Designing a Conceptual Brand | Graphic Design Portfolio

when you're just starting out as a designer and you're wanting to build up a solid portfolio to attract clients the best way to do that is actually through conceptual projects and so in today's video i'm going to take you along with me as i tackle a conceptual brief and build out a brand identity from start to finish let's get into it okay so we're gonna tackle this project in three parts first we're gonna define a little bit of a strategy that's gonna guide us on our creative decisions in the future right now on the screen you can see a snapshot of how i've broken up some of the key aspects of a very very simple brand strategy we've gone over some of the goals we've identified the key audience for the brand and we've defined some values and character traits for the brand itself now it's key to keep in mind that obviously the the strategy process in real life can take a couple of days and sometimes even weeks my strategy process personally actually takes quite a while for me to work through with the clients and often a couple of strategy sessions phone calls etc to really work through how we define the brand but for the sake of this conceptual project we're going to keep things nice and simple the second part of the project is going to be me diving in to the actual logo design process so we're going to sketch out some ideas we're going to follow the mood board and we're really going to follow what a typical design process would look like for me then we're going to dive into creating a couple of extra assets for the business and really building it out so that it's not just a logo we're going to create some stuff that are really going to help the brand grow in the future so i'm thinking maybe some illustration maybe some graphics some cool icons i don't know yet we're going to jump in and have a look and then we're going to pull it all together in a presentation so that we can display the work really nicely for potential clients inside our portfolio so with that being said let's dive straight into the first part of the project and we're going to get going with creating mood boards so without further ado let's meet the imaginary brand that we're going to be tackling in today's video benji's dilly and co is first and foremost a weekly subscription service providing meal kits and pre-packed lunch boxes that bring the fun back into food for the whole family they're a small business founded by foodie couples sam and lisa who have two kids and a dog named benji they founded benji's after realizing that the best way to get their kids to really enjoy food was to have them involved in the process of making it their meal kits are all about simple easy and fun food experiences that kids of all ages can get involved with their focus is on creating a happy healthy relationship between kids and food they are looking to grow their business in the coming year by increasing their pricing and attracting a larger audience of parents they need a visual identity that'll position them as trustworthy fun and attractive to both parents and kids putting their brand values front and center because the brand lives mostly online the identity will need to work well in a digital space but will also need to be able to be translated onto packaging and products as they intend to open a physical deli where parents can come to collect pre-made meals pick up fresh produce and grab a quick coffee while the kids explore the food craft section the first aspect of my creative process would be creating a or defining a creative direction and this usually takes the form of a mood board of some kind and i really enjoy this process because it allows me to really explore a bunch of different directions before i actually get started sketching and overthinking myself into a spiral so if you're really looking to get unstuck and you're looking to fight off creative block then having a look at some visual inspiration and just gathering ideas and even creating as many different mood boards as you possibly can is a really great way to get into the habit of defining clear visual directions so what we've got over here is the pinterest board for this brand and what i focused on doing is pulling together a whole bunch of references based on the key aspects that we want to keep in mind and what i'm starting to see here is that there's a couple of different ways we can take the brand or a couple of different directions that we can take this in but before we go into those i want to just mention some key aspects that you want to include in your mood boards when you're presenting to clients you want to make sure that you're including aspects that are going to help them visualize the brand and what it can become so you want to include some type references you absolutely want to look at color references imagery graphics all of those kinds of things and then you also want to make sure that you're including a couple of references for logo styles as well as potential packaging ideas if you have a product based business including packaging ideas is going to really be very key because when you're designing the branding side of things or the visual identity side of things you need to take into consideration how well it's going to apply to potential packaging in the future and by including some ideas like we've got this one over here for a box or a book you can really show your client what you're imagining this identity to become and they can sort of see those things and decide that definitely feels right or that's not quite what i was imagining and it helps you sort of weave out those interpretations early on in the project so i've gone ahead and created a nice comprehensive pinterest board with all my different references and all my different ideas and the key part of this is to remember i'm not trying to overthink it here i'm really just gathering everything and anything that inspires me and sort of feels right for the brand and i'm going to sort it out later on in the process so what we do from here is i start then pulling images into a folder on my desktop and i start sorting through them to work out what my different concepts might be i'll then jump into indesign where i'm gonna start trying to weed out two or three different directions for this brand and i landed on three key directions from my insights this first direction was something a little bit different for a kid and food brand i thought what if we were to take the more refined approach and definitely tackle this very modern mom situation where we've got everybody really enjoying these neutral refined colors and the sort of montessori method and you know trying not to over stimulate children and really going for that sort of soft pastel very illustrated friendly look and this was an interesting direction for me because usually when you think about food brands you do think about color and vibrancy and health and all of those things so this was an interesting departure from that and i was really curious about exploring this direction the second direction was far more in line with what you would expect it was far more vibrant and friendly but it had some interesting structure to it and my idea here was to really focus on these bright vibrant colors that might be a bit more versatile for kids of all ages and it might actually be a little bit less sort of juvenile than this one ironically you know even though this one has a much more neutral refined palette it definitely felt younger whereas this one i feel could potentially attract slightly older children as well especially with the little mascots and maybe the more friendly approach something they might enjoy a little bit more but i also wanted to balance it out with very sort of flat graphics and illustrations which might be a really good idea for the packaging and then the third direction was similar to the second one but the difference was that we had more texture to the illustration style and a little bit more of this kind of collage style logo so it was going to be a little bit more of the idea of sort of packing things on top of each other and pulling sort of things together like a kid would doing any crafts or arts or something like that so this one was a little bit more geometric in in style and the illustration style was going to include a little bit more contrast so a little bit more texture and maybe more focused on characters and interesting little graphic bits and pieces a lot more shapes involved and a lot more pattern whereas this one was definitely more solid and a little bit more refined in that sense so these were the three directions and anybody who follows me on instagram will know that i posted these three mood boards a little while ago and asked you to vote on the best one because we don't actually have a real client i was curious to see which one you guys were the most attracted to and it was a really close call but in the end direction number two one and so this is the one that we're gonna go for when we create the brand identity so without further ado let's jump into my sketching process i'm gonna get out my ipad and i'm gonna go ahead and do some sketching and see if i can come up with a cool logo for benjies okay so i've got my ipad out and i'm gonna do some sketching now i like to start all of my logo designs either in a an actual sketchbook with a pen and paper or i'm going to grab my ipad and sketch on there it just really depends on what i'm feeling on the day but i always recommend to designers start your process with your pencil and paper before you start working on illustrator or wherever you want to use for your vectorizing of your logo start on paper and even if you know that you want to use a font or something like that you want to just try and get some ideas out onto paper often this is sometimes even just the illustration style that i want to use for some of the graphics or i'm going to brainstorm some icons or something like that but really the gist of it is the best way to get your ideas out onto paper or to even start exploring ideas you didn't know you had was to really sit down and sketch it doesn't matter if you are absolutely rubbish at drawing this process is really just a way to exercise your creativity and get your brain and ideas flowing i like to do the rule of eights where i essentially draw a grid on the page and i do eight blocks and i try and come up with eight completely different logo concepts different type styles different icons different graphics etc and once i've done that and i've sort of decided on a direction that i actually like the most then i'll open up a new page or open up a new file on procreate on my ipad and actually do some more official sketching so my sketching process really does depend on the brand itself i will more often than not use just a pencil brush and i'll do some basic sketching and i might start off with one idea that goes a certain direction and then choose to explore a different direction or whatever it might be but that sketching process is where i really explore my ideas so i'm gonna go ahead and do that and see what i come up with see if i can come up with anything really clever okay now that i've done some sketching and i'm more or less happy with some of the concepts i've come up with i'm gonna pull things into illustrator and take it from there so i'm going to walk you through my process i'm going to take you through a little bit of my thought process and what i'm going to do with this logo and some of the ideas i have and then we're going to see where this goes so let's dive straight into illustrator okay so i'm sitting here and i've brought in my sketches and the first thing i want to mention is the idea so i started off with some sort of thinking that i'll probably do like a more hand-drawn thing and i was going okay you know it's a fun it's a friendly brand and maybe like a handwritten logo would look really great but then started realizing that it doesn't really suit the mood board and really wanted to do something that was a bit more bold and a bit more bubbly i thought that might feel a bit more right for the brand so i started exploring slightly more bold i did have a look at doing the logo all in uppercase that was my original thinking but you can see in the sketching process why my brain went no i don't think uppercase is going to work it's too strong it's too masculine i think it needs to be a little bit more friendly and a little bit more approachable but still really easy to apply to a bunch of different supporting materials so then i started going for this sort of lowercase look over here and i thought yeah that's definitely the right approach i think that's a bit closer started exploring a couple of different bees and looking at different ways of doing that and thinking okay i i really suck at doing bees for some reason i don't know but then ended up playing with these concepts down here and i really like where this is going i then had a bit of a strange thought a bit of an epiphany and went what if i could do something fun and playful with this logo and actually bring in a food aspect or an element to the design and so i came up with the carrot in place of the eye now i will leave it up to you guys to decide whether or not that is that whether that's going to work or not i don't know we're going to play with it and have a look and see so i definitely want to start bringing these different concepts in to illustrator itself and now how i'm going to do that is i always keep sort of an original copy of the illustration just on my artboard so that i don't have to sort of keep importing it if i don't like what i've done so i'm gonna take this and i'm probably gonna go into my image trace settings and now usually depending on how you set up illustrator you know it'll give you a bunch of different things that you can do right off the bat depending on what you've selected i've got image trace as something that comes up often because i use it quite a lot when i'm bringing in graphics from procreate and really what i want to do is i just want to pick um something that's going to work and for me now there's a bunch of different ones that you can try i usually end up with silhouettes or sketched art but for this one because there's quite a bit of texture in the logo i think what i'm gonna try is black and white logo and see how that looks now my intention is to see how the expanded version looks see if i like it if i don't like it what i'm probably going to do is trace over it using a brush or the pencil tool inside illustrator because i want that sort of hand drawn look but i don't i don't like what illustrators expand version is doing with the letters here so the first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to try and play with this a bit more and i'm actually gonna see if i can get it to look slightly better now i want to first make sure that my expand stuff is my image trace stuff is inside my toolbar so i'm going to bring that in and i'm going to just pop it here and now i can start playing with the different settings here and i think i'm actually going to go down to sketched arched and give that a try because it usually gives me a bit more to work with and now the the lower you bring the threshold um the less illustrator fills out the drawing so you can start seeing there's like way more texture going on here it's a lot less smooth so the higher you make it like the more it fills it in so i do definitely think somewhere in the middle is probably good and then you can go to advanced here and i've clicked ignore white so that it doesn't expand the background you can also fill in the strokes and see what that does this is really a process of exploring and i promise you i don't have like a full-blown foolproof method for this um it's really just a case of experimenting and trying out what works and what doesn't work and seeing if you can come up with something that looks right now i can definitely already tell that this is not really giving me the result that i want um and even though i'm trying a bunch of different things it's still not really giving me kind of the texture that i want and sometimes when you're bringing in things that are really texturized into illustrator it doesn't always work and i'm sure that there's ways of doing this but i'm already a little bit irritated with this whole process and i'm gonna go you know what i actually think a nice idea might be to just expand it and then to play with a pencil tool and smoothing tool to see if i can get it a little bit more in line with what i actually feel like and if i go back to the mood board over here um what i'm really looking for is these really smooth outlines so even though the text itself is going to be quite wobbly and flexible and hand drawn i definitely want smooth outlines because the intention here is you know easy it's supposed to be you know really approachable and easy and it's supposed to sort of represent just slapping something together and it's going to be 15 or 20 minutes and then you've got a meal that your family loves so i really want that to come through in this process so i'm gonna spend some time doing this and i'll check back in with you once i've got something better to work with i'm jumping into illustrator now and i'm basically going to spend some time working with this logo so my first thinking is that i really want to try and expand this out but i already can tell that the level of detail here is going to be too much so i know already that i'm going to end up with some really strange textures so i think what i'm gonna do is i'm going to drop down the opacity of this and then i think i'm just going to lock it and key to locking something is just command 2 if you're on a mac and i think it's ctrl 2 if you're on a pc but basically i'm just going to lock this so that it doesn't move around and then what i'm going to do is i'm going to take my pencil tool and i'm just going to make sure that i've got let's try paintbrush see what happens here so i think as far as i know you can double click on a tool and you can come in and smooth out basically what you're doing and i want to drop this down to about 10 pixels and then i want to give this a try so now this is gonna smooth out what i'm doing nicely um and i can always fix this at a later stage but basically i'm just trying to give myself something to work with here now you can see that these are all lines so what i want to do is i actually want to work with the shapes themselves because then i can use the pencil tool and i can use the curvature tool etc to edit the actual paths that i'm dealing with okay so if you are ever working in illustrator and for some reason you can't see all of these lovely little blue lines which show you where everything is when you click on it then you can go to view and just make sure that your settings here are right so hide corner widget gradient hide edges hide binding box etc all of those things are features that like show up on your artboard so you can use those to edit what's going on here so now i can see i've got some shapes and what i actually want to do is take all of these and blend them all together so i'm going to use the shape tool and i'm just going to blend them all together so that i've got outlines to work with because now what i can do is direct select each one of these letters and i can go into my pencil tool and i can actually start editing what these outlines look like now this is one of my favorite tools for customizing type when i've done stuff like this because it allows me to really add in shapes and manipulate the letter forms into what i really want them to look like because you know sometimes when you're doing things the pen tool and all of that can be really helpful but i do find it sometimes limiting so it's it can be quite difficult to get things to look exactly the way you want them now the first thing i'm noticing is that there's some seriously like over-indulgent anchor points here so what i'm probably going to do is use the smooth tool and i'm going to just smooth out these lines a bit because the less anchor points that we're working with the better um so i'm just gonna do that smooth things out love the smooth tool best friends forever [Music] all right so here we are i have pulled together sort of a rough version of the logo that i am more or less happy with um because this is a conceptual project i'm not really going to spend too much more time refining it but i'm i'm pretty much happy with where it's at at the moment so i can see that there's a couple of refinements that we need to make and what i've gone and done is chosen three sort of hand-drawn fonts for the supporting text of daily and co now i'm not 100 happy with all of them but i do think that this one over here is probably our best bet so what i'm gonna do is i i really like the sort of like freshness of this type i like that it looks like it was written with a pen and it does feel very family friendly and relaxed so i'm probably going to go with this one i want to sort of sort some stuff out with the layout of the logo as a whole and reposition the carrot slightly and i kind of want to customize this text a little bit so i'm going to go in and do that and then the next step is going to be adding in color and testing out the viability of the logo in terms of all the colors and testing some different versions of the color and then what we're going to do is we're going to jump straight into creating some logo variations and then we're going to test out giving this brand a couple of illustrations and building out a brand pattern something fun that we can add to packaging and then we're gonna dive into doing some mock-ups so let's get into it firstly i think what i'm gonna do here is the first thing that's bothering me is the position of this carrot so i think i'm gonna move it slightly and because i really want it to look like an eye i'm worried that that's dropping down below the baseline here and so it's going to look a bit odd so what i'm going to do is i'm going to make it a bit smaller bring it a bit further up so that it's in line with the bottom of the rest of the text and i think that that is going to look much better i might even bring in the e a little bit and actually drop the size of this down so that we've got a little bit of playfulness happening there now i'm not totally convinced on this s i think we might need to do some more work to it so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna come in with my trusty pencil tool and see if i can make some slight adjustments to this bottom thing here now the reason why i really like the pencil tool when it comes to especially hand drawn type is is that it really does allow you to just fiddle until you are happy um i sometimes find trying to manipulate things with a pen tool really frustrating even though i'm fairly comfortable with the pen tool i find the pen tool is far more useful when you are dealing with slightly more refined typography and you really need that granular control whereas i think personally for like hand-drawn type and things where you are actually quite you know you can get away with having rougher lines and things that are not quite as perfect then your pencil tool is probably your best bet um as you can see here i am having a bit of a fight with it though and that's quite normal because this is what happens when we're dealing with cool custom types i'm going to actually shove this in manually like that and then i think we're good to go on that s i know it's not perfect but it's not supposed to be so that's cool i do think the angle of it isn't quite right now so i'm gonna just sort of do a little something something okay i think this e is also not too big slightly i don't know we could probably fiddle until the cows come home but we're not gonna do that we're gonna carry on so i think the first thing i'm gonna do is take this type i want to see what a lowercase d looks like and just see how i feel about that i'm definitely feeling better about that i want to see if this font has given me any additional ampersands or whether we've just got the one to work with so this is another trick of mine is i really like looking at the glyphs glyphs available for funds that i download now if you buy really premium fonts from type foundries and things like that they often come with a glyph library like this where you can really explore with the different types of letters so you can see i don't know if you want to pause and just zoom in here but you can see that they've given you like a whole bunch of really cool m's and different types of like ways to do the letters so if i bring in my capital d again i'm actually going to go down and see if i can find maybe an alternative version so you can see here they've given you like a whole bunch of different versions of the d which is actually quite useful so you know i would explore that but i do think that the lowercase is our best option now which one i think that one's probably the best let's have a look at the c and see if we've got some other options there we do okay cool i think i like that nice round one better i'm sure that they've got other ampersands it would be quite weird if they didn't considering they've done this they've gone through the whole effort of creating all these different letter forms i wonder if they're going to give us an extra ampersand i mean they might not because ampersands are quite fiddly aren't they hmm interesting so what's cool is you can actually see here that they've given like if i go down to the bottom here they've given you quite like fun like they've given you little twirly twirlies and you can do all sorts of interesting things but i want to keep this quite simple so i'm happy with this ampersand i think it's good by the way if you are looking for the glyphs in typography it's this little icon over here and if you don't have it in your tool panel all you have to do is go up to window go down to type and then you're going to click on glyphs over there which will then give you the glyph panel if you're looking for that so now what i'm going to do is i'm quite happy with this but now a trick with my logo design process i never design over the top of something else i will always make a duplicate and keep the original somewhere on my artboard so that i don't lose it so that i can always go back and revert so you'll see my artboard so far has got copies and copies and copies and copies because basically in my design process i always go with making copies first and then designing on top of those copies so that i can go back so what i'm going to do now is i'm going to go up to type and i'm going to create outlines from this so that i can come in and manipulate this text a little bit what i'm hoping to do is fill this curved space just a little bit more so i'm going to ungroup this shift command g for ungrouping and i want to move these things around ever so slightly so that we're actually filling up this space this curved space a little bit more so the first thing i'm going to do is i'm just going to cheat a bit and do that now i don't want this to look totally crazy i don't want to basically mess up the layout to the extent where it looks like it's just been thrown onto the page but i do want to just fill up this curved space slightly so i'm gonna just sort of do that and then we're gonna have a look at it and i definitely think we are on to something here i'm starting to wonder because we've got a capital c whether or not i shouldn't just explore what that capital d might look like as well so what i'm going to do is i am going to take that i'm going to copy and paste it over there i'm going to take out the d here um then i'm gonna expand u and i'm gonna oops i'm gonna just make sure i haven't manipulated the type too much there we go and i'm gonna see if i can bring this in because it might actually work better i don't know guys what do you think scream at me in the comments i'm gonna go with a capital d i do think it works a bit better i really like the small one but because we've got a capital c do you know what i can't decide let's make a copy so another comparison trick let's make a copy i'm gonna delete this one i'm gonna oops group that again command d i mean command g for grouping and then i'm gonna bring the little lowercase one back in and see how i feel and maybe what we can do is actually make the c a bit smaller that looks horrendous let's do it the proper way we're gonna bring in the actual font type in a lowercase c bring you in let's expand okay people i definitely think the top one is working the best so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna move you out the way so that you're still there i can come back if i ever change my mind but i'm pretty happy with where this is going so i think what we're gonna do is we're gonna adjust the layout just slightly again and just see if i can get this to look a little bit more like i want it i think we can tilt you a little bit because these guys are all sort of falling over and i don't want them all to be falling over entirely because then the whole thing looks a little bit out of balance so i'm gonna straighten out the oh so what you you sort of don't want to create logos that look like they're falling over because when you try and apply it to anything basically you're going to end up with a situation now i'm going to do a little trick here excuse myself interrupting myself but you're going to end up with situations where your logo just is not working because it looks unbalanced um and that's really not going to help you at all so when you're designing logos even if you're creating like rough versions of the logos you want to create aspects that give it a balanced feel so that even if it is like a playful logo like this where you've got like interesting layouts and things like that you still want to feel like it's balanced or that it's sitting on some sort of shelf and it's got the right sort of shape and the best way to test that is to grab a rectangle put it in outline mode draw a rectangle around your logo and then pull it in so that it's touching the top both sides and the bottom and what you kind of want is you want sort of equal spacing so i'm looking at the bottom left and right corners and i'm seeing that there's equal spacing there and i'm seeing top and bottom right and top left are also rather equal and it does look more or less like there's a straight line and the logo could sort of be sitting in a space and that's how i know that the logo is going to actually work and that it's going to sort of feel balanced enough now what i'm going to do is the zoom test and i'm going to zoom quite far out of the logo i'm going to probably pull it into a nice open space and i'm looking at the logo really small to see if i can actually read delhi and co and so far so good i can read it i think it's quite legible it's gonna work on a nice small scale but the first thing that i'm noticing is that the b is looking way too big so i think what we're gonna do is we're gonna make some adjustments to that and then we're gonna move on to testing color okay i've had some time now to just sort of fiddle with the rest of the logo and i'm i'm quite happy with where it's at at the moment so i'm really happy to move on to color now so what i've done is i've pulled in the mood board and i've just used the eyedropper tool and i've created some swatches and i'm exploring some colors and what i've done is i've dragged the logo just as it all is onto each of these color blocks and i'm testing out the colors now and this is something you really want to do because even in a mood board you could be looking at these colors going what a what a flipping cool color palette like this is going to be perfect and then when it comes to implementing choosing background colors and checking the contrasts and making sure that it works you'll often see that some stuff doesn't work as well as you'd originally planned it so what i'm doing here is i'm basically validating that so i've pulled a bunch of colors and originally i really wanted to use this super dark green and the problem for me is is that the dark green it it works but it's not quite feeling right i love the freshness of the other colors especially this coral and the yellow but the screen is not really working for me so i think the main thing i'm going to try and do is find a different color for this green now we've got a couple of options inside this artboard we've got this darker teal but that's too close to here so i'm going to try pulling in this green or this one maybe um that's quite interesting otherwise what we could probably try is maybe a green from here so a little bit more lime but see it doesn't work with a yellow and really you want you can obviously sort of set in your guidelines that not all of the colors have to be paired together like certain colors can go and certain colors don't but really in order to give your client the best possible chance of success you want to try and make sure that all the colors go together as well as possible um rather than sort of telling them what they can and can't do you want to just have them you know have the most flexibility so i definitely think we're closer with one of these greens and i actually think this screen is probably going to be best because it looks quite playful but now it's not quite the right tone for me it's a bit green i mean it's a bit gray so what i'm going to do is i'm going to double click on the swatch and i'm going to come into this panel over here now when i'm worried about the saturation of something or i think that it's a bit too muddy it's usually because it's got too much gray in it and so what i'm going to do is i'm going to come over here to hsb and the s is your saturation now instead of dragging my dot around i'm actually going to just affect the saturation as you can see it moves the dot over to the right and it gives it a bit more punch by doing this i'm not affecting any of the other values i'm just affecting saturation whereas if you start dragging the dot around you're actually going to end up you know changing some of the other values so i'm just just worried about saturation at this stage i'm not too worried about anything else i think that the hue itself like where it is on the color board right now is great but i do think it needs a bit of saturation so let's try that and see okay so that's definitely feeling a little bit better it's feeling much more grassy green um and it's looking quite fresh so i'm happy with that what i am gonna do is test some other colors on it so the blue works really nicely the coral isn't the best contrast but what i'll probably do is state that that's one of the color combinations that we won't do so maybe the green works really well with the pink so that's really cool and it works really well with the beige of course the beigey pink creamy color so that's cool and it also works really nicely with the yellow so i think we've got a winning color palette coming through here um we've got the sort of softness here which is quite nice for example my thinking here is is that these sort of colors are going to be more for like their desserts maybe some sweeter things maybe some bakery things because it's got like a bit more of a sweet touch and then you know veggies and healthy meals and then a couple of extra extra extra extras so we've got some nice flexibility here in terms of the color pad i'm enjoying that what i would like to try is um an orange because we've got a carrot in the logo and i'm thinking you know it might actually work quite nicely if we have an orange so i'm gonna just quickly i'm gonna copy this yellow up there so i don't lose it but then what i think i'm gonna do is grab the two yellows and then i'm gonna test out an orange so there's one here which is quite nice okay all right so that's quite nice now what i'm gonna do is i think i want to see what this orange looks like no i hate that that's too dark um and there's like a burnt orange here no maybe like a more mustard no that's not quite right no maybe maybe this orange it's like quite a that's more brown than anything else so that's not great maybe this orange is actually the one oh okay right again the coral seems to be causing the most issues but i do really love this color but what if we were to grab it and turn it into this more saturated version okay the color that's bothering me the most is probably this one so i'm actually going to get rid of this color and see if i can expand this out because this is going to be like our baseline tone which i quite like it's going to be like our strong neutral so you always want like a strong neutral that's going to work really nicely with basically everything oh guys i think i like this this is looking so fresh and friendly so nice okay let's just expand this out quickly and see what our turquoise blue looks like and we might have a winner all right we definitely have a winner i think on the orange we'll definitely use maybe the cream version of the logo okay we've got some nice we've got some cool color palettes going on here okay so i'm happy with the color i think what i would like to do is be have a bit of fun let's expand this out just to have a look at what's going on here and i'd really like to implement maybe some of the color into the carrot itself just as a fun alternative so i'm going to jump in here and now the main issue is is that the leaves are connected to the actual carrot so i'm going to just quickly create a little bit of a divide here by using my pencil tool and then i'm just going to create like a little line here okay to turn that into an let's see if this works can i okay so what i just did there was i did an outline i did just a little line to divide the two shapes and now what i'm doing is selecting that selecting the main shape and i'm also selecting the line and then i'm going to use my shape builder tool to separate out the shape so you can see here if i go over the top of them i can see here so i'm actually going to build a secondary shape on top of this carrot then i'm going to use my direct selection tool and i'm going to grab that bottom of the carrot i'm going to go back to my main selection tool and i'm actually going to cut the shape out oops what's going on here let's see oh guys i'm trying to show you how to do something and it's not working all right so we're going to go back and do that again just double check i don't have the background selected because this might cause some issues so command 2 is going to lock that background color for me while i do this i'm going to come in here i'm going to just go into my selection i'm going to go here and then i'm going to use my shape builder tool and then i'm going to pull this shape out there we go and i'm going to delete these because they look a bit odd so now what's that what's happened is it's left some weird shapes behind so i'm just gonna come in here and delete those okay and then i'm gonna go out of my selection command f to paste exactly where it was so paste in front and then i'm gonna go grab my orange okay i don't hate it i don't hate it i think it's interesting it could be quite nice for something like packaging okay so we've got some cool logo stuff to work with here i do think that the solid color version of the logo is probably the best option and it's going to be the most flexible you really do want the logo to be able to work in a single color rather than sort of having it have to be in two colors but i do like that option for maybe some packaging or something like that and you know what i can do is actually inject a little bit of extra color and select you and give you the lighter green that actually works a lot better okay cool so this is quite exciting now and i'm really liking where this is going the next step for me is now going to be building out a couple of illustration sets and graphics that we can use to build out a brand pattern and do something exciting for the packaging of the product so i'm going to go back to my mood board here and i'm going to have a look at some ideas so my thinking is immediately along the lines of i really like the idea of utensils because i think that food illustrations and ingredients are quite typical and expected but because we're talking about the process of making food and getting the kids involved i think maybe some utensils might be quite nice as well and i'm also thinking in the future if they were to do instruction cards or something like that about the tools you might need then it might be quite nice for them to have a set of illustrations for forks knives blenders anything like that that they might need as part of your tool kit when making the various meals so i think what we're gonna do is we're gonna go ahead and do some of those so i think what i'm gonna do is just for the sake i'm going to do because most of these illustrations are very flat and they don't require a whole lot of sort of manipulating i'm actually going to do the illustrations using my pencil tool and i'm just going to freehand them inside illustrator typically with illustrations i would usually do them with my ipad on procreate but because i'm not looking for a super textured approach i'm going to give illustrator a go i'm also looking for those sort of like imperfect edges i don't need to use the pen tool anything like that i'm basically just going to try and create some cool shapes so let's get into it and see what we can come up with i think the first thing i'm going to do is i'm probably going to move this logo out the way just for now sometimes when i'm working i like to work with the actual colors that i'm going to see so i like working with this nice peachy cream background so i think looking at this reference i definitely think i'm going to give it a try to do maybe like a knife or something i'm going to give this a quick try we're going to see if it works if it doesn't work then i will jump onto my ipad and do the illustrations that way so let's give it a go what does a knife have so a knife has a little handle usually um okay so it's already given us a color to work with here um and then maybe we can do guys we're creating like a wow what is that okay so maybe what we'll do i think i'm already like hating everything so what we might do i'm just thinking is i might jump into my ipad and actually do the illustrations there um but first i think what we'll do is i'll give it one last go but i'm going to use a paint brush instead and maybe i'll try and draw the top of a fork so let's try this bear with me while we try this okay so this already looks like a trident so i'm going to give up and i'm going to jump into it into my into procreate with my ipad and apple pencil the point is is i really like adding illustrations to my branding projects and it's something that i have always done and probably something i will always do because i am an illustrator at heart so i love graphics i love illustration i love doing things like that and it's key to note that if you're one of those designers who don't draw and you don't like to draw or you don't feel like you're very good at it it doesn't mean you're a bad designer and it doesn't mean you can't have illustration in your branding projects you can partner with an illustrator and get them to do some illustration for you or you can look on sites like envato elements creative market etc you can actually purchase the licensing rights to illustration packs that have already been created and i think that this is really good to remember because what you're trying to do is not limit yourself you can always build these things into your client projects if you sort of as you get more experienced you'll be able to sort of work out what the project might require in order to be really good or really solid you might already know that you need illustration for me in my mind i knew this project was going to require illustration just from looking at the mood board and from the original project requirements and so i knew that i was going to need illustration now this doesn't always it's quite difficult to know this in the beginning especially when you're starting out so you might find that you end up with a bunch of scope creep like you need illustrations but you don't want to charge your client extra i think it's always good to build in a buffer zone for graphics so in the early stages of my process i always build in a couple of additional hours or costing for creating graphics and even in the beginning stages even though i'm an illustrator sometimes i can't get the style right sometimes i just can't get myself into it and i need to buy an illustration pack or i need to hire an illustrator to work with me to do it just right and i'll do that and i use that buffer that i build in in the invoicing process and i use that portion of the project to hire out an illustrator so that i can get the best result for my clients so with that being said i'm going to whip out my ipad and i'm going to give it a go to go and draw some more illustrations so i'll see you back here when i've done that one of the most important parts of presenting a visual identity to clients is actually showing them what it's going to look like in real life and my favorite way of doing this is using mock-ups and what i'm doing here is basically applying the designs that we've already done and i'm creating some really interesting mock-ups that are hopefully going to give this a client give this client an idea of what i'm envisioning for the brand in the future so it's not just enough to show the client just a static logo because it it's really difficult for clients to imagine what this might look like on things like packaging and business collateral etc so what i'm doing is i'm taking the illustrations we've created and sort of designing these around certain packaging elements and one of the key things i wanted to showcase was what one of their pre-packaged meals would look like how we plan to use typography and illustration and the color to represent what the brand means and the feel that we're really going for this is something that's you know part of the experience and part of why the brand is going to be chosen by certain people so it's going to give off this playful and fun feel as well as being engaging both for adults and for children because they're the ones who are going to be interacting with all the ingredients and things like that so it's really important to think these things through when you're presenting a brand you want to think about the application of the color it's no good to sort of just create a mood board and then just assume the color is going to work and like you saw earlier in this video when we were playing with the color palette you could see that certain colors were working and some weren't and it's the same thing when you're dealing with packaging and markups and things like that is that you're really testing the color and you're wanting to see what works and what doesn't and what adjustments need to be made so i'm going to go ahead and create a couple of these mock-ups and then what we're going to do is translate all of these items into a brand presentation and send that off to the client okay we're finally back having put together all the mock-ups and really made up our minds about what we're going to present so what i'm going to do now is basically put it all together in a presentation which will go to the client i think the key to remember here is is that when you're presenting a logo to a client you can't just take logo jpegs pop them into an email and send them off and i hope that your client is going to understand how to give effective feedback or how to basically understand what it is that you've done so in the presentation what we're basically going to focus on is giving them an indication of our thought process and in this logo presentation we really want to make sure that we're going back over the strategy that we've reminded them of what our goals are for the presentation or for the branding process in general we're going to remind them of who their audience is and then we're going to present the logo and the brand to them in a way that's going to help them really imagine and feel what this brand might look like in real life now i'm going to do this presentation anyway even though this is a conceptual client because it's really good practice for me to get used to how to articulate my thinking when it comes to design as a designer it's very easy to just say oh well i did it because it felt right and really the difference between just being a good designer and being a good service provider and a good brand designer means that you are able to explain your thinking to your clients and i think this is really important and it's a skill we all need to learn as designers we all need to learn how to actually talk about our ideas and our creative decisions and connect those design decisions to things that make sense to a client somebody who doesn't necessarily understand how design works per se so that's what we're doing in this presentation and we're really just finding beautiful ways to present the logo and some of the more important parts of presenting the logo is actually explaining with visual references so you want to pull out certain design points from the logo explain why you made certain decisions and you're really walking them through this and my biggest piece of advice for presenting to clients is to do it in person try and do it over a video call if you can't actually meet them in person or try and do a video walkthrough using a platform like loom where you can actually talk through the presentation and paste it the way that you'd like to do that it just helps the client see what they're supposed to see in the right order and if those are not possible and you are terribly uncomfortable in front of the camera then that's okay a presentation like this with all the explanations and all your thinking is gonna help the client understand why you've done what you've done and it's gonna get you more likely closer to a yes than what you would do is if you just sent a logo jpeg for example via an email i also want to keep in mind that i'm creating you know mock-ups and things like that that are going to look good on my website or my portfolio because i really want to showcase to potential clients that i can think through all these different solutions also during this process i'm keeping in mind because it's a conceptual brand that i need things that are going to look good in my portfolio so i really want to showcase to potential clients that i can think through all these different scenarios and solutions and design a result that's really going to work i've thought about everything from packaging through to business cards etc so that potential clients can really see how i go from a design process from start to finish and hopefully that'll inspire them to reach out to work with me [Music] okay guys that about wraps it up for this video and i hope that you're feeling inspired and excited to tackle your own conceptual projects for your portfolio if you'd actually like to try this project we've left a brief down in the description below you can download that and actually tackle benji's delhi and co yourself you can use the mood boards that i provided or you can come up with your own style and direction and take the brand in a completely different way so please give it a try i'd really love to see what you create so feel free to tag me on instagram as well as the flux page and let us know when you've created your own version of benji's we'd love to see it and share your work so without further ado thanks so much for watching and we'll see you in the next video cheers [Music] you

Channel: Flux Academy

Views: 178,196

Keywords: graphic design, logo design, brand design, portfolio tutorial, portfolio project, design case study, branding case study, visual identity, graphic design logo

Id: 16lsAeCeCDc

Length: 56min 7sec (3367 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 26 2022