because it's affordable for you you don't have to know coding you can just be a visual graphic designer like myself I don't know a win coding and you can design the best website use a template fully edit it in a really intuitive way create a contact page stick up your portfolio boom you're done you can even buy your domain names your Google workspace Suite on there it's insane it's so convenient and so easy it's it's all in one place something that I used to do quite a lot that you guys can do is sell templates sell fonts sell procreate brushes all through your Squarespace website so you could have like a portfolio page of com page and a storefront as well where people can buy pieces of work from you to make you that little bit of money now if you want 10% off square space click the link down below or use the code that you see and that 10% happens once the website's live so when you want it to go live you can put that 10% on and before that you can actually design it for free so go and check out the trial and when you're ready to go live hit that 10% discount on okay next step sketching for the initial ideas I always work fast it's quantity over quality for the most part I will get my pen and pencil out of real paper a lot of the time and I'll start just drawing writing the word rally in many different ways I wanted to see how the letters combined together we wanted to make it look like it was fresh that it was wasn't a font wanted to look ornate and just sick we just wanted to make it look good so i' continue to ideate for as long as I could once I've drawn rally out many times I know what works and what doesn't work so then I bring my favorite ideas normally two or three of them into a document however because rally actually is a creative agency I felt very comfortable sharing them my bad ideas to kind of prove Concepts to them the main ideas that I had were this one here which is taken with a font called noei and that is from rajes radut my favorite font designer and this one is very clean but we had the flag here now I like that idea because it was clean you could read it very easily it was very scalable you could scale this bad boy down to you know very small and you could read it was rally it just looked nice and it worked within the color schemes that I sort of chose for it it looked really good here's another version of it but just slightly thinner weighted the next one we did this sort of groovy font because I knew that if we were going to do a flag I wanted to try and create a really groovy tight face with the letter R and you may have seen this r a few times before but this R is very custom made it's an icon and it stands by itself as well as works with the type so I was very excited excited for it but unfortunately even though it looks cool here with it in 3D which I wanted to show them it was a bit too gvy it didn't match so I went to a monoline approach one thing that was really important for the design process in general was to make sure the rally was bespoke and it had to look bespoke it couldn't look like a font right so we tried this but problem is create an r that is distinguished and it wraps around it just looks terrible so I showed them my terrible options here of what we could do so it looks like I'm presenting these but I'm not these are the ones I said these aren't very good however I did show them this idea here now this idea works really well because it kind of angles to the top however the background color was a problem there is a company called balet Sports and it looked very similar to that and that because of the background color right and because this is very you know rugged right now I didn't do any sort of refinements to it it is Vector but sketched up as well it looked too much like Bal another iteration I did of this was to make it more uniform was to create this sort of sweep here this is a prototype of I was trying to create like this to be a flag in the wind but it just didn't look great either it kind of looked like a nose or something really weird around it I wasn't too happy other sketches that we had down here you can see that the Stacked method doesn't work but I did have this sort of brain crushing mindbending idea from the inspiration board here instead of trying to put a flag into the design made it act like what a flag would do so wave in the wind so I decided you know I'm going to just mess around with this and do some research and development some R&D on this work out if we could create the word rally into something and we had these ideas where I used envelope distort to like mess around with the actual design and when I started sketching I sketched all the way to the point until where I got this image here of this R I drew the letter R and then I made the flag out of it and I I kind of liked this I knew this could work so I brought it into Illustrated like you see here I created this didn't look great but then I created this this looks a lot better it looks very encompassing I like the idea of it a lot until we got to this point here where I started creating more variants and I'm not sure why there's no artboard on these but let's just create one there so we're here we have one solid idea the guys over at mayel rally really like this idea because although it's very basic and simple it worked really well but there were things that we could do to further distinguish this icon so I brought it into this like Illustrated document here I started seeing what we could do with the flag itself I wanted to see how the r could interact with the flag to make it look like it's more encompassing so I created a bunch of variations we see here from number one R is cut out of the flag see here that the r stem connection is going into the flag and it's sort of distorting the flag at the same time and over here we have a round cut from the r which makes makes sense and then we start going in and over and over until we get to a point over here where it starts working well in the end this is the one that we chose because it worked really well the r was legible the flag looked like it was waving in the wind and you could tell it was a flag it looked so nice and it worked well but this was the start of the refinement process so what I did was we brought it here I've used this uh griding part here to grid it up to make sure each line is in proportion making sure that it fits well this just shows the client how well it works when we're designing something or in the end product now for the logo type itself that is the icon the logo type itself isn't being used very much and there's a reason for it it doesn't really work very well the art is just brilliant for what it is made by rally is quite a long name so having an icon with that just makes sense I just refer it to as rally but here is one that we created which has the sort of our coming in from the Y we have this one here created as well now in the course that I created called logo launch I actually show you how to design this logo type and any other logo type from start to finish in more detail but let me just say it does take a while to get to a point where it is fully ready the great thing about this is that it's very scalable you can read that no matter what scale it's at even ridiculously small sizes it's been grided up so it works in a variety of different places so even though it's quite rectangular in its bounding box you see here we can actually drag it up to the top left and scale it down proportionately so it looks good at the top left same with this one actually we can drag this one proportionally up there if we use the dimension tool we can see that it's All Uniform so 38 pixels 38 pixels and I'm betting you anything this will be probably 37 pixels or 39 yeah that's 39 that's the offset that I've created there let's try by this one over here 39 and the offset brilliant so this design was created here as an idea of what the logo type process could be the main thing to keep in mind when doing brand identity is that a lot of it is research a lot of it is discovering new ways of seeing the same old thing and highlighting that and a lot of the time is spent on trial and error and that's perfectly fine what you see on Instagram what you see everywhere else of people just adding a little Dot and it's finished that just makes for a really cool satis in video and there's nothing wrong with that honestly I love those here is their website in all its Glory it was loaded in you can see the rally logo there which really nicely The Branding is so clean and crisp I love what they've done with the website now you might be wondering well why have they got you to do the logo why didn't they do it themselves they're a creative agency I get this question a lot because we do design logos for a lot of creative agencies and the main reason is because designing a logo for yourself is a lot more difficult than designing it for someone else a lot of the time creative agencies even designers brand identity designers will actually ask for my opinion on their work or they'll invite me to work with them on a project or to give them some logo design ideas some brand identity ideas because I see things from a different perspective I have different experiences and that's what helps with a brand identity project so guys make sure you go and follow made by rally they're insanely good and nice people and I hope this video has helped you inspired you uh giving you a different perspective on brand identity as a whole and how we create brand identities for our clients there's a lot more that goes into it that I wish I could go into but I'll do that in another video for a different type of client project that we're currently working on now so thank you so much for watching and I'll catch you in the next video like And subscribe see you soon [Music] goodbye [Music] n

Channel: Will Paterson

Views: 25,372

Keywords: design, graphic, art, photoshop, illustrator, adobe, graphic design, funny design fails, adobe photoshop, adobe illustrator, day in the life of a graphic designer, 2024 graphic design, brand identity, will peterson, will patterson, will pattison, will patison, visual identity, business of design, will paterson logo design, how to find graphic design clients, adobe systems, graphic design trends 2024, visual communication, creative brief, 2020 client work logo, design trends 2022

Id: tNAEu4JPiZ4

Length: 18min 14sec (1094 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 07 2024