HOW TO: Design a Brand Identity System

[Music] hey guys what's going on Shawn with Butler branding I thought it would be kind of cool to give you an inside look at behind the scenes of part of our process and specifically how do we go from strategy to design a lot of times there's a bit of mystery you know how do you go from a concept to something tangible or something that you can actually see when it comes to graphics and so today we're gonna be sitting with one of our designers Chris Orosco who's the mastermind behind a lot of the designs you've been seeing from Butler in more recent days and we're gonna show you a couple of different approaches that he takes because not every design is the same sometimes there's design for a logo or for an ad or for a publication and so let's kind of pick his brain to see what he's thinking to go from strategy to design come on inside all right guys meet Chris Chris Orosco he is one of the newer members of the butler team and he's the man responsible for a lot of the design work that's been coming out of Butler in more recent days Chris how long have you been doing design I've been designing for about seven years three years professionally okay and so Chris I I put out an interesting ad when we were looking for a graphic designer for help and basically I came up with the ugliest ad design I could think of and I wanted someone to basically tear it apart and make something better and Chris's response was actually the best out of all of them and so when I saw the things that Chris looks for in design that's definitely one of the things that we wanted to bring in-house and so I thought it'd be kind of cool to get a behind-the-scenes look at his process because it's one thing to strategize with clients what conceptually a website should look like or a brand identity system should look like and we try to do our best to take like abstract words or abstract ideas and input words to them and then give them to you and then somehow there's the mystery or magic that you convert that into something that looks beautiful and it's on point with the brand and so I'm interested to see your process and I think that's kind of what we're gonna do today so there's different types of designs that we're gonna be talking about so the first type is what I think is your favorite type of design right which is brand and branding okay so why is it your favorite I just love the freedom that it gives me I think it allows me to show the best that I can do okay and what is like the worst soul-sucking type of work you can usually production like stuff that you don't really get to do anything creative that's just mostly just plugging in information and clicking buttons mindless someone with no talent could do it gosh yeah okay so and we're gonna be using an example today for an actual client of ours mid India Christian mission and so when if you know nothing about an organization so this particular company is we're doing a redesign for and so if you know nothing about an organization what do you as a designer like to receive from the creative director I think a good creative brief is like good design it should be clear concise and to the point I think it varies depending on projects obviously you know some projects require more more of a descriptive brief but I think overall should be short and concise okay and for for this particular project since it was a redesign we typically have three methods of design that we could do for a redesign when we we go by mild medium or spicy right mild is like pretty close to what they already had but just a revision medium is a little bit of distance between what they had more close to what we would like them to be if when we identify their brain actually some of the spices just like completely forgetting everything that we thought of before just starting from from scratch and so for this one we landed on which type of design it was the medium is a medium right so it was a little bit of a departure from what they had but still memorable because they had quite a big following and we didn't want to have too much of a shock yeah so so when you got the brief what is your what is the very first step like what do you do with that so before I even get on the computer or even start sketching I I'll spend half an hour - now we're perusing design books or whatnot you know what's cool about being the designers that are so many sources of inspiration whether it be going outside taking a walk looking at observing the environment we're gonna add signs advertisements after that I will tend to go to the old sketchbook where I can you know refine my ideas okay so for them for permit India we we have a pretty extensive strategy document it's like 60 something pages and then part of that includes brand attributes and what we're looking for in regards to the design so did you like to sit on that for a day and then just think about ideas before you went to sketching or honestly I briefly looked at it okay and then I'll just like I say go on to inspiration and then just exploring ideas okay and so is this your sketchbook with some of your first sketches yes sir so walk us through some of these this is the very first one yeah so this is pretty close to what we actually landed on - yeah so I think there's a misconception that a lot of designers think that they can't sketch because they're not a good artist but I think as long as you get the essence of the idea on paper that's good enough for you to go forward with an idea very cool and so this is the very first sketch that she did so yeah I always say this is a really terrible inaccurate of India but I did manage to you know get the idea okay so in in in this were you thinking like this is gonna be like a medium type of design or a medium type of change from what they had before medium yeah yeah so what was it what were some of the faults that you saw it there we'll logo and what were you trying to address or change I think you look too generic and they didn't stand out from you know the competitors okay cool so so then you went from sketch to what to illustrate to illustrator so yeah once I get a few ideas usually I acts the first and second ideas usually those are ideas that somebody else has come up with so once I'm ready I'll take it into illustrator and it's just a matter of execution from there on and this is a picture they're their old logo from mid India Christian mission right so like I said very generic and doesn't really stand out amongst a crowd yeah and then one of the things that we noticed is that the icon it's really detailed it's like a detailed outline of India which if you're looking at that on a mobile phone or if you're looking on smaller devices it's really hard to see what that is and so you you got that you said okay if we're gonna go with a medium design something that's kind of similar and memorable from their primary brand but still closer to what we were looking for these were your initial skips right first thing that came to mind is try to utilize some negative space okay and so you didn't scan this in and then copy it in till it's right you just went straight to illustrator that's right yeah I usually try to begin nice and neat here and then it just goes into this out-of-control artboard very close so this is a pretty much different explorations of the same type of concept right so we're stealing colors from things are going and borrowing okay gosh yes I think they say a good artist is really someone who knows how to hide his sources right that's right so here's some reference this guy was looking at okay there's that I've been done before and what we needed to differentiate from gotcha and then you you went from here to a couple of style escapes right and so a style scape is really just the design deliverable that shows what a brand concept could look like in different applications and so we want to see how that brand can be used when it comes to the type as well as business cars of print collateral or the website and so when we're showing a climb when I'm just showing them a mark we're showing them how that mark could be used in different applications okay so this is the style scape so basically we went from concept idea to sketch you land it on a sketch this is the concept that we wanted to lead off with to show the client and then you went into illustration which is really messy but noir instead of sending me all of that stuff you want to send it in a style scape which is a more refined look at what the brand could look like right okay so what was some of your thoughts in creating this so basically here we wanted to give a lot of white space a lot of negative space clean imagery and basically just try to follow what the client asked for in the strategy document okay and then over here I see we have some icons and we I'm assuming you didn't create these from scratch yet we just showed those and what was the thought behind that again just simple iconography ask the client requested yeah so one of the things the client wanted for this particular design they they hated clutter they wanted it to be simplified they wanted to have restraint in design and they really leaned towards minimal design but their old stuff didn't really look like that so this is a example of what it could look like to utilize some of those elements that they were asking for so this is a style scape and I don't I don't even think we really showed the client this this is really for my reference and then go and open up the strategy document this is something that we're presenting to the client how we're gonna pitch to the client the design ideas and so they have this really detailed logo of India and we wanted to make it more simplified more on the abstract side okay so this is mild this is really like not changing the brand much at all so I think we change that what a different typeface okay so this is some of the logic as to why it makes more sense than what they currently have right so very similar yet simplified icon designed to be scalable conveys Christian mission in India larger more prominent brain descriptor similar yet more playful modern typeface updated em I see em blue so okay we're showing them some logic there and then this is responsive okay so what is it what is a responsive logo basically you should be used in different context which will be like favicon or a print ad or large banner okay so how the the logos nowadays they aren't just on print material they're on all kinds of different devices that we're looking at it so how does a logo scale from large to small for different contexts okay here's the meat and so this is one that's close to what we actually landed on which is a little bit more of a department than what they had it's kind of interesting you had the the logo mark on the right side as it puts the left and we're still using that negative space here okay go to the next one so that's the responsiveness and what it could look like on some different materials okay and then spicy now this spicy really isn't too spicy this could have been a lot more spicy but from gauging this particular client the threshold for how much we would are willing to depart from what was already in existence it wasn't a high threshold for that so even the spicy version which is still medium so what's more spicy about this than the medium well for one the shape is more abstracted and then obviously the colors are a lot different than the original right okay and then let's let's see what we actually landed on and then this is what we actually ended up landing on which is really it is looks like it's a mixture of the medium and then the more spicy so they wanted the spicy color palette with a medium layout - the crosswalk - across which I'm really glad they did because it was kind of cliche and what's cool about this mark is its iconic so that we can use the smart kind of as a standalone and how did we address the issue with some other sub brands do you have an example of that yeah cool and so this is what we landed on which is really a mixture of the medium and the spicy so we used the same format of the medium - the cutout of the cross at the negative space and then we use the color palette of the spicy and the way we're using negative space is to cut out icons in the main logo mark that are applicable to the sub brands right right so now the the goal here hopefully was achieved was to have an iconic memorable logo mark that is definitely the dominating icon for the brand and then some sub brands that definitely look like they are part of the same family so this is a brand style guide now you created brand style guys before you started working here and you've seen these before how long have you seen a brand style guide be like pages the most I've seen is about 80 pages 80 pages yeah do you like them that detailed no no okay what obvious reasons it takes a long time to design it sometimes it hinders designers with creativity yeah so we've incorporated here what we call a brand poster it's a single one page or it's a simple one page design that kind of just shows some applications of the brain so once you show us like what are we looking at here for them so the first section is usually the identity the multiple versions or variations of the logo that can be utilized we've got a color palette we got typography and a few examples of how to utilize the type of typography right and I like that you're not showing the entire alphabet or anything but you're showing like this is what the font is and this is an example of how it's used and then some of the ways the icon or the logo can be utilized as a design element cool so we have this as like this little striped element and I could see this in like maybe as a background element for a website or for a publication or something like that that's right and then what are you doing over here and here is an example of a tightly cropped section of logo which can then again be used as a design element so yeah so the brand poster is a really good way for designers to have rules and guides to say this is what we look like this is what our brand designs are a brand guys should be but it's not so extensive that it's restrictive to our brand or a designer can't use creative freedom in whatever it is they're designing awesome so that is a brand identity system and I think like your process because I've seen your process a little bit behind the scenes on some other things and it seems like it fluctuates differently based off what the the client is and so this is just one example of how we've done this for this particular organization I don't think this is like necessarily a rule that you follow this step by step but this is I think a pretty concise way of doing it so you go to a strategy concept idea to sketching straight to illustrator then you develop a style scape to show some contextual applications then you show that in the present to the client once you get approval on feedback then you can develop something more refined which is like this brand poster and then you could do other things like now develop the website and some different publications and their stationery material stuff like that

Channel: Butler Branding Agency

Views: 197,363

Keywords: logo, logo design, branding, brand design, stylescapes, graphics, agency, brand strategy

Id: XUi8Ftxq9jo

Length: 15min 36sec (936 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 24 2018