Branding Done Right
This post is continued from The Importance of Branding: Part One
Aside from the obvious difference in quality, what differentiates a professional designer or studio when it comes to branding, versus crowdsourced or bidding-based websites? The intensive process we go through, from creative brief to finished files, more than justifies hiring a pro. At Chestnut St. Pixel Foundry, our design process for a branding project goes through many steps:
1. The consultation. We want to meet the client and see their place of business. We want to find out more about them: their overall marketing strategy, their current customers, the customers they’d like to have (sometimes they’re not the same as current customers!), who they see as their competitors, what their goals are as a business, everything that could be relevant to the project and even things that might not be. To determine the best brand for a business/client means we need to know everything about them. This is something a one-paragraph writeup on a crowdsourcing design website can never do.
2. The creative brief. This document is invaluable, and we create one for every project at the Foundry. The creative brief lists everything we need to get started: a rough design direction and other creative considerations, any technical considerations, the target market, the project objectives, and a key message (this is, in one simple sentence, what we need to achieve with this project.) Some of the cheap crowdsource/bidding sites ask you, the client, to submit a creative brief. As the client, you may be too close to the project to objectively write a creative brief that will prove to be useful. This is why we create our own, even if our client provides one for us.
3. Research. This step is one inexperienced designers often miss. Even if a designer is creating a logo for a friend as a favour, they should spend several hours looking at other examples of branding in the same industry. They should analyze what trends keep coming up, so they can avoid them and come up with something truly original. For a vintage clothing store that specializes in late 1980s and early 1990s fashion, I spent several hours looking at retro music videos and hip hop posters from the era. (Research can be fun!)
Just some of the sketches I produced for the F AS IN FRANK brand
4. Sketch sketch sketch. On average, we generate over a hundred sketches per person at the Foundry per branding project, before even touching a computer mouse. The sketch process allows us to develop something that’s actually good rather than simply polished. This is a crucial step for any graphic designer, and one which the untrained bidders on crowdsource websites won’t even consider.
5. The percolation of ideas. You can sit down with a sketchbook and strain to come up with something amazing, but it doesn’t always happen. Creativity can be random sometimes. I carry a sketchbook with me everywhere and sometimes find myself doodling project ideas and potential solutions on the bus, waiting to meet up with a friend, or while I’m sitting waiting for software to install. Inspiration can happen anytime. Sometimes a good solution won’t come until the very last minute, after developing the hell out of another idea.
6. Review sketches critically. Stepping back and judging ideas critically is something that takes a lot of practice. It’s not enough that the branding solution is a good idea; it must fulfill the design and marketing objectives for our client! This is where the creative brief comes out again. Logo contenders get pitted against the creative brief – if the logo fails to meet an objective, it’s not a good solution, not matter how clever a design.
Why do we do sketch so many logos that’ll never see the light of day? Well, most ideas that are generated are, unfortunately, crap. Even the most talented designer is going to come up with some real garbage during the creative process. The first dozen or so sketches will likely be obvious, cliché solutions. It’s important to get it down in the sketchbook so that we can move on to something better and more original.
Tight concepts/sketches shown to a client with a web development business
7. Tight sketches for client review. For the first (and often second & third round), we don’t show refined vector logos to our clients. They take a look at black-and-white sketches we’ve produced, to get an idea of the general concept and design we’re thinking of. There are two reasons for this: 1) Many hours can be spent working on a vectorized (i.e. computer-produced) logo version. It’s a waste of our time to produce many of these for client review and 2) showing sketches prevents our clients from getting too hung up on details like the font, colour, line thickness, etc.
Though I’ve written this out as a series of steps, it’s often cyclical… at any point in the process we often go back to sketches to refine and tweak the logo solution.
Vector logo: outlines & selection showing vector points
8. Getting on a computer. When the client is happy with the solution, then (and only then) we’ll create a vectorized version. This will go through a huge amount of tweaking. We’ll do dozens of printouts to check letter-spacing and legibility at small sizes. Often several versions of the logo will be created, with thicker lines for small sizes, alternate versions for use on dark backgrounds, etc. We always create logos in vector (that is, scalable) format. Anything else is useless to you – you cannot make a raster image larger without loss of quality. (Note: raster refers to pixel-based file formats, like .tif, .jpg and .png.)
Example page from a graphic standards manual
9. The Graphic Standards Manual. This is an optional step and an extra cost, but oh so worth it if you’ll have non-professionals (e.g. desktop publishers and office administrators) working with your logo. The Graphic Standards Manual includes notes on which file formats to use for what, which versions of the logo to use for different applications, which colours (in CMYK, RGB, Pantone and html-ready hex) the logo should appear in, which fonts match well to the logo, etc. It’ll also include important information like: don’t stretch the logo. Don’t put it overtop a busy background. Things which you may think are obvious, but people without a graphic design background love to ruin your brand’s legibility.
There you have it: the 9 step process we use at the Foundry for every branding project. How many of these steps will the “designer” on that cheap crowdsourcing site go through? Step 8. That’s all. They won’t bother to do anything else. And the results speak for themselves.
