Branding Workshop - A Case Study

1. Introduction: Welcome to Brand Design- A Case Study. This is a unique branding class, where we'll use a case study and follow along from concept to end. We're going to learn how to work with a client. In this case, it's going to be an imaginary client named cloud nine bakery. We'll work with questionnaire and we'll discuss on how to extract the necessary information from the questionnaire, so we can capture the client's idea and bring their vision to life. We'll briefly talk about pricing, we'll discuss color and trends, and we'll work step-by-step on how to design a logo for our new brand. We'll work with mock ups and lastly, we'll build a brand board for our newly designed brand. We'll also then discuss the class project, and this is going to be your unique project, where you'll get to work with your own imaginary client. At the end of this journey, we would have worked on a concept beginning to end, and we will develop a professional, cohesive brand for our new client. Here's a little bit about me. My name is Shelly. I am an illustrator and a graphic designer with 10 plus years experience. I'm the owner of I'm Inkpressed, a wholesale stationery company. This is my fourth Skillshare class, and I'm really thrilled to bring to you this new class on branding. I love sharing my knowledge with all of you. Let's go on this creative experience and learn all about branding, please join me. 2. Video 1 Workshop Outline: Welcome to Brand Design Workshop.In this workshop, you're going to follow step-by-step with me as we work with an imaginary client. You'll see my process on how I work with the client, from the client interview all the way to the finish brand board. In this workshop, you'll get to learn a lot of the ins and outs of how I developed the brand, how I work on the logo, how I work with clients and in the end, you'll be able to work with a client yourself. I'll assign you an imaginary client and it'll be a lot of fun. Here's the workshop outline. The first thing we're going to cover is the client interview. You'll be discussing on what the client is looking for and just to get an idea and as a good springboard of what, just where to start from. We'll briefly discuss pricing, and then we'll brainstorm an idea together on what to do for this client. We'll then design step-by-step in Adobe Illustrator, a logo design for our clients brand. We'll then create a brand board. We'll work briefly on mock-ups and lastly, we'll discuss your personalized project. This workshop is going to be a lot of fun. It's a lot of information crammed into one place and follow me for the ride because in the end you'll have all the tools necessary to create your project and to work with a client on your own. 3. Video 2 Client Interview: Now, let's begin with the client interview. This is how we're going to get to know our client. We all wish to be hired for a job and be given creative reign. Truth is, most clients have a vision of what they'd like for their business and how they'd like to have it represented. It's your job to take those ideas and turn them into a timeless design. With that being said, do not relinquish creative freedom. Capture your client's vision but express yourself in your own creative style. Truth is, the client came to you because they've seen your works, they've seen your portfolio, they love your style. You want to take their vision of what they want for their brand and interpret it in your unique style. The client will come to you with ideas of what they want because based on things that they've seen. This brings us to the no copy cut rule. Allow your client to give examples of brand styles but make sure they understand that this is only for the purpose of getting to know their vision. Ultimately, your design is what will prevail. You put in a lot of hard work to come up with your logos, to come up with your brand design, to come up with illustrations if you're an illustrator, to come up with your designs that are unique to you. Sometimes it takes hours of work. You wouldn't want somebody taking those ideas and claiming them as their own. The same thing goes for other artists, you never want to copy another artist's work and by the same token, you don't want them copying yours. You can use other styles as inspiration, but ultimately you need to translate it into your own unique style. I hand the client a client questionnaire, they usually fill this out and give it back to me if it's via e-mail, a lot of my clients are remote so they usually e-mail this questionnaire back and we also have a few phone conferences if they live quite a distance from me. This is just so I can capture their vision. It's just a springboard to start somewhere but eventually I will still have more questions about their vision, about their business and just this gives me the good starting point to begin working on their brand. First, I look at their pedigree information, sometimes it's important to see where the business is located, sometimes it speaks volumes. It could be a coastal based business, it could be a seasonal business that's only by the beach only in the summers, it could be near a launch of a ski resort. It means a lot to find out where the business is located. Sometimes it influences the design greatly. I also look at the business name and a URL if they have one. If they do happen to have a website I'd go on there and I'd see what they currently have as far as branding, which means that they've approved that somewhere in the past and they may want to stay somewhere near what the current brand is. I also look at their About Me page just to see who exactly I'm working with and what their vision is and how they've built their business. It says a lot about the business itself. I also then ask them to give me an aesthetic that they like to list their favorite brands, brands that they admire and that they would like their business to follow this aesthetic. This gives me a pretty good idea of what they like, if somebody lists let's say Vera Bradley, I know that they like bold, they like floral, they like big patterns. I also ask them for colors and this is a unique question because I ask for colors just as a very small guide as to what colors they like personally, not necessarily the colors that their brand will end up with, just the colors that they like. This gives me an idea. If they give me gray, yellow and black, then I know that they want something a bit more muted. If they give me pink, blue and orange, then I know that they're okay with a little splash of color. I also like to find out what style they are looking for, do they want modern, do they want juvenile or do they like color. There's just a million styles and it's good to know what their personal style is. I also need to know what their target audience. They can describe their ideal customer by gender, by age, by group and this gives me an idea of who we're marketing this for. Then lastly, how do they market their business. They can include any URLs, or any social media sites that they belong to. How they market their business is really important. We're going to be working with an imaginary client called Cloud 9 Baked Goods. Here you see the client questionnaire now has my logo design on the top left-hand corner. This client questionnaire is available for download in the class section and you'll be able to download it and add your own logo and use this for your own client work. The first thing we're going to look at is the business name, Cloud 9. They're based in Charlotte, North Carolina which is a Southern town. This may influence our design style ultimately, but sometimes I like to Google the area and find out if there's any other, let's say this as a bakery so I'd like to Google bakeries in North Carolina, just to see what the competition is like, and you don't want to end up putting in all this work and in the end you design something that looks exactly like something else that's in Charlotte, North Carolina. I'll just do a little bit of work there and make sure that I Google the businesses in the area that have the same style and I want to make sure that I don't end up with that style. They do have a URL and let's say we went on there and they did have a decent website, they've put a lot of work into it but it's bland and they really haven't put too much into it. It's an extensive website, it's very wordy but not a lot of graphics, not a lot of interactive. It's just a basic design just for web presence. They don't take orders on their website, it's just an informational. As far as the aesthetic, the client is telling us that they like Vineyard Vines and they like Kate Spade. To me this tells me that the like color, they like bold, they like patterns sometimes and it's a good starting point for us to work from there. Their favorite colors are pink, blue and orange, so to me this says, they're okay with color. They didn't ask for mint and peach which to mean that means that they like muted colors. Pink, blue and orange is the starting point for bright color palette. The style they want is fun, clean and modern, so that's good because they pretty much left us with a broad style there. The target audience are baked goods are for everyone but we would like to see our brand grow into a household name. This is interesting to know because that means that the client sees themselves not just with the business that they have but they see them growing it. That's important to keep in mind because right now they may only have, let's say cake boxes that will have their branding, but later on in time they may have cake mix packages and they may have some jams, they may have other things that will require different types of packaging, so the logo and the branding really has to adapt and grow with this company. How do you market your business? They said they have foot traffic, we're on a busy street. They do have an Instagram presence and they also have a Facebook presence. We'll visit those as well and then we'll see. In their Instagram account they just take a lot of pictures of their baked goods and some of their favorite customers. On Facebook, they put on a lot of their specials. This is a good starting point for us to now begin to brainstorm on where we're going next. 4. Video 3 Pricing: Now let's discuss the age old question of pricing. What to charge? It really is no easy answer. I looked online and this is just a rule of thumb. For a start-up business, a branding package will cost somewhere around $1,500. For a small business, it'll be around $2,500, for a meeting size business around $5,000, and for large business $10,000, up to $20,000, sometimes 50, $75,000. This is really just a guide. It is no easy answer on how to price anything because although these are good starting points for most designers, you still have all these add-ons. There's collateral materials that sometimes they weren't designed with the branding package. There's packaging design that weren't designed and also they'd like some icons for their website. They like just banners for their website. They'd like you to work with their web designer and produce other designs that will go with the website in order to bring the brand to life. So there really is no easy answer. Unfortunately, I don't have the answers for you on what the right prices to charge. I can however, give you a few tips. The first thing is most designers charge either an hourly rate or a fixed rate, and which one would be better for you is really a matter of choice. I typically stick to a fixed rate. The reason is I am a perfectionist. If I were to design by the hour, it would cause an astronomical amount of money to my client because I will work on something and then I will rework it and then I walk away and come back to it and sometimes I need to make changes. If I were charging by the hour, that really would not work for me. They are clients, however, that insist on an hourly rate, and if they do so, my consult fee is $65 an hour and my design fee is at a $100 an hour. Every time they call me with any type of revision that they want and I have to reconstruct over the phone, it's another $65 flat fee per hour. So it's really a very pricey way and I've priced it this way because I know it's a deterrent for those that really want to stick with the hourly rate. The fixed rate is what works best for me. Number two is you always want to require down payment. The rule of thumb is 50 percent of the project costs. The good thing is, your final product is all-digital. Until you receive full payment, you will not hand over any of the files until you receive the payment in full at the end. I have had clients walk away completely. They've come into business trouble and in the end, we didn't get to the point where I was able to deliver the materials and received the final payment. At least I know that I had secured the 50 percent. I had put a lot of work into it, I could take a legal recourse and try to sue them for the balance of it. As long as I know that I got at least 50 percent and that that satisfied most of my time, then that was okay with me. So it's unfortunate it does happen. There are clients out there that, they then we'll take the design that you did come up with and then get a student or get someone else on freelance or on another website that will bid really low and that they'll win this project and they come to them with whatever files you've email them or I've emailed them and they say, "Yeah, this is what I want" and then they copy it. Believe it or not, it happens, it's out there, it's scary. But most of the time you have good clients that will not do this to you, but always require at least a 50 percent down payment of the project costs. The next thing is you have to get it in writing. Always draw up a contract of your services. This protects you and it clearly defines the terms. You don't want the client to say, "Well, it took you to long and now I'm not going to pay. I needed it by Thursday, but you didn't have it for me by Thursday." If the contract clearly says, deliverables will be in your hand by x date, then that's the day that you have to have it by. It pushes you to meet a deadline and it helps them understand when they'll be receiving it. It also has the pricing clearly defined in there that if they want anything extra, if they're not, it will require an additional fee. So always get it in writing. You could find plenty of contracts online. You can find a lot of templates online. You can show it up yourself. You don't really need a lawyer. You just really need to have something in writing where you can get a signature on it that could be legally binding. Number four is, when using fixed pricing, you have to limit your revisions. You can give them up to three revisions, let's say and after that it's going to be a cost. There's a lot of indecisive clients out there and in the end, they'll have you doing 10 revisions. Well, 10 revisions are going to cost because your proposal that you gave them in writing only included three. So anything past three is going to require another fee and that also needs to be put in writing. Number five, you need to get a clear list of the required formats the finished design will be delivered in. No surprises afterwards. You don't want to create an entire branding package and the client says, "Well, I wanted all deliver it in a PDF, all PDF format," and then next thing you know, they call you six months later and they want it, "well, my web designer really needs a TIFF file for the logo." They really need to from the beginning tell you what are the required formats for the finished design. Number six is value your talent. I cannot stress this enough. It's okay to say no to a job. If they try to negotiate with you the price, "I'm sorry, that's my price. It's a fixed rate. I put a lot of time and effort into my designs. It is what it is." If they don't like your pricing, it's okay to say no, but you have to value your talent. It took you a long time to get to where you are. You've taken classes, you may have a degree, you may have extensive experience, it all comes down to you have built yourself into a designer, you've worked hard at it and you need to value yourself and your talent. If someone else doesn't value it and doesn't want to pay your price, that's okay, there'll be another client down the road. But you have to stick to your guns and say, "I value myself and this is my fee. I'm sorry, it's nonnegotiable." So there isn't a pricing ethical guideline that most designers follow. It's a handbook that gets put out and actually gets revised quite often by the Graphic Artist Guild. You can find it online. They've now separated them into these three books that you can get and they're pretty informative. They break down the pricing for you on what to charge and what not to charge. Your legal rights you can also read up on, so it's an excellent tool. You can go to graphicartistsguild.org and it really is the industry standard for pricing guide. I hope I've set you on the right price for pricing. Like I said, it's not an easy answer. It really is in the end. You meet your first client, you may not have charged enough and then you realize the amount of work that you put into it and you'll end up then for the next client knowing that you need to charge more. Or you may have opted for the hourly rate and then realized, "Yeah, this doesn't work for me because I didn't make enough money. I worked too quickly or I worked too slowly and this turned out to be too much money and I had to eat some of the cost." There's a myriad of information on the web, you can read much more about pricing. But whatever you do, don't undercut yourself. Make sure that you value your work. Do not let anybody strong arm you into saying, "It's too much money." You are worth every penny. 5. Video 4 Brainstorming: Now we're going to discuss some brainstorming. Let us dissect the questionnaire. We know that the business theme is Cloud 9. Now, we have to think about are there similar names? Is the name fitting to the product? Is there a play on words? Sometimes the business name can give us a pretty good starting point of where we're going to go next. We're going to think about the aesthetic, what style trends are in this market. We know that Cloud 9 is a bakery. I'm not familiar with the bakery market but I can look up some successful bakeries and what their brand design looks like. I can look up bakeries in the area to see what their competition would look like and where the branding style that we design will fit. We also can think about color trends. I have a lot of places where I go for a color trend inspiration. We can briefly think about marketing. How will this design be utilized? It's not always just the brand design, you have to think about where it's going to be applied. Packaging, what package trends are there? Is this design going to fit all packages? Do they ship? Is this packaging design going to fit in well with the brand design that we develop? Are there any collateral on the materials and what type of collateral would be used? Let's first think about the aesthetic. We know that in the questionnaire the customer gave us two different styles, they liked vineyard vines. Vineyard vines, I looked them up. Their style is patterns, colorful, and they use this icon, this pink whale in their logo. It's displayed everywhere. It's what identifies them as a brand, is this pink whale with this very clean font of Vineyard Vines, it's just a serif font. Kate Spade was the other brand that they said they liked. Kate Spade has this iconic logo. It has the spade, which is a play on the word spade, for Kate Spade. Other than that, they have stripes and dots. They use a lot of bold colors. Usually, it's a pop of color against some black or white. Their overall design aesthetic is modern and clean. Let's think about the business name, Cloud 9: Baked Goods. Explore the possibility of a play on words. Sometimes the name itself, like I said, will get you started in a creative journey. Examine the letters and how they'll interact. We know that this is a first-generation business and that the owner sees herself growing the brand into a household name. We don't want to make it too catchy, we want to be able to make it where it'll have a long-lasting look. Sometimes people get too into the design that later on in life if they want to grow their business, they're stuck with this one type of style that they pretty much cannot get themselves out of. They would then require a whole new branding, and when a business is very large and successful, rebranding is a headliner. There's several businesses out there than when they rebranded themselves it's made the news. We want to keep that in mind. We can think about Cloud dash nine with the word nine spelled out or cloud and the number nine. There's just a lot of different ways. Do we want clouds in the design? It's all something that we're going to have to explore as we begin the process. For color trends, I go to Design Seeds, Pinterest. COLOURlovers is another good source. Pantone for the latest color trends. When Pantone kicks out their color of the spring or their color of the year or summer or fall, we definitely pay attention. It influences fashion, home design. It pretty much influences anything. Pantone is one that we want to pay attention to. But because Pantone kicked out their color of the year, that doesn't mean that it's always going to fit in with the design because next year is another year and note that color will no longer be in. We don't want to rely too heavily on just Pantone. Then let's think about packaging. How will the branding be displayed? This is another thing to pay attention to as well. If you see here in this Brumby's Bakery, they heavily rely on this pink. Violeta, their branding design has a bit of a play on the name because everything is violet. Violeta will probably always use purple in their design because it's in their name. But in Brumby's Bakery, we see that they're using hot pink. But their logo, if you pay attention, doesn't rely heavily on that pink. They're using pink for now but that doesn't mean that in the future they can't go to a green or to a blue or to another color because their logo is distinct enough, that if they change the packaging color of these cups and the bands in this packaging, they'll probably be perfectly fine because their logo itself can carry the brand. What materials will be used? It's important to know the materials and packaging where the branding will be displayed. A good starting point is as your client's business grows, so will the branding. Develop a design that will grow with the client. Here are some collateral materials. Your client may have just hired you for a branding package but in the future, they may need other elements designed. Initially, you're just designing a logo and a whole brand look, but in the future, you may get commissioned by them again to design other collateral materials. You have to keep in mind when designing the brand that in the future, they may want to expand into these other collateral materials and the brand logo must fit well with all of these other materials. Some of the most common ones are letterheads, thank you cards, postcards, stickers, and labels for packages, business cards, brochures, there'll be e-mail templates because you also have to think about digital design and how that will look. You should always test out your design online just to make sure that everything is going to look good on web as it does in print, as well as some other materials or ads, catalogs, return address stamps, PayPal templates, and some Etsy store banners depending on the size of the business that you're working with. These are just some collateral materials to keep in mind. 6. Video 5 Design Don'ts: Now we're going to discuss some design do's and don'ts. Do not ever base the design on its location. For example, let's say you have a client who has chosen the name for their business, Main Street fashions and you take the word main street, you design a street sign, you base your entire design on that, on this Main Street design. Then next thing you know, the client moves and now they're on Fourth Avenue and no longer on Main Street. I mean, it's also not a good thing for the client to have chosen that, but it's not a good thing for you to base your design on that as well. If they have a business that's just starting off and they're selecting names, and they happen to come up with a name like that and they're asking for your input, this may be something that you want to share with them as well. It's not very good to use just the location and base your entire design and brand on just the location itself. The next thing we're going to speak about is not making things too busy. Too much detail is distracting and simple designs attract more attention. If you think about some of the big logos that are out there, like this Kate Spade that we just saw, it's simple. It's just Kate, Spade, and a spade icon. Things like that become iconic and it's easier for people to remember. So if you make it too wordy, if you add taglines, I know a lot of customers want their tagline in there. Taglines have a place and it should never always be included with the logo. So sometimes the logo needs to live on its own, especially in brand packaging and in other areas. But, you know, maybe the tagline works well just on the website, not on every packaging or other collateral material. So that's something also that you want to explain to the client because ultimately, you have to educate the client on what works and what doesn't work. Taglines are good, but sometimes they just need to live on the website or live on catalogs and live on other medias like that and not on the logo everywhere the logo is displayed. The next thing that we don't want to do is be too literal. You should not have nine clouds. For this Cloud 9 bakery design. Being too literal sometimes is not good. It does work at times with certain designs, but it's not something that you should always gravitates to. The next thing is, you can't go font crazy. I'm a self-proclaimed font freak. If you follow my Pinterest board, you'll see there's an extensive font crazy board on there. Too many fonts though in a design are confusing, it becomes very hard to read. Don't ever mix more than two fonts when it comes to a logo, I would always try to steer more into the direction of just one font. But if you must add a second font, just do two, don't go crazy with three, four, or five fonts. It's out there, I've seen it and it should not be out there. The last thing I want to discuss is using drop shadows. A lot of people love drop shadow, but they look good on a web platform, they will not show up the same on print. Sometimes they show a Grey, they show a flat, they don't give the pop of when you originally designed it and you're looking at it in Illustrator. So that's something that we want to see you clear off. You can add it to web design, but don't add it in any print material. 7. Video 6 Color: Now we're going to dive right into our logo design. The first thing we're going to do is we're going to hop on over to Pinterest. As you can see, I've already typed in color. You can type in color schemes or color palette or color trends. If you know that you're looking for a specific type of color scheme, you can type in modern color or pretty much anything. Pinterest is a great source to find already composed color palettes. There's a lot of great designers out there. Here's one from design school and there's just a myriad of color boards on here. This is a pretty cool one. It shows you a color combinations and that's great if you're looking for a dual palette or something like that for a branding project. Let's zoom through here and see what catches our attention. This is a pretty cool color palette, although I don't think this navy will go too well. As we browse, keep in mind that this is a bakery, what type of packaging they're going to use. Obviously, they probably have some craft paper or something that they'll package like danishes or bagels or anything that is a to-go item. We definitely have to keep that in mind. This is a beautiful pink colored palette, but let's just see. I like when I first opened the page, these Pantone's Top 10 Colors of Spring. I remember what I said about Pantone. You don't want to design your logo and your branding package based on a color trend. But Pantone does a really great job of bringing the newer colors to the forefront. I actually like that there's a wide array of colors here that we can actually use. This may be one that we can use as a starting point. There may be some that I want just a darker hue of, but these are pretty good bases for me to start at. I'm going to take this and drag it onto my Illustrator board. Actually dragged in a little too big so I'm going to resize it. Let's put it on this side here. Now let me create a square here and I'm going to select certain colors. I like this yellow and I like this shade of limpet shell, that's cool, and this peach echo, echoes my name. Let's do one more. I like this green. You may not necessarily end up with these exact shades, but these are definitely colors that I'd like to start off with. Just so you know, now that we have these colors, we're going to create our own color swatch board here that we're going to be using for our project. If you click on here, if you have the Swatches palette open, you're going to click on this folder here called "New Color Group". With all your colors selected, if you click on this folder, we're going to name this Cloud 9, and there you have it. We have our colors, they're saved. I'm going to move these up here so I have them visually as well and we can delete that now. 8. Video 7 Typestyle: So the next thing we're going to do is work on our logo design. Our client's name is Cloud nine, as we have discussed before. We were toying around with whether or not we would use the word nine or if we would use the number 9. Now, if we think about it, the word nine may make this just a bit too wordy. If we can take it probably and just place it one on top of the other here and maybe scrunch it in. We can probably get away with that. Let's see how that looks for a minute. We can try to do that. Cloud nine, I mean, that may work, still looks a little too many characters to me. We could extend this. Just continue to extend it and see how far we can go with that and then still bring that in a little bit. But to me there's just too many characters there. So I'm not even going to continue to explore this Cloud nine. So I think I'm going to go with this one. I like how that looks. The client wants modern and clean. So I think the less amount of characters we use, the better off we are. So now let's try to figure out what type style we'll use for this. So right now it's defaulted to this Arial. But this is where my font obsession. I'm just going to have a little confession right here. I am obsessed with fonts. If you follow me on Pinterest, you'll see I have a board called font obsession. I'm pretty much obsessed with fonts. So this step for me is a lengthy process. I start off with a font halfway through, I may switch it to another font because as my design evolves, I find that there may be another type style that works better. So I've obviously have had to put some thought into this before I even set out because if not, I would bore you all with like this two hour video of just on fonts. So let's just explore a couple of the ones that I had narrowed it down to too. Then we'll go to the one I selected in the end. So right now we defaulted, like I said, to this Arial font. This is one that I liked, but to me it didn't really screen bakery too much. It was just little to block. It just was too a block letters for me. So it's a font that I use quite often. But this Bebas, but it's not one that I think will fit well with our design that we're doing today. So let's see what else we can use. A lot of these were nice, but sometimes they're hard to read. I kept thinking of the packaging design that bakery uses. Sometimes they don't have a lot of space. So if they don't have space on the packaging and you make this really small, it's going to be really hard to read. So I had to part with that one. Then there was just a couple of more. I like this one. This is a Belle font. It's nice, but it may just be too thin for the same reasons that I didn't like the last one. It may not show up too well. I needed something that had a little bit more of a stroke to it. This one just wasn't going to cut it. So this is the one that I ultimately chose. I think this will work good for our client. It has this distress look. If I zoom in, you can see it a little better. This distress look works nicely. I keep thinking of bakeries and the type of packaging that they use. Sometimes they use this craft paper. It's very economical for them, especially for the amount of to go orders that they have. So for these takeout packages, I think they craft bags and things like that. I think this will work well with that type of packaging. So this is the one that I think we should go with. Now let's explore something. I don't think I like how separate this nine is from the word cloud. So let's get rid of that space. But now I think it's a little hard to read. So what we may end up doing here is for those of you who have the newer versions of Illustrator. Illustrator has come up with this touch-type tool you see here in your characters palette. If you notice in the past, before this new feature came out, you would have to convert the type to an outline, and then this way Illustrator recognizes each one individually. Sometimes that didn't work too well because you'd have to remember what font you used. Once you convert it into an outline, there was no way for you to go back. This is a pretty neat tool. If you'll see, I'm just going to select touch-type tool there. I'll click on the nine, which is the one I want to alter. Now it's not going to affect these other characters. It didn't convert my nine to an outline. So now I'm going to play around with it. I think I want this nine just to be slightly bigger. If you notice it lets me move it wherever I want. I can move it anywhere. So that's a really nice feature. I think I like the nine a little bigger like that. We can do the same thing with the C. We can make the C bigger. That's something that we can explore. But if you notice, look how this changed. All that sticks out to me is the word loud. So we lost the cloud. That's not something I want to do. I think that's a good starting point. Like I said, halfway through the design, you may decide this isn't going to really work and I really want to change this up. This font may not work. This big number 9 here may not work. Nothing is ever set in stone. You can always go back and transform it by just changing the type style, changing the size of the font you use, stretching out any letters that maybe need stretching out, maybe you decide that you want all these characters to be closer. Nothing is really set in stone until your design is finalized. You're just working it and you may have to alter it here and there. But for now, this is a good starting point. 9. Video 8 Icon: So now we're going to move on to the next phase of our logo design. Some logos can carry just the name and it works really well. Some logos do work better when they have an icon. Just based on the client's questionnaire where they gave us Vineyard Vines and they gave us Kate Spade, both those logos have an icon associated with them. So I just think it would be fitting to add this to our Cloud9 design. Now as we had discussed before, we don't want to get crazy with nine clouds and just get too literal when it comes to the design, but I think in this instance a single cloud would be a nice touch. So let's begin designing. The first thing I'm going to do is move this Cloud9 out of the way. I always like to work with just a clean art board. So I'm just going to start by dragging some circles just to form our cloud. Maybe something along these lines. I may want to tweak it a little later, but for now that's just a good starting point. Let's see, maybe make this little guy smaller. You don't want them to look like bubbles, so you have to just be a little careful here. Okay, one more here just to cover up this hole. As you can see, I've designed it all in this black fill color just because I want to see what the finished product is going to look like. Right now they're just all separate shapes. So when I'm satisfied with the shape, I'm actually going to just join all this together. I think I'm going to make this guy a little smaller, maybe bring this guy a little bit in. There we go. All right, that's a pretty good starting point. So now I'm going to join all these shapes together and I'm going to do that in my Pathfinder. In here in my Pathfinder palette, if you don't have it open, you can go into Window and then just select the "Pathfinder", and it gives you this menu here. I'm going to select the first shape mode, it's called "Unite". I'll click on that. Now as you can see, it united all those individual shapes into a single solid shape. So now we have our little cloud. Now I am going to change the color. I'm going to make it white and I'm going to give it a stroke of black. The default stroke is just too thin for me, so I'm going to make it just a little thicker. I think that works well. We can bring this guy down just to see what it looks like. I like how that looks, but I think my little cloud needs a face so let's work on that. So I'm just going to add a little eye here. Let's change the fill color here. There we go. Zoom in a little more so you guys can see what I'm doing. Maybe just some tiny circles here just to make it look like a little glimmer in the eye. Yeah, so I'll zoom out. I'm just going to copy it by selecting it all and then holding down the "Option" key. So let's drag that over. Okay, there we have it. I think that looks pretty good. We're going to use the pen tool. Let's use the brush tool. We just add a nice little, oops, you won't be able to see what I'm doing. So let's just change the stroke here to black. Let's just go again to our brush tool and we're just going to have a little happy face there. I don't know if that's happy enough. Let's make him happier. How about this? Okay, I like that. That's cute enough. Let's add maybe a little bit of dimension. So I'm going to take my pencil tool here, I'm just going to somewhat outline this. I'm just doing this with the mouse. I didn't really get crazy, so let's try to make this a little neater. Obviously, I'm rushing through this design because if not, we'd have an eight hour design fest of videos here. So I'm just rushing through it, but obviously, you would take your time coming up with this design and perfecting it. So let's just smooth this out a little bit. Okay, there we go. Smooth it out a little bit. This is so not the way that it would normally work. We would just take our time and make the shape out better from the beginning, but for now this will have to do. I'm going to go here to my stroke palette and I think I'm going make it a little thicker, and I want this to be a dashed line. Let's see what one looks like. All right, so let's say that'll be the depth of that. Perfect, so now we have a happy cloud. We can bring our Cloud9 back down here, and now we have to figure out where we'll be placing it. I think that looks good there. This has a nice shape against the nine so I think that works well. Now that I'm zoomed out, I see that I may want this weight just to be a little thicker just to give that cloud a little bit more depth. So that's good. The last thing I'm going to add is with my paintbrush tool, I think I'm going to add some tiny little starlets here, just some little asterisk looking things just so we just have something to add. Sometimes there's spaces that you want to fill, so this may be a good way of doing that. I don't like how that one came out. Let's redo that one. We can obviously resize them. They don't have to be exactly the way you made them. You can resize anything, move anything. Anything you see that doesn't really look like it looks good, redo it. You don't want to hand in something that's subpar. You want to hand in professional work. That looks better there. That's it. Just to give it some kind of different design elements. So I think that looks good. So we're going to move on now to our next step. 10. Video 9 Pattern: Now we're going to move on to another element of this design. Our client in their questionnaire had given us Vineyard Vines and Kate Spade, like we covered earlier. Both of those brands do have patterns that they work with in different elements of their design. Vineyard Vines uses a lot of pattern, packaging and in some of their hang tags. It's something that we do want to give the client as an option of having some pattern. I've gone ahead and I've extracted just to save a little bit of time, some of the elements that we used in our icon. I mean, this is not ultimately what the client will have to use. They can end up using some other things like patterns, like some dots or some stripes. But this is just something that I wanted to give them as their own unique pattern. Let's just see, we're going to change this, let's ''Ungroup'' this for a minute. Just going to select these elements. I'm going to give them this black stroke. Let's see if it'll let me do it. Let's remove that. I'm just going to take this and I'm going to drag it into my swatches palette. Don't really like the thickness of the stroke of these. I'm going to just make the weight of that a little lighter. These now that I've made them smaller also look like they're just too thick. That's good. Just going to take this and drag that into my swatches palette. I'm going to get rid of the one that I put there earlier. Then I'm also going to back to white just because we're probably going to be using this pattern on top of other colors. Now let's just see what this pattern looks like. I don't want to stroke a lot. Just grab one of the colors that we have here and see, ''Copy'', ''Paste In Front". I just pasted the same exact shape on top of itself. I can now add this pattern. As you can see, it's very large, so I just want to see what it looks like smaller. I'm going to go to ''Object'', ''Transform'', ''Scale''. I don't want to transform the object itself, just the pattern. Let's preview that. Let's make it maybe a little smaller, 50 percent. If we do ''Command D'' and select it again, it'll go to yet another 50 percent. That's a pretty nice pattern. I like how that looks. I think it'll lend itself to a lot of different colors as well. This is a good time now to test your colors also. Let's just go to this blue. Yeah, that shows up good. Let's go to this pink, that works, and the green works as well. We had also saved it in black. That's something that we may want to use as well. But I think the white actually looks a little better than the black does for this, because we do want to keep it clean and not just overdone. I think that's good. Like I said, we can also offer the client other patterns to coordinate, but this is a good starting point. 11. Video 10 Logo assembly: The next thing we're going to do is put together our logo with some of the other elements. The first thing I'm going to do is create an ellipse, just a circle, that I want to go over my entire logo. Just about there. Send this to the back. Let's give it a color. Let's make this art board a little bigger. Just dragging it a bit too so we can have something to work with there. Let's move this guy down. Then the other thing I want to add now is the same circle. But just lets copy, edit, paste in the back and then Object, Transform, Scale. We're going to add, let's say 125. We can always change it later. Let's make that a different color just so we can see what we're working with. Send it back. This one, let's say we're going to make it this blue. There we go. You can see our logos coming to life a little bit there. Then I'm going to add a square, chose right over the entire thing. As I'm dragging, I'm holding down Shift because I want to make sure that I get an exact square or an exact circle. I don't want anything oblong or rectangular. Let's arrange and send that to the back. Let's give that guy the same yellow. Now, I think this is a little too big. Let's just bring this in a bit here, bring this in a little bit here, and a little bit up. There we go. Obviously when I'm working with the design, I'm going to have an exact square. Everything will be perfectly aligned. I don't want anything to not look right when the client goes to print it all out and uses it on their materials. I think that was good. Now, Cloud9 Bakery, let's say they do have a tag line. I can add the tag line here, but like I said earlier, it may not be something that gets used on every single printed material that they have because it may not go. If they're just using a sticker, it may be so small, the size of the tag line, that it just won't show upright. But I will include it just so the customer sees what their actual finished logo looks like. But again, that may not be what we use ultimately for some of the design elements. Let's just put that there like that. I want to make that just a little bigger. You don't want the tag line to be the hero here. You want the actual design to be the hero. That looks pretty good. I'm just going to add a line here. Let's see. Line segment, there we go. Just from here, I'm holding down Control, so I get a straight line, I'm going to make that black, and I am going to add the dashed line. We're going to change the stroke a bit. That's good. That will work well. I just want to see what this looks like if it was all caps. I'm going to go here to all caps and see what that looks like. That may work just a little better. I don't know. We can always change it later. Cloud9 baked goods. Now we have an empty space here. I think I want to take some of these little stars that I have here, little asterix as we called them earlier. Let's ungroup this now, get this little guy here. Let's copy that, one here, maybe another one here, make him smaller. Maybe another one here. You have to pay attention when you do make them smaller, the stroke always stays the same. You may want to change the stroke just so it doesn't look just overwhelming there at all. That looks pretty good. We may be able to add another one somewhere down here, but we don't want to get just too crazy with it. We can also add this pattern in this layer here. In order to do that, I'm going to select that blue circle, edit, copy, edit, paste in front. There's obviously shortcuts that you can use for Illustrator, but I just want to show you the steps just in case you don't know those shortcuts. I've now pasted a circle on top of it because if you remember when we created the pattern, it's a transparent background. If we would just go to paste it, all you would be pasting it is on top of the yellow and you'd get rid of the blue. Let's do that there. We've added now, we've applied the swatch of the white clouds pattern. As you can see, it's a little too large. Let's size that down again, the way we did earlier. It's Object, Transform, Scale. We're not going to scale the object because as you can see already, it's trying to scale the circle itself. We're going to deselect that. We're going to uncheck that part, and we're going to make this, let's say 70. I'm just going to click ''Okay'', just so you can see, but it's still a little too large. If you hold Command D and press and then again Command D, you can get it to where you want. See that may be a little too small. I think I like the way that looks there. Now the last thing I want to do is I think because there's so much black stroke here, the circles here are calling for that black stroke as well, just to give it a little bit more depth and detail. That looks good. Then this one as well, we can give it a nice stroke there as well. I think we've done pretty good. Our design looks pretty nice. Let me just copy and paste it here, so we can play around with colors. We can link the color lends itself to a million different combinations. Well, not a million obviously, it's actual mathematical equation to it, but it lends itself to a wide array of combinations. The customer may choose that in the spring time, they only want to use the green and that's okay because they have a green in their palate. Whoops. Let's change the background color here. I'd have to move that in order to get to the background color. There you go. That's a nice color combination as well. Let's see, we'd have to change this one as well. Now that we changed it, we have to change the stroke. That's another nice combination as well. There you have it. That's the finished logo put together. I may make some tweaks here and there, just in case some certain things are popping out at me that I don't like. But for now, this is a really good finalized logo. 12. Video 11 mock ups: So now we're going to briefly discuss mockups. Anytime that I worked with a client, I design a whole brand board vision with them, and I like to share with them what their product will look like while it's mocked up on products that they may be using in the real world. So I use this even in my own surface pattern design licensing that I do. It's important to show the client what the end product will look like. So even if you're just doing this for yourself, just for fun, just to see what your designs will look like on a mocked up products, on a product in real life, there's a lot of really good mockups out there. So there's a lot of resources, a lot of websites do have these mockups. Some of them from free all the way to very pricey, but pretty much you almost always get what you pay for. The higher end you go, obviously the more realistic the product will look. So one of the resources that I use is Creative Market. They have a lot of mockups. You can just search in here in the search field, you can pretty much search for whatever you want. They have things from paper good mockups, to wine bottle mockups, to clothing apparel. Pretty much there's a large selection here. So I'm just going to show you briefly, I put in stationary mockups, and for the bakery I wanted to use this one. So this coffee stationery mockup, I own this one already. I use it a lot in some of my designs. Like I said, I love to mockup what they'll look like. So I already have that. Basically, a mockup is a working file in Photoshop. So you would need Photoshop in order to use it. It's a PSD file. In it it'll have smart objects that you can pretty much put in your design and it'll just show up in a realistic fashion on the products that they show here in the mockup. So I'm going to close out of this, and I'm going to go into Photoshop where I already have the file open. This particular file came with a bunch of layouts of different objects. So this is just one of them and I think it's perfect just to show you quickly on how I use these mockups. So let's say we're going to take our Cloud 9 design and we're going to mock it up onto this tin mug. So we're going to go here to the mug, we'll hit the down arrow, and right here it pretty much walks you through it. It says your designs. So you're going to click here and it opens up a separate window. So in here now, I'm going to place my designs. So I'm going to go to File, Place Embedded, and I'll go to Cloud 9. Then here I have all of my designs saved. So I'll click Okay on that. Sometimes you have to do a little tweaking just to fit. I mean, you should really find out what the exact dimensions of the square for your mock-ups are, but I usually just stretch it. It always works just to make it fit. So once you're done with that, you go up here and you click on this check mark, and that seals the deal for you there. You're going to close that window and it's going to ask you if you want to save it and you're going to click, yes. Now, this isn't saving the file permanently, it's just saving this change that you made to that smart object. So I'm gonna click yes and voila, here's the mockup. So we can continue on now, let's just close the mug so that doesn't confuse us. Here's the small bag. We'll do the same thing with the small bag. So File, Place Embedded, we'll go to our Cloud 9 file, and let's select this one that I had already sized in this shape. Stretch it, make sure it's even. Click the check mark, close up the pop up window, click Save, and there you have it. So in this fashion you can pretty much mockup anything. The other thing that you can do when you're all set and done, let's say that I'm not going to use any of these other elements, I'm just going to use these. I can save this just the way it is, just click the check mark and crop it and save it as a jpeg. Or if I just want to save the elements separate, I can just pretty much crop it all the way this way. Just pay attention to the shadows because the shadows are there to make them look realistic. So make sure you're not cutting off any shadows where then it just doesn't look the same. Then you can just save it that way. So that's pretty much it on mockups. The next slide, we're going to discuss putting it altogether on our brand board because we're almost at the finish line. Stay with me. 13. Video 12 brand board: This brings us to our final step of assembling our brand board. This is just a template that I use and it pretty much has all the elements that I want to convey in my brand board and present to my client. The first thing is, here, I have a proposed logo, and I always say proposed because sometimes there are tweaks, so this is just a preliminary that we're presenting to the client. In the proposed logo, I'm going to drop in our logo design that we've come up with, and you don't want it with any colors or anything added because you want the client to be able to envision this as a watermark on a black and white print, on any other products. So you want them just to have the bare bones logo with no frills attached so they can then envision their logo across a variety of products. The next thing we're going to do is we're going to add the type style, and we ended up using linowrite. I only like to include a sampling of the font. You don't really need every single character in there. So let's do linowrite, and I'll change colors and all that fun stuff later. The color palette that we wound up using, just use the eyedropper tool and change these dots here. I use dots, I'm just a polka dot person, but you can end up using anything that you like. You can use squares, you can use stars, you can use any shape that you like and really format this to your liking. I'll leave that one black because black is found in the logo here and in some of the other elements. As far as the graphics we are going to use the little cloud. I'm just going to ungroup this, get rid of the cloud 9 part. Let's just take this on. Actually, I'm going to remove some of these stars too, because these stars end up being some of the graphics as well. This is some of the graphics. This is a very simple pattern of logo design. I'm branding board so we didn't get too fussy because the client wanted it modern. Normally, I would have, at least, three different elements here, but this will actually be enough for the client to work with. As far as patterns, we have the polka dot that I've created. We also have this cloud pattern that we used, so let's apply that one as well. Let's make that a little smaller, so they can see. Let's scale it, let's scale the pattern. Scale it a bit more. That may be too much. Perfect. Then one last one, we could include another one of these polka dot patterns, maybe the pink, and we can also unscale that down if we want to, just a bit. The last thing I'm going to include in the brand board is the mark up, and I have a few of them. This is the one that we worked on earlier. We can size that and place that one here. I have this one as well. I can include this if I want to, but its going get too busy, I probably won't. This gives the client just a pretty good vision of what their new brand is going to look like, and its just a clean way to present it. Its good for the client to have it as a reference. You can print it out when you present it. You can always give them a physical copy of it, so they frame it and keep it somewhere, so they always have their brand present of what their brand is going to look like, what its supposed to look like, and they never stray from it. Its always good to give them all of these in just the one brand board, printed out, presented in such a way that they can keep it for ever. I'm just going to change the color of these letters so it'll be more fitting with the design. There we go. The green is good. That's it. At the bottom here you'll want to add your logo just because your work should always have your signature, and that's pretty much it. That's how you create a brand board. It's pretty simple. Next we're going to discuss. 14. Video 13 Class Project: Now let's discuss the class project. You will receive your own unique client. In the class projects section, you will find a group of PDFs with different client questionnaires. Let the client that corresponds with the letter of your first name or screen name. For example, my name is Shelly and it starts with an S. If you go to the chart here to the right, the first name STU. Those students will have assigned to them the children's boutique. You'll then find the corresponding PDF and download your client's questionnaire. Make sure to stick to your assigned client. No cheating. Remember, this is a creative exercise. You're going to find challenges along the way but it is in the challenge that the true creativity flourishes. Remember, there is no right or wrong here. You are bringing your client's brand to life through your eyes and your creative genius. When you have completed your product project, be sure to post it to the project gallery. If you get stuck along the way or need some encouraging, I'm here to help. Just post your question in the community section of the class. Have fun designing. I can't wait to see what you come up with.