The Branding Masterclass for Graphic Designers: The Entire Process

1. Brand Design Masterclass Course Intro: The branding masterclass. This course covers all aspects of the brand design process, from sketching to portfolio presentations. There is not one thing this class leaves out. It is massive covering topics such as understanding client briefs, learning to ask the right questions, client and competitor research. Finding a target audience, creating a customer persona, finding a style direction, finding a brand's position in the market. Word association exercises, word mapping and other brainstorming activities. How to start sketching and sketching out different concepts. The select concepts for further development, the entire logo design process, picking the right typeface, gridding in a finalizing our logos, creating a logo system, creating a typographic system, creating a flexible color system. Understanding color psychology and its effect on brand design. Working with projects and mock-ups to further develop color palettes. Applying our brand systems to real-world projects. Creating and writing your brand voice and language, creating photography rules for brands, developing a full client presentation, creating a Behance portfolio case-study, understanding the basics, a brand standards and brand guidelines. And so much more. The brand development process plays a critical part of the marketing and success of a company. I want to show you not only what successful brand design looks like, but also how to brainstorm those concepts and ideas to finally turn that spark of an idea into a fully finished project ready for the client presentation, your portfolio, and the world. So this class gently guides you through this process with a practical real-world branding project. Using a case study for a sushi restaurant and delivery service. I created this course so you can start to offer branding packages to land bigger, higher paying clients and propeller to the next level in your design career. This course gives you the tools to know how to spark creativity, ideas, concepts, and put them into motion. We go over several tools to help prevent creator's block and to make it easy to come up with ideas that are relevant, authentic, and meaningful. Looking at blank pages never has to be scary again, you'll feel confident filling those pages with Finish Polish content that will wow your potential clients. We will work on building a finished case study presentation for you to start building a strong portfolio. We will work on creating both a client presentation and a brand guidelines manual to help people know how to use your brand design and identity system you developed. This course has a nice balance of theory and practical software projects. This classes for those who have taken any of my software courses or have basic knowledge of Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator and Adobe alternatives, as we will not cover beginner level software basics. This course comes loaded with a 50 page brand design guide that details the entire class and the easy to read accessible PDF. This course comes with a style presentation, Adobe Photoshop template and Adobe Illustrator brand presentation template and an Adobe Photoshop be hands portfolio template and more ready to serve. Charging more elevate your design offerings and changed the direction of a career. When to be a designer that understands both the business and design aspect of the branding process to craft strong brands. I will see you in the first lesson. 2. Course Guide and Student Facebook Group: Welcome to the course. I'm so glad you decided to join me for this adventure through the entire branding process. I wanted to quickly bring up a few important things. First of all, I have a new student Facebook group. This course has its own private group. I have around 20 thousand students in my man graphic design group, and it can be a bit busy in their this way with a smaller group, we can post our projects and have more personal branding related discussions. You can find the student Facebook group by typing in the branding masterclass student group and the Facebook search bar, you can post your progress there as well as in the Q and a and Discussion sections of the course. If you don't have Facebook, that's okay. Those community and discussion areas of the course we'll do just great. You can also tag me on Instagram at Lindsey marsh design so I can see your work that way too. I'm also active on Behance. So when we get to the Behance case study at the end of the course. I'd love to see your work there too. Secondly, the course project. I'll talk a little bit about this throughout the first section of the course. But I want you to do one of two things for your student brand design project. I want you to either download the sushi club client brief document and work through your own version of sushi club for the class and put your own spin and research with it. Or you can decide to use another client brief or make up your own. Ibm had students work on real paid client work throughout my courses as their student project. Either way, the goal is to have a nice portfolio case study for you by the end of the course. Lastly, downloadable resources. There's some pretty important downloadable resources in the class. Make sure to download them as you work throughout the course. We will start off with some theory and introduction sections and then move into some practical software portions of the course. I will use Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator in the course, but you can use Affinity Designer or Affinity Photo as your alternatives. If you feel like that works best for you. There may be some Adobe specific tools I referenced, but most projects you can still work through with affinity tools. So let's get started with the course and I'll see you in the next lesson. 3. Introduction To Brand Design: The brand development and brand design process plays critical parts of the marketing and the success of a company. I want to show you not only what successful brand design looks like, but also had a brainstorm these concepts and ideas. First of all, a simple question, you might think you know the answer to what is branding. The word branding comes from branding and animal. So a farmer or caretaker can take claim of their stock. This would include a series of numbers or another way to identify the cow. When you saw that number, everyone knew where that Cal belonged, even if it was found miles from its home. The same as the case for modern branding. You can take a look at any company asset like fliers, mobile websites or social media posts, and perhaps already find yourself familiar with the company that created it. We know this by looking at very memorable brands like Apple with their distinct Apple icon. But we also recognize Apple products and their user interfaces by its simplistic design and distinct look and colors can play big parts of this recall or brand memory for viewers, which, for example, uses his very unique bright purple colored icon. It only needs to be that purple icon on its homepage for w0, instantly identifiable, even without the company name being next to it. We mostly think of branding or identity design as the following items. A logo, you know, maybe a color palette, and some various marketing materials like letterheads and business cards. And while all of those play big parts of the overall brand design process, they just show the outer layer of the many layered brand onion, if you will. There is also brand language that needs to match the visuals. For instance, Ben and Jerry's ice cream, they have a heavy focus on social issues and sustainability. You cannot unwrap their visual branding from their brand language because they're one and the same. The headlines, words and phrases they use in their advertising's, and posters and flyers and social media are equal in importance to their appearance. We communicate with the viewer with both types. One, your brand language or how you write and communicate to the viewer and your visuals, which is going to be your graphics in your design. And this is why as a designer you need to think about this brand language. Because working with the client to write it, or crafted, or working already with written copy is important to be able to do so. All these are developed in tandem and they both harmonize. Along with a text and language that appears with the visuals. There's also emotions that brands evoke with their visual branding. Take for instance, the popular home exercise company called Pilloton. A quick review of their website and brand presentation gives us a higher end clean look, which caters to their target audience, which is mostly those with the ability to afford the almost $2 thousand bike and the monthly subscription fee. Notice the whitespace used throughout their layout. I noticed even their bike design is simple and clean and their videos are packed with quick transitions and energy. So the brand needs to echo that energy and all of their visual branding. In some cases, brand packaging can be very effective at communicating the brand's emotions, feelings, and language. This can be done by having a unique package size or form. Take for instance, the language they use on this. Can. I loved this brand? And they have a cute little simple phrases at the top and sides of the can that gives you this kind of youthful and playful vibe. Experience can play a big part of branding. The big unboxing craze that hit YouTube Many years ago, perfectly explains how important this experience can be for consumers. Take for instance, the unboxing of a subscription box. What does the outside of the box look like when I open it? Is there a greeting card that kicks off the unboxing experience? How is everything wrapped up? What type of paper do they use? Designers are the ones who help the crap all of these items and being able to develop and adhere to the brands feel and ethos is important. The quick takeaway to all of this as brand design, as multifaceted with so many different factors at play outside of just how it looks and what you as a designer to be able to think about and focus on all aspects of branding process. So you can be effective working on a team to do this, or crafting brand designs all on your own. We just reviewed how brands are more than just the logo and tagline. There's a brand language, there's product presentations, there's user experiences, and there's just so much to think about. The roles most graphic designers take in this process is the visual branding and trying to communicate the brand language with visuals. Your final deliverable or what most clients will expect from you, is a standard, predictable assets like logo design files, but it could range from package designs, marketing materials, the entire social media campaign. We're gonna take a look at fantastic looking visual branding examples to give us a little bit of inspiration Before we get working on our own example for the course. Most strong brand campaigns includes something called a unifying theme. That means all visuals are connected somehow through words, language, colors, shapes, or patterns. And take for instance, this one for a mall called River Mall. All visuals share a similar pattern throughout all the materials. What's great about this particular brand design example is they created a flexible design system that can adapt to so many different projects, sizes, and types. Instead of eliminate, limiting the client to a restricted set of usable assets, they expand that out to an infinite array of possibilities. You can see the unifying theme throughout this brand presentation. Not only does it feature set color palettes throughout, it has a geometric shape system they use to create patterns and shape of any type of size or surface. You may find that some designers even developed a custom icon set like for this coffee company brand. There is consistency in the thickness of the lines throughout the icon set that matches the more thin typeface used for the main logo type. The style of the logo can also echo and other design elements as well within the same brand system, this restaurant has a typeface as their main feature of their company. But it can also exist with a visual element, the chicken. It can exist as a vertical presentation or a horizontal. When a designer starts to extend the brand onto other items like menus or the interior wall design here, they need to have other brand elements to incorporate and tie everything together. Solid brand design has both structure and guidelines. You can see here with his clothing store company the rules of how to properly use the type size with a subheadings being set to 54.5% of the main header type size. There's some structure there. They call these brand guidelines for reason, it helps other people who may be involved with the design of future items for the company to know how to properly use it and to stay true to the original brands design, LFOs. We had a chance to see some great examples of brand design. And we're going to get more chances to see inspirational examples as we move throughout the course. We're going to be working with the entire Boolean design process. So make sure you download the 40 plus page guide. There'll be super-helpful for those who like to learn with offline materials or like to have something nearby to reference. The brand design process can be intense, but fear not. There are logical steps we walk through to go from this. Just an idea in our heads. Does something like this. Where it's welded together, it's finished, and it's ready to be executed. And we're going to walk through an example brand design project using a mock sushi restaurant called the sushi club. And we'll start with a good amount of research before we get started with any type of visual design work. 4. Introduction to Brand Design - Continued: I believe that some of the best concepts and ideas are not thought up at random. It, it's not like you can sit around a table and just brainstorm the perfect idea in the first five minutes. Well, maybe sometimes it can happen, but mostly it's about asking the right questions and receiving proper feedback from the company. And it's required to get that feedback to have a successful branding campaign. I encouraged deep and intense research into the industry and company before starting the brand design process or even touching the visuals. This gives you data to work with ideas and at least a general starting point. Without gathering proper information from your client, you will mostly find yourself guessing what they might like. When you guess you assume and fill in the blank with improper information. Research can go even further, especially in industries which you may not be entirely familiar with. Knowing what the company's competitors do can help you find those unique approaches to the visual branding that can help you stand out. Also understanding the unique proposition or unique offering the company has can help you spin your visuals and language to show off that advantage. We're gonna go into more detail on this later, but I love to visit or experience what my clients competitors offer firsthand. For example, are sushi restaurant example or work through throughout the section, I visited several different sushi restaurants in my local area. This was not to copy or emulate what they do, but to experience their process. In this case, experiencing the sushi consumption process. There are some enjoyable parts of the research base that could be nice surprises. If you allow yourself to be open and the experiences. You should never be expected to come up with an idea from thin air. There's always helpful starting points that can be generated by brainstorming. But most importantly, that research, there are several steps you can follow to gather enough research to start the brainstorming and concept development stage. But first things first, let's get the information we need from the client directly so we can move forward. And how the process usually works is one of two different ways. First of all, the client could have already done their homework and provided you with a fully written client brief that details a history of the company, some goals, perhaps a mission statement, maybe some desires and expectations for the brand design and development process. You could answer some of your questions before you even have to ask. That's great, but not all clients have this all figured out yet. There might be some clients that have just one person startups, or they could be the first time they've ever gone through this process. In that case, I like to send them a series of custom tailored questions that help to fill in any information gaps about the company, the goals, their missions, their desires, and their expectations. Questions will be different for each client. Sometimes you'll start off with some prior knowledge of the company if you already know it or it's already well known, or you may not have any information at all because the company hasn't really gotten off the ground yet. The goal of the questionnaires to ask questions that help you get familiar with what they offer, why they're different, discover possible target audiences, and any detailed information that's required like taglines and other unique situations. For example, we need to know if the client does not want us to use the color red. We do not know this. If we do not ask, imagine going through this whole brand design process with intense research to finally found out during the presentation that the CEO hates the color red. And guess what, you used red. Without gathering this information, we're making a tougher sell for us. There was a great show that streamed on Netflix called the pitch. And it was about two competing ad agencies pitching their brand concepts to a client that had a long history in the adult beverage industry. The owner told both agencies in the brief to not change the shape of their historic bottle design. It was very important to maintain that history and their package design. Let's just say one of the agencies pitching totally ignored the client's request for that. And they pitch this cool, wonderful looking advertising campaign and brand refresh. But they totally changed the brand's packaging bottled shape. They went against the one thing the client requested to remain the same. And let's just say they did not get the job and it didn't go well, you gotta listen to the clients. It's important and it's the only way to know what they're looking for is to simply ask. So now that we establish how important is to get that initial information from the client, let's go to our mock sushi restaurant client that we will work through throughout this entire class and ask them a series of general questions so we can go ahead and get started. 5. The Client Brief : You can download this client brief as an example in the downloadable resources in this class. So let's get started. This is the client brief, and this is a series of questions I asked to get some further information from the client as they did not provide a formal breed. So simple one, what is the company name and how would you like it to appear on your logo? Sushi club, authentically prepared. And it's kind of important to understand, authentically prepared is a little less important of the logo then the sushi club, it's kinda like a tagline and that's something we need to establish and get back with the client just to make sure authentically prepared isn't official tagline and not part of the full company name. Also, what industry are you end? We plan to start out as a full sushi delivery restaurant. We went to open a physical location shortly after launch to complement our delivery service. So that's really interesting. So they're going to start off as a full delivery restaurant. They hoped to be able to have patrons inside of physical store. So it's really important to kind of think of this branding process, of thinking about how important the delivery will be for them in advertising a delivery service. So we gotta think about in-store branding, but we also have to think about how they're to go items are going to be branded as well. So it's kind of a little bit more complicated and I'm glad we have that information. So they'll offer Mackey, shisha, Amy, and Nigeria style sushi along with traditional sushi side complements like at a mommy. So they're going to have a pretty simple menu. They sent us a sample menu. That's another great thing to ask for. What is their, they have a restaurant, you know, ask for a menu. If they're an online company, asked for the list of products. So it's really good to kind of know what they offer and become pretty familiar. So if I didn't know what Mackey was, you bet I'm going to Google that and figure out what's the difference between Mackey shushing Amy and Nigeria style. And it was able to find out that Mackey is the sushi roles that you traditionally associate with sushi. And she, she me is raw fish without any rice. It's just raw fish on a plate. And the jury style has the raw fish on top of rice, usually wrapped with seaweed or sometimes not wrapped it all depending on the style. So the next question is a standard question I put in all questionnaires because I think sometimes the client doesn't even know what their unique selling point is until you ask them and they have to think about it sometimes they know right away, but you really have to find this information because I think it really plays a huge part of positioning the brand design. So what is the unique selling point of your product? What makes them different? They say we promote a more authentic way of eating and preparing sushi that you might experience in Japan. We would like to bring that more authentic sushi preparation to American consumers. This is a great article that details some ways in which Eating and preparing sushi, the Japanese way, might be different from what you might have seen or practice yourself. So that's pretty cool. They gave us a nice detailed article. You bet I'm going to read that entire article. And it really kinda do some research about different ways you call sushi different ways to prepare it. This is the type of research that we need to be involved in. We really need to absorb ourselves into the Client Product and the industry and what they're offering. It's all a normal part of the research process. We will also prepare a sushi using Japanese made high-quality sushi knives called Inaki. Here's a basic website that details the look in function of the special knives. Okay, so there's another awesome article. And it's also nice if you don't know about the industry, you know, just just be blunt. Ask the client. Okay. I don't understand this part of your industry. I'm not familiar with it. Be honest. Let them educate you because they're the ones that are going to be able to educate you the best about their product. Sometimes if you go straight to Google, you're gonna get some misinformation. So it's better to go right to the client for that source. And the fishes freshly source to maintain quality everyday of operation. So when I'm reading this, I'm reading the feedback. I'm also starting to notice trends and common words that continue to prop up. And we're gonna get to some word mapping next. And we're gonna be able to take a lot of the words that the client is saying over and over. And we're going to be able to do this word mapping to help us find connecting words. And it's going to help with our overall brand design process. But I can already see authentic is obviously a word I'd like to explore further. And fresh. I've seen fresh, fresh, authentic to starting to see those kind of themes in their feedback. This is another required question of mine, is the target audience. And if you don't know who you're designing for, you're not going to be able to know how to properly put everything together. Is this going to be young millennials? Is this could be Gen X, Gen Z, all those different kind of generations. Is this an older population? What is your target audience? How much money do they make? What kinda discretionary income do they have? What do they wear? What? All these different things we want to know about our target, target audience. It can only be helpful. So they said their target audience is those who want good Japanese style sushi. Mackey, she, she, me and a jury style. They prefer the taste of fish over the flashy extra stuffing. We do not offer volcano roles and I've, I'm no sushi really well, but if I did not, I would definitely google volcano roles and find out that they're not really authentic Japanese sushi. It's just almost like a tomato sauce poured on top of sushi. It's very Americanized and silly. But they taste good. But that's not who they're trying to target too. So they don't offer volcano roles. And they, they, which is what you think of when you think of sushi. We do offer rice-based roles, but they will be made with simple ingredients and never more than 31 role. So visiting and doing research and go into different sushi restaurants. I discovered that they do kinda pack their sushi with lots of different ingredients. Which is usually kinda complicates the taste and you can't really taste the fish anymore. So that's kind of a unique selling point that I'm starting to see more with their target audience answer. Another good one is what is your price point? That also helps determine our target audience if they're super high price point than they might need to have a different reserved, higher-end, simple, elegant brand presentation. If there are more casual and they're the cheapest in their industry, is probably going to be kind of more fun, bright, casual kind of presentation. So this is important to kinda know where do they fall price point wise. So they said, we spend a good amount of money making sure we source organic fresh fish. And I'm noticing the word fresh again, so I am just making a note. Okay. They mentioned the word fresh a lot, but also soy, ginger, and other required ingredients to maximize the tasting experience. It's interesting they use the word experience and definitely going to take a note of that. This means we need to charge a slightly higher price than most other places that prepare sushi. That makes sense. I would say we do not have an ultra high price point, but higher than most. So they're not going to be the top and the industry, but they're going to be up there. Since we deliver, we're able to pass along the savings of low overhead to the consumer and still maintain our high-quality standards that sets good. They're gonna be competitive with other restaurants that might deliver, but they might be maybe 10% more. So we're not talking about a drastically expensive price points, so that's good to kind of consider. So another question I'd like to throw out there because he never know what the client's good to give back to you. They may not answer a question that happens a lot. But sometimes they answer and they, they, they give you some good feedback. But in this case style preferences. So they said we have no clue. We love a very traditional, simple, elegant look, but we also fear we will be seen as pretentious. So they're worried about looking to high-end and two, unaffordable and too expensive. So that is a very interesting statement they made. So I'm already starting to eliminate certain design looks and feels and experiences because they said that we can go this ultra sleek, simple look, but they're also don't want to be seen as too expensive either, so we have to be careful here. So they say they want to educate and offer this experience to all consumers interested regardless of their knowledge on the matter. So it sounds like they kinda want to be approachable. Approachable would be like a really good idea were to kinda think about. So as I'm reading this, I'm highlighting words, I'm copying and pasting into a document all these words and writing little notes about it. So I'm just going to write down that word, approachable and eye-catching. Of course, every client wants to be eye-catching who doesn't. So that doesn't help us too much. But perhaps when you present concepts, you can try out two different approaches so we can see what might be the best fit for us. So it looks like they're wanting to kind of have us experiment with styles a little bit to kinda see what they look Sounds like. They really don't know where they wanna go. Which can be a little challenging because we have to figure that out before we move too far into the process. So it sounds like I might need to develop a couple of style escapes are a couple of little style presentation. So they can kind of figure out where they land or where they think they belong style wise. So we have some work on our hands do and that is not a problem. So number one, they want to try a bright hip, fun, kinda like a power when you see it. We are delivery service and will most likely attract a younger crowd with this more fun, vibrant look. They're kind of dropping some hints about style ideas. Number Two, more reserved black used SIL graphic, something that would cater more toward our traditional routes. So those are two totally different styles and I think they're still trying to figure out where they land. I would love to find one in between to that can really cater to both 12. I think we can find and compromise on something like that. I think that they can have their cake and eat it too. And I think that our job as a designer is to find the right fit. So it might not be one, it might not be two, it might be a blend of the two. And I think I'm going to be the one to help them figure that out. So I know these two are totally different styles, but part of the branding process we go through with you will also help us shape our marketing strategy, price point, and other business decisions. So it sounds like they're at the very beginning of this process in terms of opening this restaurant. And we are going to help them figure out a lot of things already. So there's still not a 100% finite on everything about the company. And that's okay because that happens. What I like to do is I'd like to turn the tables and I want them to brainstorm a little bit too along with me. It's not just me that's responsible for brainstorming. I want them to get involved in the process as well. So I asked them words you think of when you think of your restaurant concept. So they went ahead and got back with the word authentic, which doesn't surprise me because I've seen that throughout the answers and it's a part of their tagline. So that's going to be an incredibly important word when we come up with their ideas and concepts for the logo design preparation. So the process, I guess the process experience, I guess would be a better word for prep. Preparation. Taste over quantity. Once again, I'm noticing the word taste come up again. So I'm going to write notes about the word taste. Fresh. Again. Stay authentic and fresh and taste are repetitive words. Delivery. So convenience and then less is better. So maybe not too crazy of a design, maybe kinda more of a simple look. Maybe just kind of started to think out loud and think through, through all the answers that they've given us. Outside of the logo and kind of some brand ideas, what else will we be needing? But they said menus for sure. Our menu will also need to be online, but also eventually in a printed form. So we gotta make sure we design a menu that's flexible for both formats. I would love to have an infographic detailing the authentic way to eat and prepare sushi. Maybe a bit of an education and different styles and names of sushi. Okay, that's interesting. Maybe in a format where we can place it on social media, but also on our website. I will want to see the brand on chopstick wrappers we have accompany already that can place the graphics on these, as well as other items that will come with a delivery kit, like boxes, bags, and napkins. So it sounds like we need to really work on some delivery branding. So bags, boxes and those chopsticks on that could be where we can test out our logo design once we get that finished as kind of a presentation for them so they can see it on the things that they need the most. So I already have some raw ideas and information and be able to write down from all of this. So I'm going to keep that on the side as I continue to gather more and more research to add to this. So next I like to kind of study the industry a little bit more. And the best way to do that is some competitor research. We talked about this before, how maybe visiting sushi restaurants would be a great way to experience this. But if your company isn't online company, there's fantastic ways to do some competitor research by just simply Googling the industry or Googling their name if they're already a business and finding out can comes up second, third, on Google. And kind of going through their competitors process. If they have an online checkout process, go through that online checkout process, you need to really be able to know what they offer and how maybe you can present something different for the client that you're doing. So competitor research is incredibly valuable. 6. Conducting Research : Experiences are a funny thing. Sometimes you can use a company's product or service and be able to quickly drum up interesting research. Sometimes you have to go out and just soak in the experience yourself. There's nothing like a holding a product in your hands and feeling the texture. Notice how it feels. Isn't heavy. Is it light? What does the packaging like? Is it rough? Smooth? Let's say we have a client that sells body wash. What other body wash bottles, what do they look like? Standing back into IL, which one catches my eye first. What flavors are they using? Cents. Am I seeing a theme among other bottle shapes? Do they use photos of the flavor or sent? If so, how big are those photos in relation to the rest of the bottle? How about, for example, a clothing brand? What does the fabric feel like? How did they place the logo on the TAC? What colors do they use? Recycled tags, plastic or the tags high gloss. How? Because the company name on the labels or the tags. This can also be applied to research in companies that are purely online. For example, a client that is creating a new streaming service that caters to dog lovers. I may browse One of the bigger, more successful video streaming services like Netflix. How's the experienced browsing and watching videos there? What does the logo look like on my phone? How does it compare to the experienced dreaming on TV? These give us clues to types of branded items we may need to produce for our client. And may also want to research web sites that cater to dog lovers to see how they presented their colors, logo, and brand elements. Combined together, we can find a way to create something blended and unique to our client. Since our sushi restaurant in delivery service will eventually be a physical store location. Let's research by visiting several restaurants to see how they handled their brand design and visuals. And, you know, I'm going to enjoy this process. One of the first things I like to notice is the restaurant signage connect easily read it from the street. Do I know what type of store or restaurant it is? Just by looking at their signage. What type of other visual aids like posters, wall silage are there on the outside of the store. What type of physical materials do they use for their interior design? Wood, bamboo, steel, concrete. Is it a dark or light facade? When I walk in, what is the vibe I get from the restaurant? This one, for example, had some beautiful architecture that really became a neat centerpiece. This one also had an online only menu with no physical menus present. And it is that most Asian restaurants had fairly complex menus and our client will have a much more simple menu. So I'm keeping track of all these different observations. This one had a really neat full color chopstick wrapper with a logo and some social media information on it. Most to go or take away bags I received when I order sushi online where the standard white plastic bags with no branded visuals on there. So I'm starting to see a really neat opportunity to add something to our delivery bags to make our experience more visually exciting. I'm also seeing the importance of a digital fully online menu as well as most places we're switching to a touchless menu system. Another sushi restaurant had a very unique concept that I've visited there called Cow fish burger. And funny enough, they serve both sushi and hamburgers. This is quite the opposite of our client, who wanted to just focus on sushi and keeping it peer and authentic. The dish I got was a bento box with sushi and other familiar items, but with a big burger in the center. It was odd, but it was an interesting experience and it was good to check out what others might be looking at when they Google nearby sushi places. Once again, I'm noticing the chopsticks had a wrapper to them and it was an online menu only as well at this restaurant. So I'm jotting down some of these notes and observing and both of these places in my notebook that may be land on my final restaurant to visit. It's a sushi place called becasue. It seemed like they took their sushi much more serious and it seems to have a similar ideas. Our client, they had a wonderful, slick-looking menu with reflective simple logo on the top. The inside pages, the menu used a special paper that had a really glossy, pearlescent quality to it. It was a very stunning and very nice. The price point was higher just like our client, but it wasn't out of this world. Hi, I'm really taking notes at this place. Their logo seems almost contemporary with a stretched out look to their lettering. And it gives it a very unique look from the road. I would not know it was a sushi place by just looking at the sign though. And I'm not sure how I feel about that. It could be a disadvantage. Our client has the name sushi in the name. So I feel like we're not gonna have that problem. The sign had very interesting topography presentation with that super long stretched out condensed looking custom typeface. The reddest striking from the sign and I liked how the black and red stood out. The great thing about Googling these restaurants is Google remembers your searches and it tries to re-target you with online ads. This means we'll get to study some of our competitors. Restaurant Ads are what people are looking for when they're looking for sushi or they enticing, do they work? What can I do different to make mine more appealing and focus on our unique approach to the authentic fresh tasting fish. I'm already starting to think about what type of photos with matcher unique concept as well. So let's do another competitive research example. Let's say we have a client that has an expensive restaurant that caters mostly to professionals that want to have a nice place to meet for business lunches. I'm gonna visit similar restaurant types and take notes. I happened to visit this one place for lunch and has the most stunning atmosphere. I notice there are many design, the typography in the layout of it. They also have really amazing cookies. Overall, the food match the brand design and I come away with a great perspective of what it might be like at my clients restaurant. This helps me put ideas together by brainstorming process. Remember ideas and concepts are never developed at random. These little nuggets of information we gathered through this research project process will all come together to form wonderful ideas with ease later on. 7. Target Audience : This next research idea can be optional and it's heavily used when doing user experience and user interface design, our UX UI design. But there's something we can do to help us establish our target audience. And that is to create a user persona, or in this case, a customer persona. We want to take the information the client gave us to put together and profile that lists basic stats about this potential customer, as well as possible goals, likes and dislikes. Being able to put a name to a face helps when we get to the concept and brainstorming phase. When we create a brand design, we always picture ourselves looking at the logo, but the client's product and services may not be for us. I think it is important to recognize that we may not be our client's target audience. I think a lot of designers assumed this role, but we need to step back and realize who we are designing this for. I want you to be as detailed as you like with these customer persona's. They need to feature possible age and job titles. A big question I get from people is due just make all this up. Well, you're going to need some data and hopefully your client has provided you with some or you can ask for it. If not, you can always research trends and certain age demographics as well. You can do surveys, you can make calls to those you know, who might be close to this target customer? Multiple user persona's? Yes, you can have multiple different customer types. Therefore, it's natural to add multiple user personas that help you better represent your varied target audience. The goals for these user personas, or in some cases, you can call them a customer persona or a client persona, depending on your client's industry. It's to help us see a person behind our design decisions later on. Our brand design is meant for someone or a group of people. And it's great to be able to visualize them. And it goes a long way. I am here in the brand guide and I'm gonna go ahead and get into this page that talks about defining your target audience. We talked a little bit about the user persona's and how it's great to develop a couple of them before we get started into the brainstorming process. But I wanted to talk about mood, just showing you kind of an example of a user persona in action. And I almost always like to put a photo on these because I think it's important to be able to put that visual to a name so that when we start to brainstorm, we can just have them in her head and have them in our mind. So you could just go on pixels.com or on Splash.com and just find someone you feel like would connect well with the brand after you've done some research. So of course, with a photo, I like to put a name, give them a name, but give them a name that's popular among their age group or, or, or whatever we want to do there. And also loved to give them a title. What are they, you know, and it doesn't always have to be a job title. Sometimes it's nicer but a job title, but sometimes it could just be the kind of personality they have. In this case is it's the professional foodie. So she just loves to kind of go out and write about food experiences. She loves food. But it may or may not be an actual title and could just kinda be a personality type. So I like to list some general facts. So she's has an age, she's 36, she's single. Her occupation. She's in banking, and she makes a pretty decent income. And that's really important because people who are making under 20 thousand a year, they may not be our target audience, and those making over 200 thousand a year might not be your target audience. So we need to figure out who are we targeting. It's gonna really help when we're coming up with marketing campaigns and when we're coming up with social media campaigns, who are we targeting? This can be really helpful to try to figure this out. Location. She's in the United States. Our restaurant is going to just start out in the United States. So it's kinda, kinda helps narrow things down for us. Education's important. So she has a bachelor or greater, and that kind of matches up with our income. I mean, none of this is set in stone for her, but it's this kind of helpful to guess kind of the education level she might have. That doesn't mean that we're stuck with only targeting people who have a bachelor's degree. That's not the case at all. There could be multiple user personas and this, this is just one example. So another thing I like to do is talk about their goals in life. What are their goals? This is when it gets a little bit more creative there you're kind of writing a story for her. You're, you're writing it's more of the Xi's is more than just facts. She's more than just statistics. There is a real person who has goals, insights, and passions in her life. And this is where we want to kinda write and craft that story. So for goals, just an idea is a professional who wants to reduce time cooking and preparing food. So she's she's busy. She doesn't have time to sit here and have a really good food. But she's a foodie and she wants high-quality food, but she may not have time to cook it. So that's where this kind of restaurant can really help her, especially with their delivery service. She desires a high-quality fresh food. Notice the word refreshes and there you're starting to see these words used repetitively on purpose. She has a desire for sushi and visits a sushi place at least once a week. So she's already kind of a fan of sushi. She understands it already. It's not new to her. She is a foodie by the way. So it all kinda connects values. So she wants to have work-life balance. And so being able to get fresh sushi delivered or go for a quick bite to eat at lunch is valuable to her. She also likes health and nutrition and raw fish can be some of the healthiest food in the world, along with rice and the other side items they offer on their menu. This is a very healthy place to eat. Food is an experience, and it's not just for sustenance. So this kinda goes back to her personality being a professional foodie. She eats food because she really enjoys it. She doesn't eat it just because it has a certain amount of calories she needs each day as an important part of her life. And some people are built that way. Some people just love to eat food and I'm one of those people, I just enjoy the eating experience. And so this really helps us figure out who this person is and some of the motivations behind her going out and getting sushi. So everybody in life has problems, and that means they have some problem-solving opportunities. These are problems that we can solve with our unique concept and product or service. So if you have a client that walks dogs and you have a problem of not feeling like your pet gets enough attention when you're gone at work. Well, that's a problem that I have, that you have a solution or product for that can solve it. So that's how you have to think what these problem-solving opportunities. So she wishes she did not have to spend so much time preparing and cooking meals as she already has just a few hours of the evenings to hang out with friends and she didn't have a lot of downtime. So we're going to be solving that issue by providing a delivery service. She loved sushi and visits to fantastic places in town she thinks has the best sushi. She feels like she is missing the quality component of the sushi she eats. So she's eating at these places that have really Americanized sushi. And our place has that unique idea of just really focusing on really high-quality fresh fish and now putting a bunch of junk on it and, and all these other ingredients just really focusing on high-quality sushi. So that would definitely solve one of her problems. Another opportunity is she would love to have great quality fresh sushi delivered, but she's a little wary of trusting a local place to deliver it. There's the idea that delivery sushi is not going to test taste as fresh as visiting the restaurant. So this could be an educational opportunity for us when we're developing our brand language, we're writing our ad copy. Perhaps we can position our company to resolve this idea that delivery is not going to be as fresh. And so we have to find some way to maybe think about that in the future to say, okay, we are fresh, even though it takes 20 minutes to get to your door, we can use an app called door dash, which can really get your order super quick to you. And the fish is still going to have a slight chill to it. It's going to be nice and fresh. So that's kind of an education opportunity that we discovered by kind of walking through this user persona exercise. So why did we take the time to put all these user personas together? I like to craft it in a really nice professional way because when I do my presentation to the client a little bit later on, I think this really helps to add professional layer to my presentation because once again, I'm proving to my client I'm more than just a graphic designer. I'm thinking about the whole marketing branding strategy piece and that's what makes me different and that's why I can charge a little bit higher prices. Because I worked through all these different steps that other graphic designers are just not doing with their work. So if I can provide this, this is what ad agencies go through all these little detailed steps. It seems like a lot of extra work, but you can charge more money, can get bigger clients this way. This is the kind of stuff when you start to get large clients. This is expecting and this is what big ad agencies tried to do as well. So I'm just trying to show you this little bit more expert level presentation. I think this goes such a long way into to proving to the client, you're really thinking through this, that you're not developing concepts at random, that there's a process and there's a little bit of order to your creative process. 8. Finding Direction : If you're lucky, the client is very detailed in how they describe what they're looking for. But in our case, our client pretty much admitted that they don't know what they want and they don't know what they're looking for style wise, which is very common. It's gonna be up to us to help guide them through figuring out what they want. And as they say, clients do not know what they want sometimes until they see it. And this is where something called style escapes. Our brand style presentation was come in handy. You may have also heard the name brand boards, mood boards, and inspiration boards. All of those basically are the same thing, that they quickly and clearly defined and show a particular design style. The presentation is simple and almost always shown with one large image or page. At this stage, we have not tackled any sort of design tasks ourselves. What we need to do is curate our photos and items from other sources. This is mostly just between you and the client to find a general direction on style and look. So legally, I would not encourage you to use other people's work without giving them proper credit or post to get publicly. I get asked this question a lot by students. If they can use their inspiration boards or mood boards used with other artists work. And they say just for internal use to be super safe or give the proper credit for each piece of work used. I can even take my own photos and incorporate them into my style scape or style board if I'm worried about it, but I would definitely keep it just between you and the client. And if you do decide to put it on your portfolio as part of your presentation, make sure either give proper credit to the artist for each of the items you used in your style scape, or tried to find alternatives that you created yourself or you have the rights to use. And as I've said many times before, I like to find photos from free stock websites first, like pixels.com and splash and pixabay, to build out my style scapes or my brand style presentations. So let's look at two brand style presentations I put together quickly for a casual fashion brand. These are two totally different styles. And one seems more simple and clean and sophisticated, and the other one more casual, bright and fun. And if the client was struggling trying to find a style direction, presenting these two different style options may allow them to give you valuable insight moving forward. They may want to have a blend of both. They may want to see another style represented. They may fall in love with one. And that gives you a huge head start in coming up with your own logo topography system and brand colors later on. So how many of these should I put together? I recommend two or three in different styles to be the most helpful. Offering. More than that can start to confuse the client and bring up more questions than answers. Offering just one will not give the client a chance to choose between different styles. Based on your research, you should already be able to pick two or three different design styles you think the client might resonate with. Since you're using other sources of the client does not connect with the style you send. This can prompt them to bring up suggestions to you. This gives you a chance to quickly present a different style. You should not spend too much time putting these together as it's still firmly in the brainstorming process and nothing final husband said. There are also style escapes for finished concepts. After you move through the entire brainstorming phase and come up with different logo ideas. There is no wrong time to present a style scape or a mood board or inspiration board. Sometimes earlier on in the process, it's necessary to establish a direction with a client that may not know what they want. And it can be helpful and deciding between two different styles they might want to go for. Also for presentation and portfolio presentations, you can take everything you're going to create throughout the class and put it into one final style, border style scape presentation like this, for example. And we're going to work through that project and talk about key characteristics of strong presentations a little bit later on in the course. So don't worry, we're going to walk through this and we're slowly working our way through this. What feels like a long research process, but I have just a few more direction binding activities we could do to further establish our style direction. And once we do a couple of these projects, we're going to be very close to one of my favorite parts of this entire process. And that is the brainstorming and sketching phase. So please hold tight. I have a little extra student project for you if you want to participate. If you decided to use the sushi club brand, great. Or if he decided to use your own different company or client brief, that's great too. But I want you to practice creating a couple of different styles, scapes or style presentation boards, mood boards, inspiration boards, whatever you want to call them. I want you to pick a hero image, somebody to kinda represent the target audience or the user persona that you came up with. I went them to be the star of your style scape and the center of your style escape. I want you to build the whole presentation around that user persona and deriving colors from the photos as inspiration. I also want you to think about a main typeface example. So you can see in this style scape, I have two different typefaces chosen. And I think each one helps to tie along with kinda the styles of the photos as well. Everything's kind of connected. As you can see, the first style has a san serif type face, but it's a more FUN, youthful look. And then the other one is a Serif typeface. It's an, a more traditional look and as well for these two different high fashion brands. So I want you to do the same thing. And once you find your user persona image, put her or him right there in the middle and build everything else around it. You can go on Behance.com, find some great example logos. Maybe put a series of different logos on there that you think have a similar style that you think the user persona would really resonate with. And same thing, you go to pixels.com, go to find some inspirational photos to kinda help build this and put it together for either the different client brief that you're using or if you're going to go along with the, with the sushi club and do kind of your own brand building with this. So hopefully I look forward to seeing your work. You can just post it. I would love to see it on social media. Look to see what it looks like. 9. Putting Together Our Style Ideas: Welcome to Adobe Photoshop. We're gonna take the next ten minutes to create and brainstorm some of these style scapes, inspiration boards, just a way to help our clients pick out a style. So I wanted to walk through this technically how I did it in Adobe Photoshop. So I like to do these in Adobe Photoshop, but you can use any photo editing program. You can even do these in Adobe Illustrator, but I just prefer Adobe Photoshop because its easy to modify, crop, and isolate images. What size do I make these? Well, as you can see, a lot of style escapes comes from the word landscape, which means kind of a horizontal presentation. Which can be nice if you were ever to print it out on a foam board and bring it to a client to show off. And it could be even nice if they have a tablet, if they're viewing it on a tablet or they're viewing it on a desktop. Because all of those screens are mostly kind of a horizontal orientation. But I've seen a lot of great brand presence style presentations done vertically. You see a lot of mood board, inspiration boards done vertically as well. So don't feel like you have to do it horizontal. You can do it in any way as long as it's easy for the client to see the style at first glance, they don't have to scroll a whole lot to see at all. They can kind of get a good idea of the style. Quickly make a determination on whether they like it or not. So let's get started by opening up a new document. And I have one right here. It's 4 thousand pixels in width by 1200 and height that seems to be kind of a nice ratio, gives you enough space horizontally to put stuff, but it's also not so long horizontally that they're gonna have to sit there and scroll to really see the entire style. So I'm just gonna do 4 thousand by 1200. I like to keep it in a nice high resolution. You never know if he might need to print these and bring it to a client presentation or if it's just going to be a digital presentation. Always nice to do higher resolution. Here we are, and we have a blank canvass and I think a lot of people freeze and they get a little bit of a panic attack because they don't know where to start and how to start. What do I start with? I feel like I can't come up with a style if I have nothing to go on, but just some data that we've gathered so far. So the client and the client brief said they had two different styles that they were still trying to figure out. One was this really pop, bright Pao. They said they even used the comment, I want it to feel like a power when they see it so they can bright vivid colors, more fun, soft topography, maybe even illustrations. I'm not sure we're going to see how that looks. And they also wanted to see a reserved one with maybe a seal graphic, just reserved colors. They even mentioned the color black. So it'll be easy to determine between the two styles because the clients already kinda given us little bit of a direction. So let's get our art board tool and let's create two art boards. Are going to go here and click on new work to be able to pop a second one, ride on there. So we have our two our boards. Let's start off with a fun, bright pop of color. So when we get started with these, the way to fight that panic of, I don't know where to start is to start out with your user persona. You might have Howard who haven't image of her or you can find a like image, doesn't have to be exactly her. Find a similar image, similar age, demographic. And possible titles. So let's go ahead and get our user persona outlets find someone very similar to the r star. So Amman pixels and I'm going to type in professional woman. We're going to scroll through and we're going to try to find someone who matches our user persona. So this is going to be a bright fun one. So I want to see if I can't find somebody with a smile. So it has a nice smile, very inviting and very warm. So I think I found the perfect one. She kinda has some clothes that are more casual, but yes, she's professional chances Smile, tour. She seems about the right age, kind of inner Thursdays. So just try to match that as best as I can. So I'm gonna bring her enemies going to copy and paste her right into. Let's go ahead and put them in the top art board. Let's right-click. Let's go ahead and make this a smart objects so we can make are smaller and larger and not worry about pixelation. And I'm going to press Enter and I'm going to quickly select her. I'm going to cheat. And the newest versions of Adobe Illustrator, I'm gonna do select subjects I can quickly masker. I'm gonna go down and masker really quickly down here, layering mask. And just like that, she has her background removed. I love that option in the newer versions of illustrator, it's worth the upgrade if you guys have an older version of Photoshop and don't have that, so she's going to be the star. I like to do it in the center and everything kind of fan out around her. So the topography and some of the other photo choices around her, but that it's not always the case. I've seen people do style escapes and they start off with, these are persona like they're reading from left to right and they kind of tell a story as they move over to the right. So there's no wrong way to build these, but I'm gonna go ahead and start off with her living maker a little bit bigger. Just like that. I don't want to make are so small that you kind of lose her and the background. So let's go ahead and put a nice bright vivid background art on her. I'm just gonna get the Rectangle Tool. And I'm just gonna put a pop of color here. Let's do a nice bright vivid orange. I'm going to put this in the background. And with his bright fun version, I also want to maybe add a little angle. And don't spend a lot of time and doing your own style here, or spending time on design because it's really just giving them an idea of a style direction. It's not at all making any recommendations for what it, what it's going to look like, just kind of a general idea. So now that we have our hero image, I like to start with topography. What typography choices are we thinking is going to work. So there is a couple we can just go through maybe some current type choices that we have in our software. Or if we want to explore different type styles, we can go to Google Fonts and kind of get an idea of style. So I'm thinking fun when it comes to typography choices. I don't want a lot of sharp, pointy right angles. I want to have some soft, rounded fun angles, but I also want to have it be chunky, easy to read. So very chunky typeface. So we can go up here to font properties and We can go ahead and increase this thickness and see what some of the thicker type choices are and kinda scroll through. So there's a couple of sans serifs. There's commit. Commit looks really good. So that can be something I can easily download. So you can download that font family. And you can even type in a headline. To kinda help you see, well, what is the name look like, what Islam company named look like in this topography choice. A lot of people show their font choice and they show the entire alphabet and how each letter is shown. And that is okay when you're doing branding guidelines and you're doing kinda some more final stuff. But for this, we're just going to kind of keep it some nice simple topography, maybe a little headline. And this case I'm talking about the style, the bright, vivid one, number one styles all about that pop of color and vibrant color. So I feel like the clients could connect more with that than they are seeing every letter of the typeface that doesn't really connect with them. They're not graphic designers. So you're designing this for non designers. So keep that in mind. So I'm trying to continue to define bright color palette doesn't have to be perfect. So another thing I can do is bring in some local designs that are from other designers that I thought would have the style that I want to go for. So I'm going to go on Behance. And I'm just gonna type, I'm going to start really broad and just type in logo design. And we can get more specific about what kind of logo design after we start to see some examples. So I really like these bright colors. Let's check this one out. All the colors are fantastic, but not all the typefaces are things that I think would resonate like that, not at all. It's two traditional. So there might be just one logo design out of this whole bunch that I think might match. And that's okay because we could just take a quick screenshot. And what I'm gonna do when I take a screenshot, I'm also gonna go up and make sure I copy and save who the artist is. Sometimes I like to get the link and I can go up here and I can have a whole series of different links to everything I'm using so that if I need to put a little credit, I can put a credit to the artists because you never want to take a logo and assume that it's yours. You always wanna make sure you give proper credit to people, especially if this is going to be made public. But once again, I prefer this to be just between you and the client. So I've collected a few logos. Let's go ahead and see what else we find. This one has kind of a lot of fun kind of shapes and angles to it. It's got this monoline. Look too at motto line, meaning, meaning single thickness. So it's got the same thickness throughout his feels very uniform, but it's got a lowercase presentation which is softer and more approachable, which we'll kinda go with their bright and fun look. So I'm just gonna take a quick screenshot of this. And I usually like to cluster the logo designs together so they can kind of see all of those together to get an idea on style. I'm just doing that right now. But it's also nice to see it on something very practical, or mockup or product. So restaurants, what would be something that they needed for the restaurant or every restaurant needs and would like to kinda see what a style looks like, a menu. So I'm going to specifically look for a menu that would be in this bright fund style. And I did this a little bit last night and I had a really hard time finding a menu that really matched our particular style. I found things that kinda were bright and fun. But they had this kind of illustration on it. And I didn't want to go into illustrations with this particular brand, so I had a hard time finding the right one. But after about ten minutes, I even typed in yellow because I wanted to kinda get something that had yellow in it and was bright. And so this is when you can start to be very specific about what you're looking for. And I liked kind of the simplicity of it, but I had that nice pop of yellow. Took me about ten minutes to finally find the right style that I thought would match everything. But sometimes some things are easier to find than others a logos I've found really quickly. So let's, I also ran across this topography option that I thought was also fun. It is a little bit different than kind of what we have here, but it's good to kind of introduce that because you're trying to get feedback from the client. They may go, I love the hand lettering, we want to have that. So it's nice to kind of throw something that's in the same category. It's bright, it's fun, but maybe a little different style that you think could work. So just kinda presenting all these in this fashion. I think also adding a little more bright color. Let me get a background here. Of course, we can modify these colors at anytime. It's very easy to do. Let's see if we can't find a little inspiration from her shirt. We can even help her pop out so she doesn't look like she's lying. She's a standing up against nothing. We could do some little small effects. Once again, don't spend a whole lot of time, but this doesn't take too long. I'm just gonna do some shadows is creating a layer underneath her. And I'm gonna paint with a brush tool, soft around brush. I'm just gonna paint on a little bit of shadows. So it looks like she's standing up against that background. And I'm going to reduce the opacity quite a bit. So it's a sick, a little shadow. So that's kinda before, after, just kinda adding a little bit of realism and pop here, let's add pictures of sushi, the kind of food photography we feel like we want to use with this style. So it's going to be bright and fun. Sushi photography. So let's go to pixels and let's look at sushi and try to find one that I think is very vibrant. See these are kind of washed out looking, so I'm looking for lots of color. Maybe a pop of the red and the orange. So that one looks really, really cool. So this got a lot of color to it, a lot of vibrancy. So I'm going to bring that went in. And remember, we need to use photos that's going to resonate with our target audience and with a kind of held that the client wants to be portrayed. So they make sure you don't get the volcano roles or the, the american ice sushi get very simple sushi because that's what the client is asking for. So when you do a style scape, getting the type of sushi they're gonna make or the type, the more traditional, simple sushi like this would probably be a more desirable photo to use than something like that. So I am just bringing this photo in. This is really just to set the mood for your style board. I want to do one or two more things here. I feel like something's missing. I wanna get to know this person a little bit more. She's probably what, mid-thirties. And this is kind of moreover, as almost feeling like more of a retro pop early nineties, almost kind of vibe would if we were to bring in some, something fun from that era. That is, just, just try to add a little personality. So I thought, what if I did a cassette tape? And this one's kind of fun. So I'm going to download that, see the bright colors that are used even on this and even on the cassette tape, just thinking out loud. So here's our cassette tape. Let's bring this in. This will be very easy to isolate. It's already smart objects. I can make it smaller and do our little cheat. And do select Subject that'll select it super quickly. And let's just do a layering mask. I'm going to bring this down to the layering system. I want it to be covered up by the logo, maybe just like that. And maybe there's a second one kinda floating around. Let's make her a little bit bigger. I want people to really get to know her. She is our hero of the day. So making her a little bit bigger and just doing some small tweaks to kind of finalize the presentation. And there's an opportunity to bring in maybe another logo over here or some kind of different type style with sushi cloud is kinda seeing what we could do with this little extra space. So that style one. And you know, spend about ten to 30 minutes on each style. And so maybe an hour total with two or three different styles. So let's tackle the other one. It's going to be way more traditional and reserved. So we're going to call it the reserve provided. 10. Finishing Our Ideas: So for this one, we want to kinda keep our same user persona and will want to find a different version of her. So it doesn't have to be the same exact woman because you're not going to say find the same model, but she could find someone very similar age wise. And for this one, she's more serious and she has more reserves. So it's going to match the overall style. So we're going to build everything around this woman. So I'm gonna do a select Subject and quickly masker. I think I even wanna make her black and white because this is not a bright, fun, vivid one. This is more relaxed. So let's see if I can go to adjustments and add a black and white layer, my black and white layer. And it's gonna do a quick Black and White. And I'm gonna go and mask this black and white. So it only affects the layer below. So I'm just holding down option. Holding down option. You see that little arrow and I'm just going to connect this Black and White Adjustment Layer is connecting it down there below, so it only affects that layer. Let's make our tiny bit smaller so we can have some room for some topography. So let's bring in our type choice. Let's see what kind of type choice might work well here. And you don't have to just use Google Fonts. If you have the Adobe subscription, you could do Adobe fonts and do the same thing. And has a little area where you can do the thickness and thinness of the topography. You can browse fonts and they have all sorts of cool tags that might be helpful for brainstorming different types of typography. So we can go to font properties may be reduced the thickness quite a bit. Woo Monserrat is really nice. There's a Montserrat, It has a lot of different weights. So the more font weights you have, the more flexibility you have a love a typeface that has lots of different fall weights. So I finally ended up with the typeface for tomorrow, PT. I used a light and I also showed contrast by using a Dhimmi bold. So just doing a simple headline, the reserved one, elegance and sophistication with a focus on tradition. So i'm describing what that is, but also showcasing and tight choice. So let's do the same thing and put her on a background. Let's do a nice dark background for this. Let's expand that over the entire document and bring that down below. When I also want to do, is when you doing styles, there's also talking about textures. So for this, I thought maybe a gold texture would match really well with the black and kind of this color that I've picked out. So let's see if I can't go and type in textures and pixels and gold texture, so you buy, can't find something I could put over the typography. So let's first try out this one mixture here. So I'm gonna do the same thing on my texture on top. You'll hold down Option and clip it to the topography choice or the topography layer below it, flip it. And then I think that's a little too bright orange. So I can simply do a simple adjustment. Bring down that saturation a little bit, just to bring in more of a deeper rich gold just like that. So it's not as orangey. It a little bit. So I thought that added a little texture to that. We wanted to play around with texture for a style. So let's do the same thing. Let's bring in relevant photography. So this photography might feature darker backgrounds and might feature slate materials that sushi is resting on it might feature of our stone. So I found two photos on pixels that could really fit. This is that slate stone that it's resting on that I was thinking about. And here's another one that focuses on that traditional sushi fresh. It's expensive, it's valuable, that type of look. So we can arrange these in a certain way to kind of you're really telling a story here with these. So however you feel like you can best tell the story. I'm going to bring that in the background. And I don't want this sushi to distract too much. Let's see if I can't bring her up a little bit so that the type is not covered up too much. And let's start to pull maybe a few colors. So let's get a rectangle tool. I'm just going to cut. This is a good area to maybe add some color boxes. And I want to do kind of a darker gray. And I'm just gonna hold down Option and drag and its gonna get another copy of this. Let's bring out some of the gold color that we used. And let's make another copy. What other color, maybe kind of a cream, light gray color. We can even adapt something from the sushi colors that could be a possible inspiration for colors later on is bringing out the color of the sushi. So just kinda showing a, a brief little color palette here. We can also go for some logos that's going to match the style. So let's go to Behance and they talked about SEO graphics. And so I'm going to search for that right away, kinda see what kind of options we have come up. So here's an example that uses gold. It doesn't feel like a sushi place does. This feels more like a Steakhouse. So you just need to be careful about what we're choosing to make sure it matches. Gonna take you a few minutes to kinda find something. This is interesting. I really like the line art here and everything has the same thickness, so it's kinda monoline. And this has a wonderful seal graphic. So I'm going to scroll down here. There is an excellent example here that I can use. And you can just take a screen shot like a, just like a little screenshot to give the client and idea of the look and style. And once again, make sure you give this person credits. So Kevin Kraft, I'm gonna go ahead and copy his link and have that nearby so he can get proper credit for this awesome look. Since I like the monoline luck, I went ahead and typed in monoline logo and I found one that I thought would look really good as well. So among these seal graphics, I thought this one kind of had a nice traditional seal look to it, as well as this one kind of the circular topography presentation looked really nice and professional. And I want to bring out that gold idea too. So gold foil logo. So gold foil is kind of that gold that you see printed. And it shines its an actual foil that they can imprint just like this. That's kinda of gold foil stamping. So that could be an example that I can show and my style presentation. And that one's a great example too. It would be great to find one with black used as well. So I spent a few more minutes and found a couple of logos I thought were kind of seal graphics and also some really nice type treatments. I thought all kinda went well together. This, this should take less than an hour and you can even come up with a third one if if that's your client's needs, you may feel so confident you can skip this stage entirely if you feel like you really know what the client once, but sometimes clients say what they want, but they don't really mean it until they see it. So this can save you so much heartache by doing this and sending it to the client. You'll be surprised what they say. They always surprise me with their responses and go on. I like this style and you weren't even thinking of that as an option and they really just fell in love with it. So this is so helpful, it's gonna make the brainstorming process so much easier. So instead of having all these different style possibilities will really hone in on a particular style. So we don't have to sit here and sketch thousands of logos and wonder if they're going to like it. We're going to know, have a better idea that they are going to like it and have some direction. So that's the whole point of this section is to find a direction so we can start sketching and brainstorming. 11. Finding a Brand's Position : Capturing a brand's position, find ways to rate and quantify certain company characteristics and personalities. So sure some of this might be very subjective, but all these exercises can still be valuable in helping you find a style direction isn't required. Absolutely not. But each activity brings you closer to having definitive reasons for making certain design decisions. So you pick rating scales that pertain to the company, industry or target market. What's important to them? Client interaction and feedback can be very helpful in gaining valuable insight into the company. Is the company cleaning company would a rating scale that shows where they stand on price. It might be very meaningful when you're doing competitor research. Sharing these scales with a client and discovering where they land on the scales could end up sparking great conversations that can lead you down the path of certain design styles and decisions. So we're gonna do a quick example using our sushi club. And their scales can be made up depending on the industry. So like I said before, if it's a cleaning company, price would be really important to show. And so for this example, we're talking about a restaurant, we're talking about sushi, we're talking about takeout and delivery. So a lot of things are matter. So one thing could be how fast they are at delivery. Are they going to be faster than their competitors? Are they going to be slower? Then you're not gonna be able to find the perfect position on a scale. So some of that is subjective, that's okay. This is just generating conversations and generating ideas. So that when we go to the brainstorming process and we will finally get there, I promise. When we're brainstorming, we have these scales in our head, you know, so price point, where do we fall based on what the clients already said? They're not the highest, but they are a little more expensive than average. So I'm gonna put them a little bit higher on the price female. Another thing is talking about our target audience. Do we wanna be more masculine, feminine, gender neutral? So that's a really good question. Our user persona happens to be professional woman, but that one person doesn't represent everybody that could be our target audiences, just kind of a helpful visual for us. So that could be a client question, you know, do you want to go more masculine with your design? Do you wanna go more feminine? And a lot of these are being challenged today in our new world where, you know, we're, we're challenged to ourselves to be more gender neutral with everything we do. That it's really important. A really interesting discussion that you can either have with your client or have with yourself. Kind of figuring out where you think this this company would be best suited. In terms of that style, I worked for a company that had a 100% of their audience were min. So obviously I had a more masculine style. I used grunge. I know I hate it that a US grunge, but hey, it, the client liked it and that's kinda what they use. Darker colors, richer color. That's kinda what I did for them. So you will have some clients that will only target women and only target men. And it's good to know that. Okay. So here's another one is entry-level or retired. Where are they professionally? That that's a great question for us. Is when are they going to? Who's going to be most interested in delivery people that don't have a lot of time. So that's going to be probably people that are going to be kind of in-between. Some are going to be retired, some are going to be entry-level. I would honestly probably put this closer in the middle of kind of a career path because our user persona, she's in her mid thirties. She's kinda just starting to get some extra income. So style, this is another good one. So you have modern, transitional and traditional SO transitional is right there in the middle. You're not modern, you're not traditional. A lot of this, you can even have a home design and interior design. This is kinda some tags that they like to use. So do you wanna go more modern and fresh and simple and clean or traditional unreserved. And that's exactly what we were trying to figure out with our style scape and brand presentation. So I think they're gonna kinda sit in the middle and then it's not going to be super helpful for us, but it's good to know whether they're going to be ultramodern are also traditional. That would kind of change how we approach the brand to. And you don't have to use these for your client. I just picked these because I thought they would be relevant to my industry. So Bolden, reserved style, design. Are you going to be reserved? Are bold and that's exactly what the style scapes we're helping us figure out. So bright or neutral. Once again, that's another style. If he were to present and have the client rank these and put it on a scale one to ten. And trying to figure out where they are, this could be very, very insightful. So desired audience characteristics. Who do we want to be our client? Not who is our currently our client, but who would we like to be our client? Or they could be rule-breakers or rule followers. So that would change your whole design. So if you're a useful clothing brand and you want to target young people who are interested in changing society and going out there and just kind of being a rule breaker in a positive way. That would be an interesting care insight to the audience. What if they're rule followers and what if it's a financial institution? And then you have people who feel like they do all the right things and they're going through all the right steps. So this is all very open-ended and open. This is a way to open discussion. So risk-takers and risk averse. So that'll be interesting in the financial industry, Ru, have risk-takers who are going to be getting into investments that are very risky, like cryptocurrencies. Or you have people who are risk averse and they are scared to invest in the stock market. How we design using colors and color psychology might really get some good ideas of how to approach color two and psychology and making people feel safe with cooler colors, cool tones for the risk averse and for the risk-takers using some of those, Brett bought bright vibrant greens and oranges. We even have one for extroverts are introverts, are these people that are social or they kinda keeping to themselves, well, this is a delivery service, so you might have a little bit of introvert, introversion here. But this is just, once again, this is a lot of subjective stuff. But anything helps when when coming up with the brainstorming process. Do you have to do this? No, I'm just giving you a set of tools to use. You can choose to use all of these tools. You can choose to use just a handful. Whatever you feel like is going to be useful. 12. Word Association : So we are getting ready to do our word mapping exercise, which will be the precursor to sketching. So when we do a word map were coming up and generating words that neither the client has mentioned that member we wrote down in the client brief how repetitive words like fresh and authentic kept coming up later, some great word bubbles to start off so we can branch out and come up with other associated words to those main words. But if you don't feel like the client really provided you with a lot of content. Sometimes you have to kind of generate some of these words on your own. So we're gonna do this quick word association exercise to kind of generate some other words so we can help brainstorm associating words. So then we can get some concepts jotted down. So one thing I like to do is have two columns, list tangibles. So these would be things he can hold, touch, or see in your client's industry. So for an example, a home improvement company, some things that you can touch see hold. When you think of home improvement is a hammer, roof, maybe a work truck, tape measure, blueprints plans, a hardhat, just coming up with things very quickly. Wood, stone, brick, just kinda of raw materials. A house because a lot of these people are going to be improving their house, yard, a construction zone. So just kinda listing some tangible words is helps me brainstorm some words. Uh, we sketch. I got a couple of things in my mind that I can start to sketch. So there's also intangibles. These are gonna be experiences and feelings and emotions. So how did we come up with that for home improvement company? Think about when you improve your home or your apartment, or wherever you are living and you get something to make it better. How does it make you feel? Does it make you feel overwhelmed? Because when you walk in a home improvement story like wow, what do I, where do I go? What do I do? How do I even do this? Lots of people in my house doing construction work, just kinda writing down general ideas. Loving my home and liking how it feels after I put all the hard work into it or have other people come in and do the work for me. There's also homeownership pride. You know, I'm proud of my space and I'm proud that I'm able to make it better. And also owning my space. If you own your own home, which most people who go to home improvement store, they either own a home or they're trying to eventually their own home or apartment. So this is just a really quick word association exercise. We could do the same thing with our sushi restaurant. We can write sushi, wasabi, soy sauce. Just kinda brainstorming things right off the cuff. Intangibles will be the experience, how it makes me feel the rich, deep texture of the fish. How it feels to connect with people in an intimate space. Those type of things would be good examples. Words we can brainstorm. So with some of the word association exercises we did and some of the repetitive words that kept coming up that the client mentioned that we went ahead and jotted down earlier on in the class. We're going to take all of those words and we are going to make the map. We're going to do a word mapping exercise. We're going to take all those were bubbles and try to find associating words. 13. Word Mapping : There is not an exact science when it comes to work mapping. I've seen it done different ways. I do like to start off with a main word. Bubbles that are best associated are commonly used when describing the company. And those are my first words. But from those words, I can dig deeper and come up with additional words associated with those first few main words. You can continue to branch off as much as you'd like, or even come back and write down another main word, bubble as you think about it. So down the rabbit hole we go. The brainstorming process is a series of jumps you make from one idea or thought to another. You cannot get to the final concept without working through several steps. First, it's like jumping across stones of a pond. You can't skip ahead to the final stepping stone. You must slowly work your way through Vinny stones. Before that final idea becomes clear. Think of word maps as pathways to concept ideas. For instance, we write a life coaching here as the main word found frequently and the client brief for this life coaching company. What do we think of when we think of life coaching? Words begin to appear and from that additional words can branch off from those ideas and so forth and so forth. So let's write our sushi clubbed right there in the middle. What is the word that is not only in the name of the tagline, but something that came up really frequently in our client brief. Well, that was the word authentic. That's going to be a very easy word to start off with because it was so obvious. So when we think of the word authentic, know what other relative words are. Words that are also associated with authenticity come up? Well, I think a lot of traditions and history. So I think of a history. There's a reason why it's authentic is you have to have a history first for something to be traditional and authentic. And of course, traditions with the sushi place, there's certain traditions that they do where they keep the fish as the focal point. And they're trying not to Americanize the sushi. So there's a lot of traditional there and the type of knives and the way they prep the food is very traditional. So those are just some quick words that are coming up. So when I think of authenticity, I think of timeless. So something that we're drawing from her history. So I'm just going to write down the word timeless. So branching off from history. So now I can go to those secondary bubbles and start to brainstorm branches off of those secondary bubbles. So what I think of history of the word rooted cups to mind. So we're rooted in history. So all of these are starting to be connected and we're starting to kinda see some themes. So another word I'm thinking of outside of traditions is a ritual. So we're thinking of the ritual of sushi preparation. And that goes back to traditions, and that goes back to the word, all this stemmed from the word authentic. So the other word that kept coming up was the word fresh. So I'm going to jot that down as a, another second main offshoot of sushi club. So that'll be this Odin bubble. And so what I think of when I think of fresh, in our case, I think of raw. So fresh equals raw, it's not cooked. There's something very nice about that. Also, it's healthy. And going back to our user persona and how they kinda more of the healthier crowd of fresh, raw sushi can be very healthy. Lastly, a word that comes up is safe, that was also brought up as a problem-solving opportunity for our user persona or customer profile is safe. They want to make sure it's fresh and, but also it's safe to eat because we are talking about raw fish and it's important that, you know, we feel safe eating it. So that brings us to another word I jotted down after reading the client brief and that was experience. So I'm gonna type in experience. What does, what is part of the sushi experience? Well, you know, the first thing you do is you open up a packet of chopsticks. Either you have your own chopsticks that are nice, or you open the package that the delivery comes with, and you snap open those chopsticks. So that's kind of part of the first part of the experience. I think about slow food. Sushi is not something you rush. It's something, you know, you take your chopsticks and you just eat it one bite at a time. And that also popped up. Another word in my head is savour. So we're savoring or food, we're taking our time, it's slow. Food. And remember the list of tangibles and intangibles we just talked about. I just wanted to jot down some some tangibles. So some wasabi, it's part of the experience that's definitely different. You don't really see that in any other type of food that you eat and also soy. So always plays a big part of sushi where you have the soil and the salt from the soil. So just kind of writing down some simple items that are also relating to it. So another main word, bubble or ideas preparation. So there's a preparation that kinda came from me thinking about experience. There is a preparation process of preparing sushi. So I'm thinking, okay, they have the sushi knife, which are going to use really expensive, high-quality sushi knives to do all the preparation. They have really good high-quality ingredients. There's rolling and cutting of sushi. That's kind of part of the preparation process. So I'm really thinking and MR. To starting to kinda conceptualize some ideas and already kinda thinking of a sushi knife somehow involved in possible sketch or a logo, symbol or idea. You can also go back and add bubbles as you think about it. So I'm gonna go back to authentic and going to just write down Japan because I'm thinking we might want to study or bringing something with Japanese culture history into the logo. That's also a possibility. And I lastly thought of flavor, which I think would probably fall into the experience bubble. So I wrote that down and I feel like after about ten minutes or so I have some really good words, associated words that can really help to form some sketches and concepts. How do we turn these words into real concepts? So we have all these words that relate to the company name, the brand, LFOs, the client brief. But how do we translate these just words and shapes and symbols and to ideas for our logo and our brand design. So sometimes connecting several words together helps you to form a concept. For instance, if I came up with the word exclusive or high-end are rare, it might start to shape how I present the brand. I could have it be clean and simple and exclusive with simple symbols and elegant typography. This can also help us in picking out our color palettes later on down the road to. So I'm just gonna go through each main word bubble and see if I can't find a symbol or a topography treatment. We can start to sketch out and I'm just going to write these ideas down. So for the easiest one I think is the experience. I see chopsticks and that's the first part of the sushi going experience as the first thing you do. So I think people associate chopsticks, sushi. So we can explore that as a possible idea. Some square write down chopsticks and gonna start are researching how chopsticks look and how I can best sketch and draw those. So another thing is, let's go up to preparation. So the sushi knife, they even mentioned that in the client brief was kind of important to them. So when if I went and I studied sushi knives, I have no clue what they look like or how they differ from other knives. So I'm gonna go on Google and just kinda see what those divs look like. I think they even supplied us with an article and kind of study that and take a few, grab a few photos that I can use as references. When I go to sketch sushi knives, I can figure out how to work the sushi knife and the name together to see if I can intertwine them somehow and make it really cool. So when I go down to fresh, I see raw, healthy, and safe. So none of those words are really drawing up any concepts to show visually. And those are kind of more abstract. But I'm going to keep those in mind when doing it Healthy. Might be interesting. Do something with health, with leaves. I don't know. I'm gonna kinda keep that in the back of my mind and then safe. So perhaps having a logo that, that shows confidence. So maybe some bold typography, really chunky topography that makes you feel confident and safe, authentic we have, we can look at the Japanese history or culture. What about using a circle? As, you know, that's the Japanese flag. I don't know if we can explore that or not. Maybe we can look at Japanese characters that mean the word sushi or have something with like maybe the word authentic in Japanese characters. That's something we can explore, that's really neat. So I think that's something I'm going to write down and figure out. Okay, so I have some rough idea is we have a knife. I also want to play around with the word sushi Club and also want to play around with the first, almost like a monogram and take the first letter of sushi clubs, so SMC and want to play around with that knife, play around with the Japanese history and culture, and play around with chopsticks. So I have a couple of sourced images I can use as reference points. So when I go to sketch, I kinda know what chopsticks like already and you kinda know what the sushi light knife looks like. So I could just get sketching. So yay, we're finally here. All the hard work is over and now it's going to get really foreign. So I'll see you in the next lesson as we start to really sketch