IDENTITY DESIGN: BRANDING

today we're going to be talking about something pretty special we're going to be talking about Identity Design a lot of you asked about that and we have a very special treat because Master dough is going to be showing us how he does it like Master though well stick around card [Applause] any type of cards are we going to get so in the audience we have Nicole Vincent clap for yourselves Vincent Emily yeah yeah nice nice she's like a professional in the camera over here and of course we have uh Ty the master of the tech running there's a lot of Masters all right so Chris let's get this show started let's get started this is an exciting episode I'm excited to learn how you do it so what is it that why are you doing this episode first of all because you told me to you're the executive producer but no people have asked can you talk about identities this is one of the top requested topics actually top requested topics okay so now yes so now let's actually look at it so so let's let's start with the question uh what's the agenda for today the agenda let's put up the agenda Ty Boom there's our agenda so I'm going to break this down into four parts identity versus branding I'm going to get started with the design talking about brand definition and perhaps a way to design smarter and hopefully I spelled that correctly smart is that I think you did yeah let's look at this and it's a term that's a buzzword branding it's used a lot in our industry and it's used in kind of um kind of in the equal way that you might talk about a logo so I pulled this up this is the Nike logo yeah we are symbol and underneath it from German it's French okay sorry oh and what this means is like Margaret's painting this isn't a brand what is a brand that's a logo brand no no what is it it's a logo and so this is all taken from Marty newmeyer's book The Brand gap which I love and you guys need we love you Marty Call Me Maybe anyways a logo it's a term uh used for logo type and designers use this in lieu of using the word trademark which is accustomed I like that custom letter you know what I like the the trademark the logos in Greek means word logos because in the beginning was the word and the Word was with God boom that's deep okay anyways how do you know what you're doing okay anyways the trademark can be a logo symbol monogram emblem or other graphic device a trademark is not the brand itself it's merely a symbol for it as in with the Nike logo totally so the trade is you know I have a Tackle fishing you know shop and that's my trade and then the market is the mark that represents me sounds about right all right great okay so what we want to talk about is the understanding of branding and so we can't talk about Identity Design or logo design without understanding the larger context of branding and so I love this definition because it's something I can wrap my head around a brand is a person's gut feeling about a product service or company you can't control the process but you can't influence it got you and that's from Marty's book The Brand yeah and so here's a couple illustrations to kind of bring it home so on the left is a guy and you're saying to a girl I'm a great lover and that's marketing got it got it and so when you do it over the telephone saying I'm a great lover that's telemarketing so over the Internet it'd be internet marketing what is that called email blast no it's called online dating online dating okay anyways if somebody else has it for you trust me he's a great lover that's called public relations word of mouth or wom that's the word of mouth Word of Mouth yeah okay and if you keep saying I'm a great lover I'm a great lover I'm a great lover over and over again that's obnoxiousness of advertising advertising and if you're right now and if you say it with a symbol instead of with words you're a graphic designer interest graphic design manifestation is a visual manifestation of the words yeah love it when she tells you I understand you're a great lover that's Brandy got you so to recap branding seeing Vince is like where did you steal all those Graphics from from all from hold on don't get ahead of me branding is not what you say it is it's what they say it is gotcha you need to understand this okay so now that you understand this definition of it you'll never look at a logo and start telling people it's the brand it's not the brand if you say that you're a newbie you're a newbie yeah okay and where do we get this from the book the brand Gap Marty newmeyer Liquid Agency if you're a graphic designer and you haven't read this uh like go to Amazon and order it we should just give people our affiliate links no no we're going to okay yeah okay so we have complaints before about not providing links I've done my best to Chris doe in Jose's words to provide all the links and reference points at the bottom all right and so when we look at branding there are a lot of touch points consumer touch points to define the brand and some of those things are the website the decor if you if you're a brick and mortar Place Graphics a customer experience the staff and how they treat you all those kinds of things product logo messaging Finance Packaging I'm making a lot of noise all right anyways well let's get started right so the the client that we're going to work on is police hakai pass and it's a fishing lodge you fly in it's in remote locations only available by plane float plane where is it located where where's the only is located it's in British Columbia kind of off the central west coast of Canada and they're a client but you're also a customer correct so you know them all excellent what does their current logo look like it looks something like this Jose whoa 1970s call they won their logo back let's be nice oh I'm sorry it's actually great for it so I know what a lot of designers in our audience are going to be thinking right now that maybe the fish could use a new illustration it looks a little like clip art the colors need some help there's the foot Mark instead of an apostrophe there's this complex kind of blue white black on a light blue background and so we're we're ready to go boom just we're ready to go so we're on the starter blocks and we're ready to run because we have all these design skills and we're ready to get redesigned started yeah right so all we can focus is going down the lane and finishing fast and we've got all those skills look at you and Shutterstock images that looks good yeah and so here I put together just a bunch of logos like what it could be so these are references that you found on behance yes and they're from very talented designers um if you need them just look them up on behance it's very easy to find great designers now here's the problem with this is we're going wide we're casting a very wide net and we're doing a lot of work a lot of ideation but this is how I was taught how to design identity systems and logos well you haven't put pen to paper yet I haven't but I'm if I were back kind of like 18 years ago I might sit down and I might do a lot I might start doing a lot of sketches got it I'm looking at a symbol like an anchor that seems kind of cool and you can see the one that's the Merkel merchiori where there's like two M's in there it's beautiful they're all beautiful marks right they're all very nice can the open-air journal that's pretty cool too so what I'm encouraging you guys to do is to think more and make less because what happened last for me there's a huge gap a huge divide between you as a designer and your client and this seems to be like the number one question that we get is there's this conflict that exists objective reality means subjective expectations we get that question asked a lot which is how do I get my client to buy into my design which is really a weird question well you know what it might be a weird question but I'll tell you right now I may be guilty of it sometimes and more more so earlier in my career we've all done it we've all done the walk-in you know shooting without listening so the challenge obviously is you know how do you uh objectively uh represent and present a narrative that the client feels is theirs for me yeah if I don't have an objective goal what I'll do is I'll design lots of things I don't know what I'm looking for you're quantitative yeah if the client feels like they're not it's not theirs like I'm doing it I'm making I want to make them feel good like they're part of the process does that make sense yeah so oddly enough uh where I got this definition from is from a book called story written by Robert McKee and he teaches all the Hollywood level kind of a-listers how to craft a better script and in story you want conflict because that makes for drama and for an interesting uh point of view but in a business transaction you don't want that conflict not at all Ty you can cut to us a little bit during this whole thing so that people don't just get slide slide slide look we're still here we're behind the slides hold on let me put on my shirt hold on all right anyways right so so but this is a good book anyways on Amazon so look we're right there hey hello there we are we're not just like all right all right so now we can go back to slides so anyways what we want to do is we want to define the brand before we get started how do we do that well you need a framework and you can use something like core or you can use any process that you want but we've broken it down into these steps I'm not going to dive deep into this but this is what I'm doing we can put a link below like I love promising links don't promise a link if you're not going to deliver it it's Vincent Vincent it's your job to make sure there's a link to the episode and brand attributes and I'll make little bubbles like this and kind of pull out the keywords and I'm looking for words that at least for me are kind of more visual less abstract you know so these are the top ones that you got from that yeah what are these guys the client came up with these the client came up with this you didn't just shoot these out I did not got it but I did facilitate that conversation got it so if they gave me an abstract word I would ask them what does that mean can we find another word is it more like this word when you say this do you mean this totally makes sense so I'm not merely note taking here right okay so you're participating and facilitating yeah so what I did was I I saw these words that kind of seem to group together the ones in light blue and the ones in dark blue and when they move around like this animation I I started to think about what the words and light blue have in common and it's it's not quite luxury but it's refined gotcha and I like the pairing against that of rustic these are two words that don't go together well they both have art so is that alliteration is that it's called in literature it is alliteration I believe I believe all right and then cows are Charming old school so what I try to do now is I try and find photography that represents refined rustic that's my filter now because in the internet there's a million different kinds of photos and different styles in which this can go go down so now refine rustic I'm defining it here gotcha and you can see that there's a logical progression here but more importantly the client has seen this narrative we're fine rustic it's what we came up with from this process now look at what we're shooting back to right so if an image doesn't look refined rustic then we have some problems gotcha so this is a well-traveled person there's a sense of curation and there's antique objects vintage things that kind of come together to create a certain mood nothing looks brand new so these are mood boards you got these references from the interweb yes one of them actually is a photo from their place gotcha and then I find more typography examples you can see here everything is weathered a little distressed hand done so that's the vibe right and then I found images that kind of can represent their Lodge it's a great place it is not their launch gotcha but as they go through um you know iterations of refining their Decor as the budget allows for it I'm sure this will help to inform certain things yeah this is a foundation for the future it's kind of like the ultimate man cave yeah I love that that's actually awesome that's really that's really the clientele so the breads look really good and I'm now hungry all right so anyways I I put together some logos because this is an Identity Design assignment right and so I put some logos together I feel communicate refine rustic and so all the way from the left to the right there's a consistent thinking here I would be happy with any one of these I showed all of these to them you showed this to the client I showed them everything so for those of you who are just joining us for the show uh Chris is showing us references for the redesign of Ollie's hakkai pass logo and identity as a whole and he showed us the evolution of where it's come from so right so here we are the one on the left is their current logo and the one on the right it's a sample of what their logo could look like and so when we say refine rustic the one on the left is neither refined nor rustic so now their old logo is off-brand towards the new positioning of the company you know to be fair it it's not awfully horrible I didn't say that just in case um all right all right but the new stuff looks really cool so that's where we would propose it to go and if you can look at this this is a pretty radical departure there's no fish in it there's no kind of woodcut illustration there's no wave there's no chunky type we're going to just focus on the word always well does the client have a problem with that that we're a fishing lodge we should have fish in our logo well if you take them through this whole process you don't get pushback you don't get pushback you've never you haven't had any pushback they trust you fully well I'll tell you where the pushback came in and we'll talk about it all right so now this is for also those of you who asked the question how do I convince my client so here we are so now we can start designing so let's design right yeah and so as I have buy-in from the client as to what it's going to look like I can start sketching and I'm on conference calls taking notes for other meetings it doesn't really matter I'm just Googling and kind of being influenced by the interaction and I'm not an expert letter form designer but I'm drawing you can see that book right you can I'm using my computer yeah and so what I'll do now is I'll switch over to sketch mode right so I'm going to escape out of this so you as a creative director you're sketching I'm gonna sketch man all right you're going to sketch man and now we have the Mac yeah I'm gonna I'm gonna see what happens here you can bring It come back to us for all while the well the Mac desktop isn't Fun there so so the interesting thing about what I'm seeing or what what I see your process two things have stood out to me one is how you took the brand attributes and you came up with two primary uh attributes I like that a lot and that they really represent the core I don't do that enough and that actually really helps me think through some of the projects that I'm doing right now uh my Consulting projects and I already can see the mistakes that I'm making but I'm not actually distilling it sufficiently to uh to give enough Clarity to the team and to the client it's still too open good good call Mr quantitative all right so um in front of me you guys are going to see um my sketch pad right this is just normal tracing paper it is blurry don't worry it's kind of cool it's you just deal with it it is it's got a massive lag to it so look I can't draw a perfect circle so I got this super handy Scotch shipping packaging tape it's super technical right now I'm gonna draw a little circle because I know I want a circular logo less blurry now right this is the new show I can hit this and maybe it'll auto focus ah there you go oh folks getting focus nice Circle all right so right now I'm going to do a little sketch and so I know I want it on on a diagonal all right can you guys see that yeah so I'm gonna sketch in so I'm gonna just keep it nice and loose and for those of you who who who are tuning in who might not be you know as uh you know and and letter form design is something it's a class that's actually really important and you know I I Emily I don't know did you take lettering yeah in school did you take it with Leah Neil okay got it so I think that that's one of the one of the classes for me it definitely makes a huge difference to actually understand check that out look at that footage Crystal going super fast to actually understand weights to actually understand uh uh uh just the nuances of letter forms and to get to do it so in lettering class what did you do Emily during lettering what was the assignments right right and that was the second week was we drew black letters and then after that we used the love the Electoral actual actual Fitness trip which is what I'm using right now can you guys see that there's the pencil so you're you're drawing scripts so you start with a set serif a black letter and then a script then you do the placa paint like with a brush thing that's layoffs that's Leah yeah yeah I think she's the only one who does that who did we did that yeah sorry um so so right now I'm working on line weights right I'm I want to point out one thing here is you can see the emphasis on that diagonal so the highest parts of the font should be here see this diagonal right there there's even a narrative within the context or at least structurally within the context you even have that choice of like having the diagonal be so uh so thick in the center it gives it a visual anchor if that makes any sense right so I'm like a play-by-play in a football game so I love it Chris doe is drawing the Ole's logo notice the emphasis on the set point uh by having the thicker Parts be in the center so the weights of the script are actually a little bit thicker and they thin out as you go that gives you a diagonal line okay that draws the eye right so now um since I don't have a template I'm going to just sketch in where that uh Inner Circle exactly and you know Chris makes it look really easy um but again a lot of it is about practice and a lot of it is about um just sign up for a class you know even even if it's in your local uh Community College if there's a lettering class or calligraphy class that the goal is not anything other than to get experience and understanding the fundamentals fundamentals fundamentals fundamentals fundamentals fundamentals I believe that you can teach anybody design some people disagree some people that people are born with it or that they're born with certain degree of you know Mastery of it but you can learn it too you too can be a master designer like Master doe uh if you act now you can order the typography kit from wait we don't have it wrong show wrong show this is a wrong show so you know I'm not going to sit here I think we're okay on time so far yeah for sure and then I know what do you use a sketch for like why would you even sketch this to show it to who well I'm gonna tell you that answer in a second because I mean you can do this on the computer it's like much easier I can do this in the photoshops so here's some mistake some common mistakes that beginners in identity work like this make one of them is to depend only on the computer that's one big mistake uh two I see this happen very frequently don't design in word okay now that's two that's two that's too far back so let's go I don't know why this is flipped uh the opposite way on on the camera you might have to have a setting that the flips I'm sure but I don't think let me adjust it yeah so one thing real quick while he's addressing the flip uh is the idea that so who we're really addressing is those of you who might actually have a studio who might have one of more than two people Chris and I are sharing our knowledge and directing projects if you're smaller if you're an individual a lot of you might say well I can't really do this I don't have a team keep in mind what Chris is going to share next um and how he actually uh worked on the execution of the uh design of the well he's doing the design now in general but how he's getting it produced we'll give you a hint as to what you can do too uh in order to grow your practice and do more work also the other thing that I see in our audience is that you might not be a designer you might actually be more of a strategist or you might be a tech person who's running an agency a studio or web practice you know if you feel comfortable mastering the brief and a lot of those other components you can always hire really good designers Chris do you hire other designers to do stuff like this for you I hire designers as often as I can why is that what what's the reason why you prefer you can do it yourself I I can but I I believe that uh they're experts at what they do so I like to find designers uh deep knowledge about what it is whether it's character design modeling concept art letter form design uh if they're if all they do is do black letter letter form design I'd rather just hire them what I do in this sketch is trying to work out all the iterations uh beforehand sites man where things go yeah generally like hierarchy of information those kinds of things that's why I can block it up with a pencil like this with my lead holder kind of like directions doing film they block out the shot and then they give it to a sketch artist and then a cinematographer yeah so exactly I sketch my own storyboards too and then I hire storyboard artists to do the actual drawing to clean up the perspective on all that stuff the tip is to do everything yourself can you see there there we go it's on tissue and what I'll do is right so I know okay so let's jump back into keynote now let me switch this mode switch mode back to Missy Elliot I think all my life should be hip-hop metaphors it's gonna be the new show um well you know and one of the things that I think is really interesting about seeing Chris work in his process and comment like let us know what you think of Chris actually working on identity you've made a lot of really great comments when I was working on strategy last week um all right we're back right and we're back so here you can see that Emily uh one of our designers she worked on a bunch of different iterations we're getting close here she's trying to figure out where to put the year in which uh the company was formed in 1984. the hierarchy of Vancouver British Columbia as opposed to the salmon fishing lodge and so that's what we're working through did you show these to the client no got it you know why not normally I might show the client something like this the reason why I don't need to is because we already agreed that the logo needs to be in this Ballpark and they just need to see it kind of finished right and they trust me they're they're not um a kind of company that is used to working with design firms so I don't want to overwhelm them with information but you know that's a good thing because uh there's a lot of people out there that are working and and some companies might not be used to that so be gentle on your on your clients yeah so you can see the one in the lower left it's getting pretty close uh to where I can hand it off to this person now I happen to refer to this logo for Obin Jones and I reached out to you you used obin's uh typography as a reference as reference to say like could it be like this yeah and my intent the entire time was actually at the higher open and I got lucky because sometimes they're not available they're not interested or they're just too expensive and in this case he was available and interested and I could afford him so I'd rather just hire him rather than work on myself because a he's going to bring the little touches to it that can we ask the ball Parker what you paid no I don't want to talk about that okay great but I can afford it though yeah right I'd say it was between you know 500 and 2 000 let's say yeah all right so anyways so open he wound up doing this sketch and he sent this to me nice and it's it's quite beautiful and he added the little the brush is really perfectly placed of course graphic designers no open is uh out of the UK and if you want to look them up there's this information open Jones on behance and while he was working on it once I approved the pencil sketch and again I did not show this to the client you just I just this way it's got to be let open do his thing and ask them to um to show me Works in progress I mean just take photos just for reference later on because I think it makes for a more interesting story I love it so Obin was gracious enough to shoot some photos with his uh I assume iPhone or something while he's doing this one-handed and here's his process and he's doing uh pen and ink uh painting oh not pen and ink and just an ink like uh Indie ink watered down a little bit and he painted this in it's beautiful and here's the finished product the brush is always I love the texture I really love the texture uh and and the fact that you can see that that is it isn't perfectly solid right so you asked me before did the client have any pushback and they did have a little bit of pushback so you see that hook that's on the top of the O um kind of on the upper left makes it look like Hanukkah pass so they said you know they're they they had they had more of a question than a mandate that that must be removed they said you know do you think people might misread it as shakai pass or something like that it's a Hawkeye pass and given that they've had some bad experiences before with people misreading them and legibility I didn't want to run into that so here we go this is the finished logo we cleaned it up I I still need to work on some of the refinement the lettering and the texture to make sure everything's legible but that one plus sign is actually uh from the screenshot or is that in there one little plus signs a little exercise to negate the negative space gotcha that's all it is right cool so let's look back this is where we started on the left and remember the uh open Jones logo on the right now open himself designed the logo so now it's always and there it is that's super badass and you you asked to see some applications yeah you know out of context sometimes people think it's not going to work and the beauty of the way this logo was conceived was that it could be stripped down just to say always or to have the entire circular mark on it like a little badge and there it is well what's funny is that I can see this being even like a t-shirt you know in a retail establishment you know uh being sold even you know how sometimes it's just ironic t-shirts and like you know oldies that really exist yeah yeah but this is really a Hollister it kind of something yeah and actually that's what we're doing with them how does it fit into the context of the rest of the brand like well I want to show you okay uh but if you can see somebody wearing this it gives you a feeling right it's not the brand but it's part of it and I started working on some ads for them some messaging and so here's where we we're doing something with for for the young and young at heart this is a photo I took PC guys and here's one of my dad um and this it's got some brand attributes in it but you know you get the idea for a moment he's a kid again love it you can actually see a GoPro over there in the in there that's right that's my GoPro that's funny yeah yeah all right that's it for me wow that's amazing so Chris first of all thank you for sharing that with us that was awesome to see your process here are the lessons that I took away and I want to see what lessons you guys took away the audience I took away the lesson of summarizing the brand attributes into only one or two into two which is nice because they paired together that really defined the look and feel and the way that the mood Boards of the references work and the process of getting from you know a reference to the actual logo was really like it was nice it was kind of like it dropped in very smoothly um and and like a film director almost working out kind of like the little details Etc that's how you do masterfully or how you masterfully do an identity because it fits the context it's not about you that's not your style your style is DIN and Mr Roboto Arigato you know everything would be like super modernist you're going completely outside of your style and working on something that you know is the right thing to do yes that does confuse okay yeah Computing perfectly you guys have questions what did you do wait wait I I gotta I I it's past an hour I have to wrap I I have to jump okay you guys continue the conversation uh what do we call it over time we have questions over time all right you guys join us on overtime what's the hashtag Jose School Live school live hashtag and how do they ask those questions in overtime schoolrocks.com yeah the Google Hangouts we've left it we 've given an extra 10 minutes at the end so it'll just so we're hanging out with you guys for 10 minutes all right guys Jen we're just gonna talk in chat okay well I hope you learned something you know it's going to take way more than half an hour for me to show you the letter form design but let us know what you guys think of suggestions right did you like it share it did you like it yeah thank you for saying something all right thanks guys tune in next time thank you foreign

Channel: The Futur

Views: 915,024

Keywords: Brand, branding, brand identity, branding design, brand identity design process, brand design, identity design, business branding, branding process, brand identity design, brand identity techniques, branding your business, brand design tutorial, brand design process, branding identity, corporate identity, corporate identity design, visual identity design, identity design branding, branding documentary, design branding, visual identity, logo branding, brand design tips

Id: pR7tMnKghDs

Length: 28min 51sec (1731 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 26 2014