Brand Marketing: Designing an Extensible Brand Identity

1. Introduction: In this class, I'm going to show you how to apply my particular style of design thinking to a specific type of project, a brand identity system for a complex brands. And by complex brand, I mean one that includes a parent brand and then any number of sub-brands that all need to work together in some way. Hi, I'm Courtney Alicia. I'm a brand strategists, designer and educator who spent the last 15 years helping small businesses bring their brands to life. In this class, we'll tackle how to think about designing a brand that is extensible into the future as your brand grows and changes. I've developed these lessons with experienced designers in mind. In particular, those of you who are in the beginning stages of a project like this. My goal is to set you up for success. So that as you get ready to kick off your project, you're ready to go. Whether it involves ten brands or to. My aim is to provide you with the focus and inspiration you need to get started. You leave class width and understanding of brand architecture and how it applies to your specific situation. Clarity around your project's constraints and opportunities, appropriate approaches for designing within your particular brand architecture. And understanding of the consistency, flexibility spectrum and how it applies to your situation. And a plan to help you kick off your design process. As a way to lead you through content. I've put together a design plan workbook that you can use alongside each lesson. When completed, this will act as a sort of creative brief to guide you into your design process. For your project. You'll submit your completed workbook and share a two to three tactics that you found to be particularly helpful. And all you'll need to take this class is some design experience and a project to keep in mind as you complete each lesson. Next up, we'll kick things off by learning about brand architecture. I'll see you in class. 2. Understanding Brand Architecture: In this lesson, we're going to talk about what brand architecture is and start to get specific about how your particular brands are structured. Getting really clear on your projects brand architecture will provide you with some foundational knowledge that will help to inform all of the work to come. So before we go any further, let's define exactly what brand architecture is. Put simply, brand architecture is the structure of the brands within your organization. How do they work together? How do they relate? Defining how your brands work together has major implications on both a small and large scale. Yes, it will impact how you design for your brands, but it will also impact how customers interact with them, how sales are generated and everything in-between. Brand architecture is something that is generally defined at a high level business perspective. So depending on how large your organization is, you may or may not be involved in the discussions around this. In any case, this means that the model you belong to will most likely be dictated for you. The brands you're working with most likely already have a set structure. There are three main brand architecture models that show up with complex brands, which means your organization most likely falls into one of them, a branded house, a house of brands, and an endorsed brand. Technically, there is a fourth model, hybrid model, which incorporates some combination of the other three. But for this class, we're going to focus on these three primary models. If your project involves a hybrid model, I suggest just paying close attention to the content around whichever models apply to you and just make that information work for your situation. Also, one thing to keep in mind is that the stakeholders who made the structural decisions for your brands may not use the same vocabulary we're going to use. So even though the brands you're working with may have a set structure in place, you may not already know which model applies to you. But once we take a look at the details of each one, it should become more apparent. So with that said, let's go through each model individually. Starting with a branded house. A branded house structure is one where the parent organizations overall branding drives the branding for any sub-brands. Typically, the sub-brands will involve some variation and design that give them unique perspectives while remaining overall very loyal to the primary brand. Fedex is a really good example of this. As you can see, there is no question that the sub-brands all belong to the parent organization as there is very minimal visual difference, the endorsed brand model features Apparent brand, that lens it's support and credibility to a number of sub-brands. The sub-brands likely have their own identities, but are typically seen in association with the parent brand to maintain that connection. Marriott and its various hotel properties is a good example of this structure. As you can see, there isn't much visual similarity at all between all of these different brands. But they are easily and quickly connected because they all include the parent brand as part of the design. In the House of Brands model, each sub-brand has its own unique identity. Customers may or may not be aware of the fact that these sub-brands are connected to their parent brand because they generally do not share any apparent similarities. A good example of this is Procter and Gamble, just a small sample of P&G brands, but as you can see, they all have their own completely unique identities. And there really is no way of knowing how they're linked without doing some research. Let's also take a look at an example from my own work. For the purposes of this class, I'm going to share my process for the brand refresh that I designed for beginning with children, which is a charter school network in Brooklyn. This product involve creating an identity system that needed to be extensible so that it could allow for adding additional schools over time. If you've taken my brand refresh course, this will look familiar to you. But I'm going to share some different details here, since we're talking about a different aspect of the project. So what you see here are the original three logos for the three primary network categories. They have a foundation which is their overarching brand, and then to sub-brands for representing two schools. This is where we started and this isn't actually where they are now, but I'm going to show you how the foundation and the organization as a whole existed. When I worked on the project. As we work through the lessons, I'll share with you how the process applied to my own project and show you how the work of Vault, beginning with children falls into the branded house model, which you can see here, even in their original logos that we haven't touched yet. So now that you have an understanding of the three brand architecture models, your job is to determine which one your organization falls into. Take stock of the brands that you're working with and just determined the very basic information. How many brands are there and then how do they fit together? As I mentioned earlier, the structure of a company's brand and sub-brands is determined at a high organizational level. So the most basic answer to this question should probably be provided to you, but what may not be determined is what model your brands specifically fall under. That info isn't readily available. It's your job to use whatever information you have to name the model so that you can use it in your design process. And having this in mind will help you get more clear on what your next steps should be. So now let's take a look at your project. Your first step is just to download the workbook if you haven't done that already. And then once you have that in hand, you first want to determine your organization's brand architecture model based on what we talked about in this lesson. And then you want to create a simple graphic that visually represents all of your brand. Something like what I just showed you in our brand examples earlier. The graphic can be as simple or complex as you want it to be. It can also be a super simple infographic or it can be a sketch. It can be fully designed or just sketched on paper. If your brands don't have fully designed logos yet, the graphic can just be really barebones and list their names. The main goal is to get a visual representation of your brands so that you can use it as a reference throughout your process. And then when you're finished, update the design plan workbook and feel free to share those pages and any questions or insights that came up for you in class. Thanks for joining me today. Next up we will work on identifying your project's constraints and opportunities. 3. Identifying Opportunities: In this lesson, we're going to focus on getting really clear on both what constraints you need to work within and what opportunities those constraints provide for your particular project. Before we get into this lesson's content, I just want to make a quick note about creative briefs. At the end of this class, once you complete your workbook, you'll end up with a design plan that will help to guide your design process. However, it won't be quite as in-depth as a traditional creative brief wood. For the purpose of this class, we're going to focus on a small but essential chunk of information that I would typically include on a creative brief. We're not gonna go into depth on briefs in general. If you are interested in a deeper dive on how to build one for yourself. I do have another class that you can check out which is linked below. Now with that other way, let's get into constraints and opportunities. Starting with constraints. Your constraints are the guidelines and restrictions that you need to work with them to develop your design work. They may be dictated by certain stakeholders or they may be defined by you if you're leading the team. But either way, they are essentially a set of rules that you must adhere to within your design project. What they will specifically look like is going to depend entirely on your personal circumstances. Constraints can range from design-centric rules like you cannot use the color blue or you must use a serif typeface for our primary typeface. To more functional rules like our logos must work in an animated context to anything and everything in-between. Let's take a look at the constraints we were working with for beginning with children as an example, to give you some context, we had to incorporate the original icon that you can see here in their logos, meaning the graphic that you see within the blue and the orange shapes. We also had to retain blue as a primary color that is similar to what they had as an existing color. We had to create some sort of system that would work for future schools with any name, which is truly the extensible part of this brand. And the biggest challenge that we had to work with, we had to find a way to incorporate existing taglines. As you can see, it is very tiny and the original logos, but most of the organizations have some sort of tagline or descriptor associated with their brand name, and we needed to keep this intact. Lastly, we couldn't abbreviate any of the names. All of the names are pretty long and we needed to figure out a way to create a cohesive system that allowed for this flexibility. And you'll see how we approach this as we move throughout the class. Now that you've seen an example, your first project step is to pull together a complete list of your project's constraints. The goal is to get this list as specific as possible. So when you and your team begin to design, there is no question about what you can and cannot do. And if you're unsure of anything, now is a good time to call a meeting with any team members or stakeholders that will be involved in the projects evolution and ensure that you're on the same page. Then once you've established consensus among anyone that needs to be involved, review your list and ensure there's no duplication or murkiness. Aim for the most clear and succinct set of guidelines that you can create under your specific circumstances. And then once you've arrived at a final list, use the corresponding pages in your workbook to fill in a list of all of your projects constraints. And then when you're finished, you'll have a clear list of all the guidelines you need to keep in mind neatly in one place. Now, let's move on to how your constraints translate into design opportunities. Once you've established some restrictions for your project, you can start to see the space being made for the things that you can do. Constraints can seem daunting or limiting at first glance, but once we accept those boundaries, they can open up a world of creative possibilities and give you some clues as to starting points so that you don't find yourself frozen while staring at a blank page or screen. You can't do X, Y, and Z, but what can you do? No, you can't use blue, but does that mean you could use essentially every other color? You need to use a serif for your primary typeface. But does that present an opportunity to use a clean and modern Serif or a flourishing script for all of your accent type. As with constraints, the opportunities you'll uncover will be entirely unique to you and your project. What's different from constraints is that there is no reason to limit yourself or ensure that they're succinct or even all that clear That's at this stage. Coming up with a list of opportunities is essentially your first steps toward the creative ideation phase for your project. The only limitation should be avoiding any ideas that divide the constraints that are already in place. So let's take a look at beginning with children. This was the initial set of opportunities that I started out with. We knew we had the opportunity to redraw the icon, even though we had to keep it, it didn't need to stay exactly the same. We could adjust the icon shape. We weren't limited to the current square with rounded corners at the final design for the icon. Then when beginning with children came to us, they weren't using consistent type across all of their brands. So we had the opportunity to create a type system that would help to bring a lot of cohesion to the brand's overall. When it came to color, the only requirement we had to stick to was the primary blue that I mentioned earlier or some version of it. We had an opportunity to make color a focus of the refreshed and extended brand by expanding the color palette significantly. Lastly, we had the opportunity to introduce new lockups for the logo design. We could change structure and layout and proportion as long as it worked with the other constraints. So despite having a lot of guidelines to work from, we also had a lot of starting points for design. So now that you understand the purpose of opportunities, this is your chance to brainstorm a bit. What are some ideas that you have at this very early stage that you'd like to explore in the design process. You can be as specific as try a version of the logo in a circular shape or use Fuchsia as the primary color or as open-ended as explore a monochromatic palette or play with animation. And then as you work, you can refine your list for clarity as needed. What you put together in this class is just an initial list and it's most likely going to grow and change as you move through your project. But I always find it helpful to have a few threads to pull right off the bat. So now that we've covered the basics of constraints and opportunities, It's time to complete your work for this lesson. First, create a list of your project's constraints. Second, create a list of your projects opportunities. Since you'll be working with multiple brands, the constraints and opportunities may be more complex. That's okay. Don't put too much pressure on yourself to do this, right? The primary goal of these exercises is to set yourself up for a design process that will be focused and run smoothly. And then once you're finished, update the corresponding pages in your workbook and share in the project gallery or check in with any questions that come up. And next up I will introduce you to a model that I call the consistency flexibility spectrum. 4. Exploring Consistency & Flexibility: Now that we've determined your brand architecture structure and defined your constraints and opportunities. We're going to take a look at how determining the appropriate level of consistency or flexibility for your brands will provide more direction for your design process. The consistency flexibility spectrum is a graphic model I created to provide visual context when determining how your organizations brands should defer or aligned from each other. As you might have guessed, one end on the left side represents consistency, and the other on the right represents flexibility. All complex brand systems will incorporate some level of consistency and some level of flexibility in their design. The differences arise based on how close your brand aligns to either end there specific place will help you to determine just how consistent are flexible your design system can and should be. Which can help to provide you with lots of direction as you move into the design phase. Placing anything on this graphic is of course not an exact science. But we can reasonably conclude based on how the brands are organized and what drives their structure around where each one should fall. So let's take a look at where the three brand architecture models might show up. Starting with branded house. This model presents a major advantage in terms of customer acquisition and eventual loyalty. It can essentially eliminate confusion in an instant and quickly create a sense of comfort or knowing. If one brand and the family is already one that a consumer knows and trusts, chances are they'll immediately feel that same trust across other brands. All of that leads us to the brands being aligned with a strong sense of consistency, which is why this model pops up on the far left of the spectrum. For endorsed brands, we're looking at a family of brands who may have very little visual connection aside from the endorsement from the primary brand, the range of difference can really be wide. Generally, I'd place the endorsed brand model and the center of the spectrum though. But depending on the constraints you have to work with, your brands may fall closer to the left or to the right. For house of brands, this model doesn't require any consistency at all. Each brand has its own unique identity and no apparent relationship to the parent brand. Which means this model fields most at home on the far right of the spectrum where there is maximum flexibility. Now let's take a look at where our example brands fall on the spectrum. As you can see, the brands I've shown you so far fall in distinct places on the spectrum aligned with their models. Yes, this is definitely subjective, but generally the examples we've seen do represent very clear versions of each model. So FedEx, as far to the left, four more consistency, Procter and Gamble as far to the right representing flexibility, and Marriott is right in the middle. For more context, let's take a look at beginning with children. They are also a branded house model. But before designing anything, we can see that we will have most likely have a little more freedom and flexibility than a brand like FedEx does, for example. I've placed them over towards the left, but not quite at the extreme end of the spectrum. So what does this mean for your project? The combination of determining your brand's model and they're placed on the spectrum will point you in a direction that will help to solidify your path during the design process. If you're working with a branded house, for example, you know that you will need to set some guidelines where there's a high level of consistency between your parent brand and the sub-brands. So all in all, the consistency flexibility spectrum is another simple tool to help you clarify and refine the direction for your design work. For your next steps, start by determining exactly where your organization falls on the spectrum, and then update your workbook. With that information, you can use the graphic that I've provided to mark your place. Again, this doesn't have to be exact, so use your best judgment. The goal of this simple exercise is to start to point you in a more specific direction towards design that will work for your particular model. The next few lessons are going to break down each model in more detail. We'll take a look at more examples and talk about what consideration and strategies might make sense for you. Each lesson is setup to discuss one model at a time. So you can feel free to just watch the one that applies to your particular model. If you want to watch all three, that's great, but it's definitely not required to complete the work for the class and there will be a bit of overlap between each lesson. I'll see you in class. 5. Designing for a Branded House: In this lesson, we're going to go a bit deeper into the branded house model and I'll give you some more food for thought around how to approach your design process. Before we get started, keep in mind that I'm going to be referring to your projects as if you are creating your brand from scratch or redesigning completely. Reality. You might be in a situation that deviates from that. But for the purposes of this class, will approach the process through that lens. Let's recap what's unique about a branded house. We already know that a branded house model is one in which the parent organization acts as the primary brand and drives the branding for all of the sub-brands within it. In this model, all of the sub-brands have the room to grow and market themselves individually. But when it comes to their visual brands, they adhere to the overarching organizations design and strategy. These brands are easy to recognize. In general, they share a lot of common features and may differ in only one or two small ways. So watch an approach for a branded house look like when working with a complex brand, a big focus of your work should be placed on creating a system that gives you the tools you need to extend the brand family into the future. Systems needs some level of consistency depending on your model and some level of flexibility. Your model will tell you to what degree each of those needs to exist and keep in mind despite the work you put into them initially, systems aren't foolproof. Most likely they'll need to shift and grow as your brands do. But you want to set yourself up with as many resources in the form of assets, standards, and guidelines as possible to give yourself the best possible chance of creating brand consistency over time. So with that in mind, the first thing you need to do is determine your starting point when working with a design for a complex brand. Trying to figure out what task to focus on first can get overwhelming really quickly. Determining your logical starting point is a good first step to breaking down a big project into smaller tasks if you're designing for a branded house, the answer to this question is pretty clear. This model in particular calls for a buttoned up system in a way that the other models don't. Which means it's probably the most straightforward model to design for. Since your parent organizations brand should drive everything that falls under their umbrella, its design is what you should focus on first, establishing that initial brands will provide a ton of direction around what you can and can't do with your sub-brands. And taking this approach means that the look and feel of the brand can be modified and whatever way you choose and then apply to as many sub-brands as you have to work with infinitely into the future. So this brings us back to the consistency flexibility spectrum. As we discussed in lesson three, the branded house model falls about as close to consistency as you can get. Which means you should aim for your suite of brands to feel like they all belong to the same visual pattern. They should be instantly recognizable as companion parts of a whole. So how does this inform design? This model is likely the easiest to work with because it's the most straightforward. Since you know upfront that your brands will need to incorporate strong visual ties, you may have less work to do than if you had the freedom and flexibility to create many distinct brands. And then once your primary brand is designed, your focus can shift to how you can apply some variation to those brand elements that will differentiate your sub-brands. This can be really simple, or it can be really complex. At a basic level, the words representing each brand might change. Technically just replicating the logo of the primary brand with new words can count as variation that makes up a system. But most likely you'll want to add at least one additional element that is giving customers of visual clue that each sub-brand has some unique quality that makes it both an obvious part of the family and its own thing. Let's take a look at some examples of brands employing this model. First, let's check back in with FedEx. Fedex is current brand is extremely straightforward and extremely consistent. They've had a brand with more color variations in the past. But now, with the exception of FedEx office, which really isn't always seen with a three color icon. All of their brands look exactly the same with one difference, the descriptor for each sub-brand. There is no question that all of these brands are essentially one and the same. Let's also take a look at Apple. Again, we have a set of brands that are incredibly consistent. All of these sub-brands contain an apple to the left of the black sensor of typography. Some minor exceptions are the Apple TV logo, which is often seen in white on a black background. And the Apple Watch logo, which is set in all caps. And obviously the parent organization logo, which is just seen without any text at all. But still, even with these minor tweaks, little logos are all very, very consistent. As with FedEx, there is no question that these brands are all part of the same family. Lastly, let's take a look at Google. One more example of a branded house. This brand incorporates the most visual variety that we've seen in branded house examples, get it still is really consistent. Google's app icons essentially act as their logos, so their shapes and proportions do vary. And their primary colors are applied in slightly different ways. But overall, all of these icons use the same four colors in a similar angular design with the same chunky line work. They are easily recognizable as part of Google's family of brands due to their consistency. Now that you have a sense of what the design approach to a branded house could look like. Let's try to simplify your process. After completing this class, you will have the design plan workbook, which is going to outline some basic, yet essential guidelines that you'll want to work from as you start your process. But you'll still need to fill in some gaps when you're ready to kick things off. Here are a few ideas for what those first steps could look like. Where the design plan stops the creative brief we'll fill in the gaps. Your brief will provide much more insight into the project's goals, their audience, the messaging, and all sorts of other considerations. For a branded house, you might only need one creative brief for your entire project, as opposed to having individual briefs for every single sub-brand that you're working on. Since all of the identities that you'll be building are going to be so closely linked. Either way, it's important to take the time to ensure this document is clearly representative of your project as a whole. Again, if you want to learn more about creative briefs, I do have a class I've linked below that you can also check out. Then your next step is to determine your starting point. What is the most important or essential or urgent step? As we discussed for a branded house, it's likely that the project should be focused on the parent brand first because it will streamline the rest of your work significantly. And that might not be the case for you. You and your team should prioritize the work that is going to give you the most bang for your buck within your unique set of circumstances. Next, you'll want to go over your constraints, opportunities, and place on the spectrum with your team and make sure everyone is on the same page. These metrics are important details that should inform the choices you make as you start designing and provide you with a framework that will empower you to be truly creative. While at the same time ensuring there will be no confusion or argument from stakeholders throughout the process. Next, you want to turn your opportunities into tactics. Revisit the opportunities you defined in less than two and turn them into tactics that will provide a structure to your initial design work. For example, if one opportunity you created was, we can create an entirely new color palette that is driven by the primary logo. You might change that to something more action-oriented like explore color variations for the primary logo. Translating all of the preliminary work that you've done into clearly defined steps will make doing the actual work flow much more easily and help to ensure you're covering all your bases. You might even have more ideas now that we've discussed your model in a bit more detail, you can add those to your list now. Lastly, you want to trust your own process, avoid creating an entirely new process for this project, even if everything I'm sharing is completely new to you. Instead, just adapt your process to this project, keep the overarching structure and then add, remove, or change anything that resonates with you from this class. Overall, this type of project is a really big undertaking. There are lots of considerations and lots of options and a lot to manage. Whether you're a team of one or a team of 20. A clear and concise process will help translate the complex and sometimes overwhelming into a straightforward set of steps for your projects. Steps for this lesson, set yourself up for success by determining 123 strategies you'll use in your design process. Once your design plan is complete, then you want to take your strategies to the next level and turn them into tactics, can clearly direct your work as you move into the design phase. Once you've defined your tactics, adjust as needed to make them work for you. They can be designed directions that you hand out to a team member, or you can explore them on your own. Or you can provide them as topics for a team brainstorm that's completely up to you and how you work best. Then after you've made a solid list for yourself, add them to your design plan workbook. As always, let me know if any questions come up in the class discussion. And if you're continuing to check out our more in-depth coverage of each model. Next up, we'll be covering the endorsed brand model. I'll see you in class. 6. Designing for an Endorsed Brand: In this lesson, we're going to go a bit deeper into the endorsed brand model and I'll give you some more food for thought around how to approach your design process. Before we get started, keep in mind that I'm going to be referring to your projects as if you are starting completely from scratch or redesigning entirely. In reality, you might be deviating from that. But for the purposes of this class, we're going to focus on things through that lens. So let's dive in. Let's recap what's unique about an endorsed Brant. As we learned in lesson one, we know that an endorsed brand is one where a parent organizations brand lenses credibility to a number of individual sub-brands. In this model, all of the sub-brands have the benefit of being free to exist as unique entities while being clearly supported by the overarching brand. As a consumer, you may very quickly recognized the parent company while you're unfamiliar with a sub-brand. But placing the sub-brands identity in close proximity to the parent company might give you a sense of trust and comfort that you wouldn't have if you had seen it outside of that context. It can essentially eliminate confusion in an instant and quickly create a sense of comfort or knowing. If one brand and the family is already one that you know, and trust, chances are, you'll immediately feel that same trust across the board, which presents a major advantage in terms of customer acquisition and eventual loyalty. So what should an approach for an endorsed brand look like? When working with a complex brand, a big focus of your work should be placed on creating a system that gives you the tools you need to extend the brand family into the future. Systems need some level of consistency depending on your model and some level of flexibility. Your model will tell you to what degree each of those needs to exist. Keep in mind, despite the work that you put into them initially, systems aren't foolproof. Most likely they will need to shift and grow just as your brands do. But you want to set yourself up with as many resources in the form of asset standards and guidelines as you possibly can to give yourself the best chance of brand consistency over time. With that in mind, the first thing you need to do is determine your starting point. When working with design for a complex brand. Trying to figure out what task to focus on first can get overwhelming really quickly. So determining your logical starting point is a good first step to breaking down a big project into smaller tasks. Luckily, the different brand architecture models can help point us in the right direction. If you're designing for and endorsed brand model similar to a branded house, the answer to the question is pretty clear. This model in particular calls for a system that relies on the primary brand as a driving force, which means it should be designed first. Establishing that initial brand will provide you with a ton of direction around what you can and what you can't do with your sub-brands. And taking this approach means that the look and feel of the brand can be modified in whatever way you choose and then apply to as many sub-brands as you have to work with infinitely into the future. This brings us back to the consistency flexibility spectrum, as we discussed in lesson three, the endorsed brand model falls somewhere close to the middle of the spectrum. The persistent presence of the parent company's identity will provide a sense of consistency for all of the sub-brands. But the submarines individual identities can provide a significant amount of visual difference depending on how far your brands are willing to take things in different directions. When it comes to your design process, this model lends itself to a process where the parent brand project is completed first, followed by the work for the sub-brands in whatever order or combination that makes sense for your team. One built-in Directive you'll always have in this model is that any sub-brand will be seen at least in some contexts alongside the parent brand, which means there needs to be some level of congruence between each pairing of identities. May be helpful to hold off on creative briefs, constraints, and opportunities for your sub-brands until your parent brand's design is fully fleshed out. Most likely the desired solution you arrive at for the parent brand is going to dictate certain constraints that you'll want to keep it in mind for all of your sub-brand projects. So let's take a look at a couple of examples of brands employing this model. First, we're going to take another look at Marriott. As you can see, each property represented here has its own unique identity. There's very little overlap with color or type or any of the other design elements. But all of the brands include either just the word Marriott or by Marriott to link each sub-brand to the parent company. You will notice though, that each brand applies this differently. They use the typeface, but the layout and sizing and color usage varies from brand to brand. And there is no replication of the Marriott m anywhere. But despite that variation, there is still no question that each of these brands belong to the Marriott family. Now let's take a look at Kellogg's. You'll notice a really similar pattern here where all of the sub-brands have completely unique identities. And the one similarity is that they are all paired with the parent brand's logo. Compared to Marriott, you'll notice that the Kellogg's logo is present alongside each sub-brand in a consistent design, the position of the sub-brand is always varying a little bit, but it is very consistently seen on top. And you never see any variation in color or style. The standard red logo is always present. Lastly, let's take a look at divergence family of brands. The approach version takes is sort of a combination of what Marriott and Kellogg's are doing. Each brand has its own unique identity, but there are several elements that tie them both together and to the overarching parent brands. There aren't really any similarities between each logo beyond the visual connections to the parent brand. For one, they all incorporate the primary Virgin logo in its original form. And then they also incorporate the primary virgin read as a main or only color. Beyond that, the brands use different typefaces, shapes, proportions. There really are very few similarities. And yet, as with our other two brand examples, they are all very clearly part of one brand family. So as you can see, all three of these examples present different approaches to endorse brand model. Even though they follow a consistent pattern, there are still varied approaches within each model. Now that you have a sense of what the design approach to an endorsed brand could look like. Let's try to simplify your process. After completing this class, you'll have a design plan in place that will outline some basic get essential guidelines that you'll want to keep in mind as you work, but you'll still need to fill in some gaps. So when you're ready to kick things off, here are a few ideas for what those first steps could look like. Where the design plan stops, the creative brief we'll fill in the gaps. Your brief will provide more insight into the project's goals, audience messaging, and other considerations. For an endorsed brands, you may only need one creative brief for your entire project, since all of the identities you're creating are so linked. Either way, it's important to take the time to ensure that document is clearly representative of the project as a whole. Again, if you want to learn more about creative briefs, you can check out the class that I linked in our class notes. The next thing you want to do is determine your starting point. What is the most urgent or important or essential step for you? As we discussed, for an endorsed brand, it's likely that a project focused on the parent brand is most essential and urgent because it will streamline the rest of your work significantly. However, that might not be the case for you. You and your team should prioritize the work that will give you the most bang for your buck within your unique set of circumstances. Next, you'll want to review your constraints, opportunities, and place on the spectrum with your team and make sure everyone is on the same page. These metrics are important details that should inform the choices you make as you start designing and provide you with a framework that will empower you to be truly creative. At the same time, ensuring that there will be no confusion or argument from stakeholders throughout the process. Next, you want to turn your opportunities into tactics. Revisit the opportunities you defined in lesson two, and turn them into tactics that will provide a structure for your initial design process. For example, if one opportunity you created was, we can create an entirely new color palette that is driven by the primary logo. You might change that to something more actionable, like explore color variations for the primary logo. Translating all of the preliminary work you've done into clearly defined steps will make doing the actual work flow much more easily and help to ensure you're covering all your bases. You may even have more ideas now that we've discussed your model in a bit more detail, add those to your list now. Lastly, you want to trust your own process. Avoid creating an entirely new process for this project, even if everything I'm sharing with you is completely new to you. Instead, just adapt your standard process to this new project. Keep the overarching structure and then add, remove, or change anything that resonates with you from this lesson. Overall, this type of project is a really big undertaking and there's lots of considerations and lots of options and a lot to manage. But whether you're a team of one or a team of 20, a clear and concise process will help translate the complex and sometimes overwhelming into a straightforward setup steps for your project steps set yourself up for success by determining 123 strategies you'll use in your design process. Once your design plan is complete, then take those opportunities to the next level and turn them into tactics that can clearly direct your work as you move into the design phase. Once you've defined your tactics, you can make them work for you and your team and whatever circumstances you're dealing with. They can be designed directions that you hand out to a team member to explore individually or topics for a team brainstorm, that's totally up to you. But after you've made a solid list for yourself, go ahead and add those to your design plan workbook. As always, let me know if any thoughts or questions come up in the discussion area. If you're continuing to follow the more in-depth coverage of the different models. Next up, we're gonna be focusing on the house of brands. I'll see you in class. 7. Designing for a House of Brands: In this lesson, we're going to go a bit deeper into the house of brands model. And I'll give you some more food for thought around how to approach your design process. Before we get started, keep in mind that I'm going to be referring to your projects as if you're creating all of your brands from scratch or redesigning completely, in reality, you might be in a situation that deviates from that. But for the purposes of this lesson, we're going to look at everything through that lens. So let's get started. What's unique about a house of brands? As we learned in lesson one, a house of brands model consists of a parent organization that houses a collection of distinct sub-brands under its umbrella. In this model, each sub-brand has its own unique and independent identity that often has no obvious ties to the parent organization whatsoever. Each brand is free to create their own unique identity and position and market as they please. Their audiences may overlap to a certain extent or they may be completely unique. So what should an approach to a house of brands look like? When working with a complex brand, a big focus of your work should be placed on creating a system that gives you the tools you need to extend the brand family into the future. Systems need some level of consistency depending on your model and some level of flexibility. Your model will tell you to which degree each of those things need to exist. Keep in mind that despite the work you put into them initially, systems are just not foolproof and they're likely going to need to shift and grow just as your brands do. But you do want to set yourself up for success with as many resources in the form of assets, standards, and guidelines as possible to give yourself the best possible chance of brand consistency over time. And with that in mind, the first thing you need to do is determine your starting point. Since you're working with a house of brands model, but you have a lot of flexibility. And the answer to this question could be one that is completely out of your hands. Since there isn't any design-related reason to start with one brand over the other. Your starting point will best be determined by your specific circumstances. Perhaps there's an important launch date for one of your brands that you need to adhere to. Or perhaps one brand is the company's biggest moneymaker. So that has a higher level of importance. Maybe your team is really small and so you need to spread the work out over the next year. The business goals, timeline, or team constraints you may be faced with could drive this decision entirely. If you do have a choice in the matter, I suggest starting with the most challenging or complex project first. I personally find it easier to push myself harder at the beginning of our project then in the homestretch. But if that doesn't work for you, that approach is entirely up to you. As long as you choose a single starting point, you just need to start there. And from there, you just keep choosing the next step until you have a finished project, you might be required to map out all of these projects on a specific timeline. But if you're not starting with one and then moving on incrementally from there can be really helpful when you're working with a project that is this complex. This brings us back to the consistency flexibility spectrum. In contrast to the branded house model, the house of brands falls just about as close to flexibility as you can get, as we discussed in lesson three. This presents an existing design opportunity in that you aren't required to work from any sort of existing brand guidelines beyond the constraints so that you defined at the start of the project. Over time, this also provides lots of room for brands to grow and change. If one sub brand wants to target a new audience, they can refresh or redesign their own brand without it affecting anything else in the parent organizations portfolio. While this model does lend itself to lots of design flexibility, your particular circumstances will dictate the level of freedom that you have in the design. So take a moment to revisit where you initially landed on the spectrum and just keep that in mind as we move on when it comes to your design process, this model could be looked at as an easy one to work with because it affords you the most flexibility. You have the most options to work with. But sometimes the fact that you have so many choices and so many objectives can present as a more challenging situation, it can feel exciting, but it can also feel really daunting. You will have more work to do than a person designing for a house of brands. Because essentially you will need to create multiple, completely distinct identities from start to finish. And there just aren't any shortcuts. So in your case, you will likely want to create individual creative briefs for each project. Since the constraints and opportunities and goals and audience will most likely be completely different, it warrants giving them their own focus and space. This is of course going to take more time, but doing so will lead to a more focused and efficient design process when you're ready to start that portion of the work, the way you tackle where to start is going to depend entirely on the structure and size of your team and the urgency of each project. You may want to work altogether on multiple brands at once, or you may want to tackle one at a time, depending on the bandwidth of your team. When it comes to the details of your designs, one detail that will point you in an initial direction is how much flexibility you have to work with. Your constraints allow for no restrictions at all in terms of design, or do you have minimal restrictions to consider or something in-between? An example of minimal restriction could be each identity can have its own independent design elements, but they all need to use a script for the main logo, or each identity needs to incorporate the color pink somehow. So let's take a look at some examples of real-world brands employing this model to give you a little bit more inspiration. First, let's take another look at Procter and Gamble. Again, these logos represent just a small selection of the P&G brands. And as you can see, there really are no visual similarities between the designs. Each brand has its own unique identity with its own personality and look and feel. Most consumers will have no idea that these brands are owned by the same parent organization. Now let's take a look at GM. Again. All of the GM sub-brands have their own unique identities. There aren't any shared typefaces or any design elements. However, these brands do feel a little bit more tied together than the P&G brands we just looked at. If you isolate the car brands in this grouping, for example, the Chevrolet, GMC, Buick, Cadillac. They do share a similar sensibility in terms of their design. They all have beveled three-dimensional logos and they all use a similar color palette. So it seems intentional, although I don't know this for a fact, that they share a similar visual language despite having their own unique identities. The other brands included here are definitely a bit of a departure and style, but overall, there aren't any extreme differences here. All of the brands live in similar color palettes and styles. This is an example as a really interesting one to show how certain categories of brands within a family can be loosely linked together while maintaining uniqueness throughout. Lastly, let's take a look at Unilever. Unilever, as with Procter and Gamble, maintains a portfolio of brands that are completely unique. They own 400 brands that span a wide range of design styles. Each one maintains its own visual identity and doesn't rely on the parent company at all from a branding perspective, most often with the house of brands. This is what you'll see, complete freedom and independence from brand to brand. But there are certainly exceptions to that rule, as you saw with GM, this goes to show that there are ways to maintain that independence while still creating links between groups of brands or categories of brands within an entire brand family. It just depends on what's going to work best for your particular situation. Now that you have a sense of what the design approach to a house of brands could look like. Let's try to simplify your process. After completing this class, you'll have a design plan in place that outline some basic good essential guidelines. You will want to keep in mind as you work. But you'll still need to fill in some gaps when you've completed your plan and you're ready to kick things off. Here are a few ideas for what those first steps could look like. If we think about each individual sub-brand as its own project, this is how you might want to structure that work for each one. Starting with finalizing your creative brief, where the design plans stops the creative brief we'll fill in the gaps. Your brief will provide more insight into the project's goals, audience messaging, and other considerations. We're house of brands. You're likely going to want to create a separate brief for the overall process and then one individual, one for each brand that you're working on. Since the constraints and opportunities and goals and audience is most likely going to be very different from one to another. It warrants giving each brand its own focus and space. This will, of course take more time. But doing so is just going to lead to a more focused and efficient design process when you're ready to start your work. Again, if you want to learn more about creative briefs, I've linked in other class below. The next step is to determine your starting point. What is the most essential or urgent or important task that you need to tackle a house of brands you've run the risk of trying to do everything at once. If you have a team of 20, that might be completely doable. But if you're designing five sub-brands with two people, you may have more success if you take things one step at a time, each brand is important and deserves to have its own space to be developed. Approaching things this way will allow you to access more creativity and focus than you would if you were to spread yourself thin trying to create everything all at once. Either way, you and your team should prioritize the work that will give you the most bang for your buck within your unique set of circumstances. The next thing you'll wanna do is review your constraints, opportunities, and placed on a spectrum with your team. Make sure everyone's on the same page. These metrics are really important details that should inform the choices you make as you start designing and provide you with a framework that will empower you to truly beach creative. While at the same time, it will ensure that there's no confusion or argument from stakeholders throughout the process. Next, you want to revisit the opportunities you defined in less than two and turn them into tactics that will provide a structure for your initial design work. For example, if one opportunity created was, we can create an entirely new color palette that is driven by the primary logo. You might change that to something more action-oriented, like explore color variations for the primary logo. You just want to word it in a way that gives an instruction for you to work from. Translating all of the preliminary work you've done into clearly defined steps will make doing the actual work flow much more easily and help you to ensure you're covering all your bases. You might even have more ideas now that we've discussed your model in a bit more detail. So you should add those to your list now. Lastly, trust your own process. Avoid creating an entirely new process for this project even if everything I'm sharing with you is completely new. Instead, just adapt your process to this type of project. Keep the overarching structure that you're used to and then add or remove or change anything that resonates with you from this lesson. Overall, an extensible brand project is often a really big undertaking. There's lots of considerations and lots of options and a lot to manage. Whether you're a team of one or two or 20, a clear and concise process is going to help translate the complex and sometimes overwhelming into a straightforward set of steps for your project steps set yourself up for success by first determining 123 strategies that you'll use in your design process. Once your design plan is complete, then take your opportunities to the next level and turn them into tactics that can clearly direct your work as you move into the design phase. Since you're working with multiple distinct brands, I'd suggest focusing on tactics for the overall projects here, ones that align with the big picture creative brief you'll be using for your entire project as opposed to one for an individual sub-brand. Then once you define your tactics, just make them work for you and your circumstances. They can be designed directions that you hand out to a team member to explore individually. Or they can be topics for a team brainstorm, it's completely up to you. Then after you've made a solid list for yourself, go ahead and add those to your workbook. As always, let me know if any thoughts or questions come up in our discussion. And next up, I'm going to take you through the full case study for the beginning with children brand and show you where I started and how I finished that project up. I'll see you in class. 8. Analyzing a Case Study: In this lesson, I'm going to take you through the work that I created for beginning with children. And I'll show you how we started and how he finished and take you through all the steps of that extensible brand case study. So let's get started. First, we're going to recap. So as you remember, these are the three logos that I was presented with. To start out, we have our overarching foundation logo at the top and then the logos for two schools below it. Again, beginning with children, fell into the branded house model. So you can see that structure here. When we first started working together, there were only three logos, but there was a fourth organization that was part of the whole system. So as you can see, I'm just representing that here with type. Let's take a look at what the constraints were. Again, just to recap, we had to use their original icon. We had to stick with their primary blue. We had to create a system that can work for future schools with any name which was really are extensible part of this system that we had to really focus on. We had to find a way to incorporate their existing taglines and then we also couldn't abbreviate their names. So those were all things that I kept in mind as I was working. And then for our opportunities. I started with this list. We could redesign the icon. Obviously not from completely. We couldn't really create anything from scratch or introduce new content, but we could redraw it. We can update the icon shape. There was no restriction as far as that went. We could create a consistent typography system. We could create an expanded color palette, and we can also introduce new logo designs. And at the beginning, I was planning to do all of those things. So I did explore all of that. And now, just to revisit where they fall on the consistency flexibility spectrum, they are a branded house model, so they do fall very close to the consistency end of things. They are not quite a FedEx. We're not keeping the logos as consistent as something like that. What I did move them over slightly towards the center. But generally they are a pretty consistent brand. So we knew that that was something that was going to be driving our work. Let's take a look at the work. I'm first going to just share with you the core brand elements and I'll show you how those applied to the overarching brand. And then in the end I'll show you how that applied to some of the sub-brands. First, let's start with the icon. So this is the transformation that we did to the icon, very subtle but made a big difference in terms of modernizing the brand. We kept the illustration with three people and the book essentially the same. We just adjusted the spacing a little bit, close the gap on the book so that it felt a little bit more foundational and strong underneath the three people. And then we also changed the shape of the graphic from the rounded, the square with rounded corners to a circle. The color palette was a spot where I did a lot of work. We shifted to a much more expanded color palette that you can see here. We ended up with one primary color, a library of highlight colors, and then one neutral color. So we established a color system where every sub-brand would use both the primary color and then neutral color. And then they would have their own highlight color that would identify their brand. And as you can see, the foundation highlight color is separate because that is the overarching brand. So we want to give it a little bit more importance. And you will see that in a lot more places as I go. Here are some examples of what those smaller palettes look like for sub-brands. Right here, I'm not necessarily representing any existing brands, but this gives you an idea of what they can look like. And then we can extend this for that entire color palette. So there's many more schools that can be added before we need to add anything to the existing palette or revise it at all. For typography, we chose a san-serif typeface center number two, that has a ton of flexibility to it. We knew that there was a lot of language you are going to have to incorporate and a lot of flexibility around language when it comes to naming. So we wanted a typeface that gave us a lot of opportunities to differentiate just by using different weights. And I also wanted to use a geometric sans serif that was really open and friendly as part of this brand. We also had some accents. I biography here we have shift, our serif typeface that we use for things like pull quotes. And then we have Laura marr for our condensed sense, are off typeface that we use for things like headlines and varying situations. Our logo system, we also put a lot of work into. We came up with a system that uses multiple logo designs that all can be applied to any sub-brand that exists now or will exist in the future. First, we have the typographic logo, which you see on the top-left. This is the primary logo. We stripped away any unnecessary information in this logo so that the name is front and center. And then we also created a more simplified logo that removes the descriptor or tagline and brings the icon back in, since that is an important piece of their brand. Then we have two other components of that system, the badge logo, which is used in smaller spaces, it allows us to get their tagline into the design. But obviously the type is smaller and the icon is a little bit more emphasized. So this wouldn't be appropriate for every situation. And then we also created just a really simple version of the icon that the brands can use for things like social media or just any really small usage. This is what the four logos look like altogether. So this covers all of our bases for different usage and circumstances. Then supporting graphics we worked on as well. We broke apart the different pieces of the icon and translated that into a graphic that then expanded itself into a pattern. So you'll see those three rounded bands plus a dot represent the people from that original icon design. And then you also still get the curves with a book here too. So we just made this scalloped pattern that has a bunch of different variations to it. Each of the brands all have their own suite of these that can be again expanded as they add new organizations. And we also have a couple of variations that incorporate the entire color palette to represent the foundation overarching organization as a whole. Here's a quick glance at the Library of patterns that we've created so far, and then a big look at the multicolor version. So now let's take a look at what the full brands turned out to be. Here is the beginning with children foundation brand. This is the overarching organization, so it's the most important one and you're going to see it most often. Again, we have the four primary logos and then these three different pattern variations that are available for each brand to use. And then this is one of their charter schools beginning with children charter school too. They were able to just select a color from the palette that they wanted to use for each sub-brand. And once we had the system in place, we just were able to apply that color choice to all of the existing elements. So that's what you see here. Then this is their other existing school community partnership. Again, they just chose this orange color, which was part of the palate and we just were able to apply that to everything, the whole system that we had built. Then this is the last brand, an organization that's part of the network That's didn't have an existing identity. So again, we just picked a color and set the logos in the system that we had built. We had this fully flushed out brand pretty easily because we had put all of that initial work in. So here's a look at all of them next to each other. You can see that they're really pretty consistent and color is really the driving force that distinguishes each of them. Now let's look at some design applications so you can see how we applied this brand to some real-life materials. First, we have a t-shirt using the badge on the sleeve and the primary logo on the front. And then these are their business cards. They are designed using the foundations colors, since these cars are representative of the network as a whole, then we have their stationary, again kept pretty simple and for the foundation as a whole. So these are, uses the blue highlight color. And then a little mock-up of a notebook for the legacy network. That is it. Now, this doesn't represent the entire suite of products we created for them and materials we've designed. But this will give you an idea of how we started applying the brand to actual products in real life. And I hope that that illustrates for you how the brand being extensible really works. We put a lot of work into the system initially to establish the rules that would guide all of the implementation of new brands for the foreseeable future. And what that did, putting all that work in upfront and putting a really clear process in place and real clear standards and constraints that helped our situation in that it made it so much easier to create the new brands. Essentially now, they could add ten brands all at once. And it really wouldn't be that crazy of an undertaking because we have such a good system in place and we know exactly what to do, and there isn't any guesswork. So I hope that gives you some more context for how to establish a brand like this and gives you some ideas for how you could apply that to your own work. As for your project, there is no specific projects steps related to this lesson. So if you haven't already completed your workbook, now's the time to do that and please share that. I'm really looking forward to seeing how the lessons helped inform your own process and how you're thinking. You're going to apply this type of thinking to your own work. If you do have any questions about my particular project and any challenges we face or how that worked as a whole. I'm happy to answer whatever questions you have and I'm just really looking forward to seeing your work. Thank you so much for joining me in class. 9. Final Thoughts: Thanks so much for joining me in class. I really hope that you feel equipped with the clarity, focus, and inspiration that will facilitate a successful design process for your extensible brands. If you haven't already, please share your completed workbook in the project gallery so that we can see how the lessons and firmed your work. And as always, if any questions come up, please share them and I'd be happy to help you out. Thanks again for joining me in class. Bye for now.