Markenkonzepte erstellen – Von der Recherche zur Präsentation

1. Class intro: Up with brand concepts that feel really thoughtful and true to the brands vision can feel really, really challenging, especially when we're just staring at all of our notes from a brand discovery meeting, and we're not quite sure what to do next. My name is Malin and in this course, I'm going to take you behind the scenes for real client projects I've been working on. This course is divided into three different parts. In the very first part, I'm taking you through every step of the creative process that I do so that you know exactly what to expect, what questions to ask. And so that you can prepare for it and create templates. Then my partner, Jeremy and I will take you through two different case studies of real projects we worked on, and we're going to talk about what we discussed in the discovery, how we actually took that and came up with concepts, even ideas that we thought could be really good that we rejected in the end, and how we actually were able to know which ideas are good and which ones are not so good. We even asked those two clients to give us a little statement about how they felt about the brand concept stage. And the things that they were expecting maybe or thoughts they had during the meeting. So that will be a really interesting insight into the client perspective as well. As part of this course to help you along the way, we have also put together a course kit. This includes our template for brand discovery, our template for brand research, and a guide to creating really compelling moodboards. Lastly, we're going to summarize everything that we've learned, and we're going to talk about some bonus tips that will make your projects run a lot smoother. These are based on a lot of trial and error on our part, so it'll be really fun to share them, and I hope that they can help you along the way as well. Class project is to write down a description of your brand concept and then create a mood board paired with it so that you can just start designing and have a really clear direction in mind. If you have any questions along the way, don't hesitate to add them down in the discussions tab because I'm sure it's not just you who have those questions. And don't forget to add your class project to the projects tab as well. So we can all support each other and get inspired by each other's work. I hope this class takes away some of the uncertainty or perceived complexity that you might have around brand concepts, and that help you feel confident to tackle your own projects. I can't wait to see what you create. I'll see you in class. 2. Discovery: Discovery meetings are usually the first more in depth contact point that we have with our clients, because at this point, they have paid the deposit, they signed the contract, and they're ready to actually start working together. The goal of this meeting is to get to know each other and start building a really good client designer relationship. We also want to understand what they already know and understand about their own customers and their own vision. Not every assumption that the client has about their own customers or business might be correct. But we're really trying to help them think about these bigger questions and we can then do more research later to try to validate these different assumptions. We really want to understand their pain points and try to understand what this new branch should achieve. The reason we really want to build a lot of trust and have this longer meeting in person is because if we would just show them a brand concept fully fledged after we've just had a quick survey. They might not feel that confident that this is actually the right solution for them. But if we've done all this groundwork together and gotten to know each other and make sure we've understood all of their points of view from all the different aspects of their business, we have that respect of the client that we are doing a really thorough job. Not only do I find that this makes the project itself run a lot smoother. Also find that clients actually come back for years because you have that built up report together. They know that you understand their business inside and out. There's no point for them to go anywhere else for design help. As the creative person in this meeting, we need to make sure that we act a little bit like a psychologist. We need to ask very targeted questions. We need to listen a lot more than we talk and we need to follow up on anything that feels even remotely vague. If you're unsure about what a client means or why they're choosing to say that, make sure that you ask and follow up. It's totally okay to push back in a friendly way if you want. Let's say your client says, Well, our customers just don't like minimalist design. Can say, great, that's super interesting. Is that coming from service you've done? Is that something you've seen in the different products that you've launched because we really want to get to the bottom of why clients feel a certain way about different design directions, for example, or something that they think they know about their target customer. We do this not only so that we can learn more about our clients and their business, but also to help them think a lot more deeply about where they fit into the market and who their competitors are and what their customers really truly care about. Some clients might have already done a lot of work thinking about these questions. For some people, it might be the first time they're actually going this in depth about their brand strategy. If you work with someone who has done a lot of brand strategy before, make sure you ask for that documentation because that can be really valuable for you to read before you get started on your own research. Also remember that you being an outsider and not knowing exactly how their product or service works is actually a benefit because you're going to be able to spot things that could be confusing for a customer. You can then use that knowledge as a way to make the visuals a lot more clear and communicative as you're creating this visual identity and brand. My discovery sessions tends to have three different sections. In the very first section, I'm really trying to understand how the company was founded, why it was created in the first place, what problem they were trying to solve and just get the client talking about the company, get them feeling really comfortable, talking about their mission and why they started. This is a really good kick of point to any meeting because it's just very open and relaxing. It's usually something clients feel very comfortable talking about. I always think it's a good idea to have the founders in this meeting. But sometimes when you're working with very big brands, they might have their marketing department actually handle the branding. That's totally fine, but just make sure that the decision makers who have final say are also going to be in that initial meeting and in every meeting in fact because otherwise, you might end up showcasing all this work, only to end up with someone at the end making a decision, not being aware of any of this hard work that you've put in. In this first section, I also want to understand their vision and long term goals for the company. They making a new product? Are they expanding into a new market? Is there something they really want to focus or be known for, for example? Ask those very targeted questions because all this information will help us to actually set them apart from their competition, and we can then use visuals to actually communicate that. One question I like to bring up to help my clients think a little bit more abstractly about this, is to ask them to describe their dream office or their dream store. Maybe there's someone who will never have a physical location, but trying to describe the way you feel when you come in, what does the decor look like? Who are you met by? Is there music in the background? Are there lots of plants? This can be really helpful for helping them envision that experience that they want someone to have with their brand. When I'm taking you through the different case studies, I'm also going to tell you what their dream offices or shops felt like and looked like. I'm sure you're going to find that the visual identities that we ended up creating were quite closely tied to that overall vision that they had in their head. Next up is a section that I find might be the most important one during discovery, but it's also the one clients tend to find the trickiest. That is describing not only who their customers are, but also what they care about and what motivates them to make a purchase from a certain seller. I like the personas that we create to have a little bit of demographics, but also a lot of psychographics. So Demographics are the basic information that you have like your age, your income level, what city you live in, if you're married or not, for example. This information does have certain value when it comes to looking at trends and looking at general things that that group of people tend to like. But it's actually a little bit too broad for us to actually make any decisions based on. That's where the psychographics come in. Psychographics talk about our values and our motivations for buying something. One person might be super excited because they made a bargain and got a car for a lot cheaper, while another person might want a very expensive car because it makes them feel proud that they can afford it. Trying to think about who people are and why they would purchase things is a lot more important in my opinion than just knowing their age, for example. Being aware of these different reasons won't only inform the visual identity, but more importantly maybe the messaging, because that's really going to help us nail down how we're going to be speaking to those customers because we know exactly what they care about and why they make a purchase. I know this sounds like a lot. I have added my brand discovery template to the course kits that you have here. There you have every single question that I ask, you have things like competitor maps, and you've got different things that you can write down for the different sections. Go have a look at that after this video and you can use that as a reference point. Finally, I have a section called How Might we questions. This section is very short, but very important for the success of your project and to make sure that you're actually creating something that will work in the real world. Client has likely talked about lots of different things during the discovery meeting. Now we want to distill that down into very specific questions that we want the brand to resolve? We want to be very specific here so that it's actually questions we can answer and point to as we're presenting our brand concepts later on. Instead of saying something very broad, how can we create a very exciting brand? We could maybe talk about how can we have a bigger reach on social media with our branding? How can we create a brand that appeals to a much younger audience that we currently have? I suggest sticking to maybe one to five questions because sometimes clients has more than one and that's okay. But if we start getting into a lot of different questions, we might start to actually contradict each other a little bit. That might be very difficult then to have a focus when we're creating a branding. We want to have very specific goals that we're trying to solve for when we're designing the brand. Now that we know why we're holding a discovery meeting and we have a little bit more information about what to actually talk about. Here are some bonus tips that I have noticed make a huge difference for making these meetings, not only something that the client enjoys, but also something that gets you those really precise helpful answers. The first one is to build in breaks and tell your clients about those breaks at the very beginning of the meeting. My meetings tend to take about 3 hours because you're going through a lot, the client is telling a story of their company. We tend to want to be open for tangents because that's usually where little tidbits of information that are interesting lie. But if you're sitting there in a three hour meeting and you're not quite sure what's going to happen. You don't have any breaks, that can feel quite exhausting for everyone involved. We tend to have a break either right before persona so that they come back and they're fresh and they're having lots of energy for those target audience customer profiles, or if they're doing more than one because sometimes you have more than one persona, we tend to do it in the middle. Between let's say persona one and two My second tip is to turn off the cameras. Obviously, this doesn't work if you're in an in person meeting, but I find that people are more relaxed and it's a nicer atmosphere overall anyway, if you're in person. This is just if you're doing a video call. Doing a three hour video call with the cameras on. I find that at least for me and for lots of my clients, we tend to be very focused on. Am I still smiling? Do I look, is there anything weird in my background? Is my cat walking by? Is my kid running by? So make sure that at this point, I suggest that after you have the initial conversations and a chat to get to know each other, you can suggest, Hey, if you want to, you can turn off your cameras for this part so we can just focus on answering the questions. A lot of people really embrace this and I found that people feel a lot more comfortable in the meetings and don't get so distracted. The third tip is to be the moderator, because as I said, tangents can be very helpful. But if we allow every tangent to go on for however long it could, then I've noticed it could be a six hour meeting and people tend to get quite tired. You start getting quite confused about what's really important to the company. Allow clients to go on the tangents that feel important and then you can say, that's really helpful. Let's tie that back to this point that we're making here. This goes into my fourth tip, which is to show them the question that you're discussing on screen. To show them one question at a time and maybe even have a little progression at the top where you're showing the different stages you're going through like doing company background, personas, and how might we questions. Because that's going to help keep them on track and also help everyone know how far is left in the meeting. 3. De-brief: Just come up our discovery meeting and we have this mountain of information. Sometimes that might make you feel really excited, full of ideas, and sometimes might make you feel a little bit overwhelmed and a little bit unsure where to start. For this exact reason, I like to have a little deep briefing session, either just by myself or with my partner, just to have a think about the core themes and prepare myself for the actual research. Jeremy I like to sit down quite shortly after the meeting, maybe the same day a few hours later once we had a rest or the next day so that the information is quite fresh in our mind. We'd like to grab a coffee, and notebook, and have the notes in front of us from the meeting as well. Very first thing we'd like to do is just write down anything that we thought could be a big overarching theme that came up a lot. That can be keywords that the client mentioned a lot, features, they want to be known for. Things that they found were big pain points, for example. Anything you think is, this is really important. I want to keep this in mind as I'm doing my research. Then we want to have a look at those, how might we questions again. Have a look at how you could break them down into more actionable search terms, for example. For example, if the how might we question was, how can we assure our 40-year-old audience that their medical data is safe while still feeling personable and friendly? Your questions for research might be something like, how do other brands build trust through visuals? What common questions or frustrations does this exact audience have with this industry in general? You can ask these questions directly in search engines, but you can also look at competitors, websites, social media, all these different places where you can try to gather information about people's testimonials, comments, anything like that. We're going to go a lot more in depth and actually do the research in a bit. But having these questions in mind and breaking them into these more actionable search terms, at least is something that I find very helpful. I also like to write down my own assumptions about the target audience and the project and industry. For example, let's say we're working with a client who has a bookish niche of people who love to read, who are women in their 30s and who are parents, for example. That is something where a category that I fall into. I would have a lot of assumptions about what that audience would like or not like. Or maybe you worked with a client who has a similar audience to the one that you're working with now and you have assumptions that you learned from a previous project. Write these different things down and then we can try to verify them or disprove them a little bit later in our research. After this little brain dump session, you probably have a list of different keywords, you have different assumptions written down, and you have more broken down questions that you can use for your searches. This is a really nice kick off point I find and it feels a little bit less intimidating than just going straight from discovery into research. But now we're going to dive into the research. Let's do that in our next video. 4. Research: Have done some really important foundational work. But now it's time to dive into that research and form a new path for this brand. Brand research doesn't only focus on the visuals, but more importantly, it focuses on the why and why people purchase something specific. For example, in 2022, there was a huge trend around Japandi, Scandinavian design, and everything that felt very natural, a lot of textures and colors that were taken directly from nature. This in itself is quite interesting, but knowing that it came from Everyone feeling very cooped up in their houses after the pandemic, knowing that people were at the office all the time and felt like they were missing that connection to nature. I meant that a lot of companies were bringing in colors, textures, design elements that felt very reminiscent of actual natural elements. It is really interesting for us when we're designing and putting together a brand identity as well. This is where those psychographics that we created previously are really important. Because, for example, a very busy toddler parent is going to have very different priorities from a teenager, for example. This is also where we want to start challenging those different assumptions that came both from us and the client. Because you might think, for example, that no 1/30 is going to buy this. But you look at competitors and notice that a big portion of their audience is 30 plus. This is where we really want to start getting into the nitty gritty. We also want to get a really good idea of the overall trends in society and of course, this can be very local or global. And really start to understand what the general site guise is and what people care about. These trends might not dictate the visuals that you're going to have for decades and decades, but we want to be aware of them so that we're fitting nicely into the cultural sense that you have at the moment when you're launching the brand. But you might push back a little bit here and say that well, logos shouldn't be trendy, and I completely agree with you on that. But there are so many different elements of a brand and some are going to be more foundational, like I would say a logo and brand colors, for example, you wouldn't be surprised if they stayed the same for decades and decades. But when it comes to things like social media campaigns and messaging and photography styles, this is where we can be a little bit more flexible because you might not expect the photography to look the same in the 80s as you did in the 2020s, for example, even if it's for the same customer and the same brand. How do you make sure that you're still conveying the same brand through all of this flexibility and looking at trends and everything? I think a great example is Nike, for example. They've had this very core guiding principle of someone who is very ambitious and driven and wants to do something that might initially seem quite challenging, but they're overcoming it and they're doing more than they thought they could. This is something that can guide every single campaign, even if the campaigns look a little bit different, even if the people depicted are a little bit different. This is something where we want to really get to what the core of the brand is, which is something you probably already have from the discovery. Then we want to think about how we can tie trends and other aspects of the d of culture that we have and live in into this mission. Our job as creatives in this research stage is to gather all this information. We can help make suggestions for how this ties in with the brand strategy and the core message. For a smaller project, this might be as simple as having a mission statement, and then showcasing how the different visuals you're creating are tying into that. If you're working on a much larger scale project, this might be a lot more extensive where you're talking about how you're tying different campaigns to different markets, or you're talking about how it works with different seasons or over time, or even how they can use different color palettes within their own brand spectrum to actually convey different portions of their business. I know that feels like a lot. How do we actually conduct this market research and get really valuable information? I'd like to start by setting up a home base in a project tool like Mila note, for example, where I can add in links to really interesting sources that I find, where I can write myself notes, and also where I can put imagery that I can then repurpose for moodboards later than the world. Then we can turn to these different places to find our answers. First place to turn is social media, because you can look at your own clients accounts, you can look at competitor accounts and even accounts that have the same audience. You can look for what people care about, what they're commenting. What are pain points they're bringing up? What words are they using to describe features that they really like? All this information is going to give us a great starting point. For this psychographic and building it out and verifying those assumptions. Next up, we can turn to pinterest trends and Google trends. This is a gold mine because we can search for very specific terms, and they will also show us what's trending related search terms, so we can start going down some different rabbit holes and find different directions that might not be as obvious or the ones that competitors have taken, but that really resonate with that same audience. You can plug in words related to the client's industry, to their product, or service, or you can do it around the moods, for example. This is especially useful on Pinterest, where something like A cozy home decor will be a lot more specific than just saying home decor. This is a great place to start spotting trends and see what is really important to people. You can even see seasonal trends that they might be interested in for specific product launches. Number three is government and charity reports. A lot of these different organizations actually put together a lot of industry information that you can access for free. For example, if you live in the UK, I know that government gateway for a long time have done industry reports, where you can read lots of different interesting trends, different things that the industry is in ways it's changing and things that they care about, what customers care about. This is really, really valuable information that you can then start to distill down and translate into a visual identity eventually. Next up are white papers, and this is really helpful if you're in an industry where there's quite a lot of competition. White papers are essentially reports that are usually quite well researched that try to discuss a specific topic within that industry. For example, being able to do a specific innovation in the industry or reaching a specific target audience or something similar where they have asked usually a copywriter or researchers to compile information, and then a designer to put that together in a really compelling format. So these different reports are usually either free or just behind an e mail wall, where you just have to give your e mail. Getting all this information specifically from competitors of your company can be really important and a great insight into what the market is doing as a whole. Then we have competitor websites and this might feel like a very obvious one. But we really want to look at not just the visuals that they're using, but what features they're highlighting? What kind of benefits are they're bringing up? How are they representing their audience through photography, for example? Try to write everything down and make sure you're really analyzing what the site is doing correct. What could be a weakness that your client could actually highlight in their own messaging and branding. Really try to go in depth into the competitors as well. Then you can have a look at recent rebrand. This is, of course, especially important if it's in the same industry as yours. But this can also be really interesting to see overall because we have seen, for example, a trend from very complex logo marks to very, very minimalist ones in 2015, we had a lot of flat design, for example, then going into a little bit more ornate once again. I think it's really interesting to see as an overall trend, what companies are doing and what customers are looking for. There are lots of sites that actually compile a lot of these rebrands, and I'll make sure to link some of them down in the description as well. Finally, of course, we have our inspiration sites like dribble, B hands, Pinterest, where we can search for all that different visual inspiration. We can look for trends, we can look for things we can put on our mood board. These are of course great places. I also think it can be valuable to look at more design focused blogs like dieline, for example, especially if you have packaging, because a lot of times they will not only show you what has been designed, but ask the designer to describe the process or why they made certain design choices. This can be really helpful for understanding why certain industries are designed in certain ways. Doing brand research can feel very overwhelming if it's something that you're just new to. But it's really just about trying to understand not just what things look like, but why they look a certain way. I hope that the brand research template that we've put in is going to help you out. It has very specific structured questions and templates that you can fill in. I hope that that will be something that can demystify this portion a little bit. All this hard work that you're putting in now is going to be key as we're moving into the next couple of stages, which are all about creating those actual concepts. 5. Client check in: All this great foundational work done. We can actually start getting ready for the Moodboard and research meeting together with our clients. This is like a check in. We're both trying to make sure that we're on the right track, making sure the client actually likes the directions that we're picking out. But it's also a way for us to showcase to the client all the work that we're putting in, so they feel part of the project and that they're ready for the concepts when we're actually show them. We don't need to share absolutely everything that we found. We want to do is distill down the key things we think are really interesting and that we're going to be incorporating into the project directly. That might be different things that you're seeing as interesting trends, highlights of competitors that you want to bring out, or anything else that you think relates to those how might we questions and things you really want to highlight. At this stage, you might still have a lot of different possible directions that you might want to take the project. Having this check in with the client can also be a good idea to present things that are a little bit more out there for them, but you think could be a really interesting opportunity and see which directions they actually think could be relevant to them. Because of course, you have the target audience, which is the core focus. But as a founder, you still need to be really passionate about the branding direction and feel like it really connects with your mission. Everything you do day to day, because ultimately the people who are in the company are going to be the ones who are marketing this and they need to be passionate about it. For example, let's say you're designing for a restaurant. You might have found two vastly different directions. Maybe one is a one with illustrated characters, or a retro feeling, maybe a little bit humorous, while the other one is focused on natural ingredients and nature colors, and a lot more focus on the founders, for example. These two directions might both be strategically a really good choice, but it might be up to the founder which of these directions they feel strongly about. This is a very collaborative meeting, so we're not really trying to present an idea and get a yes or a no at this point. We're trying to present different things that we found and see how different aspects could tie into the final identity. Both strong yeses and strong nos are really helpful at this stage. Get the most from this meeting, I suggest starting by restating those how might we questions. They're fresh in mind both for you and of course for your clients. Might be in a few weeks since you looked at this together, so that can be really helpful to restate them. This is a little bit of a summary meeting of your research. You will be doing a lot more talking than you did in the discovery meeting. We still want to give space for our clients to actually be able to react to things, to contemplate different ideas and directions because we're ultimately throwing so much new information at them. We need to give them space to actually have reactions that are not just gut reactions, but have a think about how it falls into the overall strategic movement of the company. As you're presenting, take notes of the clients likes and dislikes and also why they like or dislike certain things. I also find that splitting this meeting into a few different sections like looking at trends, looking at competitors, looking at moodboards, for example. It can help make the meeting a flow a little bit easier. Also then like to send the entire research report to my client after we have the meeting, so they can actually dive into a lot more of the in depth content if they want to. But here in this meeting, we're trying to summarize the key points and discuss how they fall into the overall strategy. Personally, I like to talk about the mood boards at the very end of this meeting because then we have all the context of the research that we've done. It makes it a little bit easier to make a judgment call on what you actually prefer. When you're putting together the mood boards, you want to keep a few things in mind. First, we need to make sure that each of the mood boards is a very distinct and unique direction, so they can be clearly separated from each other. I suggest giving each moodboard a name so that you have a way to set the tone both for yourself to keep focused and to have it for your client as well later on so that they can instantly understand where you're trying to go with this moodboard. To create really effective moodboards, we need to make sure that we're being super consistent with the images that we choose to put in there. If we're showing logo styles, we need to make sure those logo styles are showing the same style within a moodboard. We're using similar font styles. We're using a similar color palette. We're sticking to one color palette within a moodboard. The same for anything like photography and illustration style, it should all feel like one brand image already. For this to happen, you might need to actually tweak some of these images a little bit. You might need to adjust some colors or block out a section and add your own font there, for example. I highly suggest making these customizations because even though it takes a little bit of extra time, it will be such a much clearer guideline for you when you actually start designing. And you know exactly why your client liked a certain modboard. You're not trying to second guess if they like the more minimal font or the more flourishing and decorative font that you chose. We also want to make sure we have a range of different applications within the mood board. Because this is a branding project, we want to show, of course, logos and things like that. But you should show how it works on wire frames. How does it work in an e mail signature? How does it work in a social media post or on merchandise, for example? The exact applications are, of course, going to be unique to the company that you're working with because it needs to be applications they would actually use. But try to make this feel a lot more real life. As you're presenting these moodboards, make sure you're always asking why a client likes or dislikes a certain image. I have had so many times when a client says, Oh, I like that one that, that one and I don't like this one, that's all they say. Then you have to be the one who says, Great, what about these images is it that you like? Because in certain cases, a client might really dislike a certain image just because of the color, but they actually love the style of everything else. We really need to dig into what is it that you like about these different images or what is it that you dislike? Because that's going to be much more helpful information for us than just which ones they like and dislike. Can be a little bit tricky for people who are non designers to describe what they like or dislike about something. They don't have necessarily the design vocabulary for that. You can try to help them use words that maybe are a little bit more relatable to them and make sure you're not using a lot of jargon that could be very confusing or alienating for your clients. I create more than one concept for my clients. I'm okay with my clients picking more than one moodboard. But if you're someone who is creating one concept and one concept only, you might want them to pick one moodboard, because otherwise, that could be a little bit confusing for you. Once you've had this meeting and you've been discussing everything together, Maybe it's a little bit up in the air, what happens next. You want to make sure that your client feels really secure in the next steps. I suggest discussing exactly when you're going to have the next meeting. You're going to talk about exactly what you have discussed in this meeting. Making a little summary where you talk about this is what we like. This is the moodboard we're going with. These are potential changes we want to make. Making sure that your client feels super comfortable and part of the projects. Now we're ready to start thinking about our design concepts. 6. Idea dump: We had our game plan session after we had our discovery meeting. I like to have a little debrief session after the Moodboard and research meeting to try to write down my different concept ideas and try to really make them a little bit more tangible before I start actually designing. Because you've done so much groundwork at this point, you probably already have some ideas for different directions that you think this brand could go in and different concept directions. Now let's try to distill that down a little bit. The first thing I'd like to do is to try to put a name to each concept. I try to pick names that really evoke some feeling. Let's say you're designing for a cafe. Instead of just calling it, for example, plant inspired. We can have secret plant hide away or secret forest hide away, for example, because this is going to be a lot more emotionally evoking than that more simple name. At this point, it can be quite a good thing to have a lot more ideas than what we're actually going to be presenting to the client because most of them don't pan out. Even if they seem great on paper, sometimes when we try to go into practice, some things just don't turn out the way that we want. That's totally okay. It's just all part of the process. You're going to be seeing some clear examples of this when we go into the different case studies of ideas that we really wanted to make work, but they just were a little bit too complicated or had something else that was not quite working. We want to keep a really open mind, but use that framework that we've developed with our clients as a baseline for different ideas that we're coming up. When you have some ideas written down, you can start to bullet point different ideas of ways to actually visually represent this. For example, for our secret forest Hideaway cafe, you might add bullet points like lots of nature inspired colors, cute creatures, botanicals, magical influences. These different words will help you create a lot more of a cohesive image both in your mind and once you start putting everything together. This is completely optional, but I also like to make a little mini moodboard for myself for each of the different concept directions. This could be a little moodboard like you would do for a client, but a lot less complex. Or it could be a collection of reference images that you can use so that if you're creating illustrations or logo designs, you can have these different reference points refer back to. What does it look like when someone is sitting reading a book, for example? That's really useful for you to have all of this collected in one place. As you go through and start creating these little mood boards for yourself, you might start to notice that some feel really easy and engaging and they just flow when you're trying to put them together. Some are really tricky to get to feel cohesive. That is usually a sign that some of those directions are really easy and going to be working well as a concept. It might be a little bit of a red flag for the ones that are very tricky. Just make a note of this and then try to think about that when we're going into actually vetting the different ideas. With these more clear directions, we can start to actually design our different concepts. 7. Sketching: Biggest challenge with sketching in my opinion, is trying to distill down an entire emotion into just a few lines. But this is where we can remember that it's not just about creating a logo that represented the company. This is such a tiny part. The emotion that you're creating is coming from the photography, the colors, the layout, everything you're putting together into one. That's why even though this is often a logo sketching stage where most people start, don't feel like you have to just sketch the logo. You can work on all aspects of the brand at the same time and try to tie things together. If you're feeling stuck and you want to work on the color pattern alongside the logo sketch, go for it. If you have an idea for an illustration that could be great for their home page, incorporate it together. See how it works. This is going to help you also know which brand directions are going to feel a lot more intuitive and easy to work with. To create really successful sketches and concepts, I think it's really important to take away as much pressure as we possibly can at this stage. You might be on a tight deadline or you might be working with a much bigger client than you're used to. It's easy to feel like you have to come up with this amazing idea right away. And that's usually not how it works. Our first ideas are usually not the best ones, they're usually the most obvious ones. What we want to do is just take away the pressure, assume it will take time and give yourself that creative space to take different days to come back to it, to gather inspiration from other sources, to be creative in other ways and let that influence your creative process. If you come across an idea that you really love, feel proud, feel excited about it, and then put it to the side and keep going. I know it's so tempting to just go with that idea, but you might end up in a situation where there's something practical that isn't quite working, and you've poured all your time and energy into this one idea. We want to make sure we keep going. I suggest sketching at least 30 to 50 completely different ideas because that is going to really help you think about new and innovative ways to represent the ideas that you want. If you want to set up a notion or Mil not board and start adding in the different elements as you create them. Put in the color palette, put in some illustrations, put in a photograph that you found from a stock site that you can use as part of the brand. You can start to build up this board that is basically a moodboard, but it's the actual concept. I like this as a way to start making sure it feels cohesive, that the ideas you're creating also feel distinct from each other, so you have distinct concepts from each other. Personally, I'm a very visual learner, so I find this very helpful and you could try it as well, see if it works for you. So make sure you're going back to those how might we questions and specifically trying to design to resolve those questions. With these different ideas sketched out, it's time to refine and stress test your ideas. 8. Testing ideas: Have a few ideas that you really like. We want to make sure we're stress testing these and that they're going to work in the real world for the client day to day. How much you actually choose to refine these ideas before you start testing them is completely up to you. I know some designers like to make them absolutely perfect, which I guess is the thing, but as close to perfect as you can, just so you can really envision how they will look. Some people don't like to put that much energy into ideas they don't know if they're going to be using. Find a balance that works for you. I think the important thing is that you know that you can check that they're going to work at smaller scales, be accessible, that they're giving the right feeling, feel like the right industry, and that they're going to practically work day to day. Of course, solving for those how might re question. I think mock ups are a great way to run these stress tests. If you're trying to add your different branding elements to a mock up that feels really on brand for the company that you're designing for it, and you're finding it really difficult. That might be a sign that you need to either make amends to that concept to add or change something, or that is a concept that maybe you need to put to the side and experiment with other ones. Make sure that you're taking time to step away and then coming back and identifying not just if it's working or not, but what is working, what's not working, and why is it not working? Maybe you can add a neutral to the color palette to make it feel a little bit more friendly or easier to work with. Maybe you can add photography that feels a lot more personable and that brings it from that very cold design to a lot more friendly. Look at different ways where you can make tweaks and see if that makes an improvement. Sometimes it can be easy for everything to feel very the same, so having a minimalist color palette, minimalist photography style, minimist logo design. Sometimes bringing in an element of something different can be the thing that makes you feel unique and makes you feel like the brand that you want to create. After you've been going through this process for a few of your different ideas, chances are you're starting to notice some winners and some losers. Personally, I like to present more than one concept. I usually have three because it means that I'm able to put in a little bit more of a wildcard or something I think could be a great choice for the client, but they might not be ready for or expecting. As an option in there without feeling too intimidating for them. They can always say no to it and have a more safe option in there as well. But sometimes that wildcard is the one that they end up loving. But sometimes you have one concept that you know. This is much better than all the other ones, and then it can be a little bit worse to muddle the water with all these other ideas. How many you choose to present is completely up to you for what your workflow looks like and what your preferences are. As we're getting ready to present concepts to clients, we want to make sure that we can help them see what we see. This is where the presentation comes in. 9. Presenting: You have concepts you're really excited to share. How do you make sure that your client sees their full potential just like you do? I think the simple answer here is to really show them real world applications that really apply to them. Something as simple as showing a phone mockup of their social media profile, with their new logo icon, maybe with a couple posts designed in their new brand style so that they can really envision that. Rather than having things just on a white background, for example. It's a bit like buying a house. Yes, you might like the location, you might like the facade of the house, but it might not be until you've been walking around in that house and starting to imagine where you're going to be putting the furniture and how this can really become your home that you truly fall in love with it. As usual, to get the most from the meeting, I usually start by restating the how Mt requestions. You might feel tired of that by now, but I really think it does make a big difference. Actually have another course on specifically concept presentations for branding. If you like to go and check that out as well, that could be a great complement to this course. But essentially, you will see that I have a very clear structure that I'm following. Every concept is presented in the same way using the same mock ups to make sure that we're presenting apples to apples and it's not just another mock up that they like more than another one. Also showcase the structure to my client from the very beginning knowing we're going to go through logos, we're going to go through colors, we're going to go through social media, and so forth. They know exactly what to expect. It's very rare that a client falls in love with the logo at the very first glance. They want to see the entire visual identity and start to imagine those different applications before we usually have that super falling in love moments. Sometimes they can take a little bit of time because people are very attached to their own brand that they currently have, maybe. It has a lot of history, or they might have a very specific idea of what they want the brand to look like. We really want to make sure we're giving our clients time and taking them through each step of the brand and the concept. As you're presenting each concept, you want to make sure that you're always talking about why you have made certain choices, how ties back to the goals of the company, and really talking about the strategic portion here, not just the visual one. It's quite a fine balance here and you have to be a bit of a moderator because you want to give your clients space to react and to be able to talk and ask questions if they like. But you don't want to get stuck on anything before you've actually seen the different concepts because it might be that you're spending an hour discussing the pros and cons of concept one, and when you get to concept three, they just absolutely love it and it doesn't matter what happened in concept one. We want to make sure we give the space to react and be able to ask questions, but also moving forward until we get to the end of the presentation. Once we're at this point and they've seen all the different things, that is a lot of information that your client has just seen for the very first time. You've been working and living with these different designs for a long time. But the client has just seen them. What I'd like to do is just to ask gut reaction, which one they think would be the most interesting for them. Then we go back and look at that one first. That usually means they start to have a lot more of those positive reactions that they initially had, and we can start to break down why they like that concept a lot. Then in my experience, clients typically like to go back to the other ones as well and just have a look. There might be little things that they really like about the concept that you created that are not picked. But sometimes it can be a little bit too Frankenstein to put them together, but in some cases, it might be that they just really like a photography style and that is something you could incorporate into the one that they actually chose. Have an open discussion and make sure you're helping them guide them to one direction and picking one concept at the end. People can have lots of different levels of feedback. For some projects, you might have very specific feedback. Some people might have no notes. That doesn't necessarily reflect how good of a job you did with your concept presentation. It's usually more about the personality of the person and the approach they have to their branding projects. When we get into our case studies, you're going to see how we actually tackled feedback on changing parts of the logo, changing colors, and all different aspects. You can see how you can take that feedback and turn it into something that still feels very cohesive. 10. Case study - Petra Fisher: First case study I want to share with you is for a brand called Petra Fisher Movements. Petra runs a business where she shows mostly women over 50 how to start moving in ways that can reduce a lot of pain and just give a lot more flexibility and happiness in life. Petra has a very personal story where she started working really hard as a lawyer. Started to really run her body down as she was in a lot of stress and really difficult work environments and so she wanted to share what helped her. She decided to start working with a lot of natural exercises that didn't require a lot of expensive tools and that anyone with different abilities could do. She's not grown her Instagram account to over half 1 million followers, and she came to us to create a visual identity for her brand. In discovery, we talked a lot about inclusion and making sure that all these different people who maybe don't see themselves normally in the fitness industry would feel represented and her type of teaching was for them. A lot of people who find Petra come because they've had a lot of chronic pain, and they felt quite frustrated with a lot of quick fixes or they feel like they would like to avoid doing surgery if they can by being able to build up their body instead. Big part of Petro's brand is to share very well research different exercises and to be able to build trust by showing that what she's sharing is really based on research. When I asked them to describe their dream office, they had this really lovely description of almost being outside. Maybe you're able to open sliding doors. They wanted to be really bright, have lots of pillows and things to sit on the floor because a lot of their exercises are about getting up and down and being able to sit on the floor rather than sitting on chairs all day long, like in your office. Also, we're talking about lots of plants, maybe white walls. We immediately had this very open and positive and really clear, I think image. At this stage of the process, the Hight requestions were quite broad, which is quite common. We can actually go back into them and refine them as we keep going through the projects. The goal here was to be able to communicate this personality and this connection that people have with Petro on Instagram into other platforms where they don't have as much video of her. That could be like sales pages or the blog, for example, because we really want to keep that connection to Petra throughout the brant. With all this information, we did our debrief and we started to dig into the actual research and we found some really interesting trends. One big thing we saw through social media and different reviews was that people felt a bit alienated because a lot of times there were no adaptations to exercises. Let's say that you had pain in a certain way or maybe you weren't as flexible and you weren't able to bend a certain way It was difficult for you to actually complete the different exercises of other coaches or other trainers. That meant that they basically just stopped doing the programs. They also felt quite off put by a lot of jargon. We know that we want to make sure that we're keeping different adaptations for different body types, different abilities, and that we're also very jargon free. I think that goes really well with this idea of Petra being the central character of the brand. We also saw that a lot of people found it very difficult to stick to some program. You might need to continue doing something for months. If you felt like it was really difficult or you kept forgetting, it was really long and inaccessible, people just dropped off. From our background in design, we know that gameification in so many different ways can be interesting for making sure people come back. Now, that doesn't need to look like an app or anything in this instance. But it might be situations where they can do challenges as a community, or they can have some accountability group or they can have different challenges within the program that you're doing just by yourself. We wanted to bring this up as something that we can incorporate into the branding as well. On sites like Google Trends and Pincher trends, we also found a lot of terms around natural movement and primal movements were growing and this is super interesting. F the visual aspects, we also saw there was a lot of organic shapes, a lot of inclusive illustrations, and a lot of more minimal Japandi inspired illustrations and graphics in general. Now, there were of course tons of other trends that we came across, but knowing the information that we do from discovery, we know that these are the ones that are going to actually apply to this company. These are the ones that we decided to present to the clients. At the end of the research and Moodboard meeting, we ended up making the how might we questions a little bit more specific. First one was, how can we make sure that our audience feels truly seen, regardless of their bodies and their different capabilities, making sure that they feel like this is a community for them. The second part we're still focusing on getting Petras personality through. That could be through visuals, through messaging, any aspect where we can get Petra to be a core central character. When it comes to the mood burs that we presented, they really liked this first one because it felt so open and bright and like a lot of the things that they had talked about in their discovery. But they also really liked for this third moodboard, the different swirls that we have here. This is something that we were able to create. This wasn't part of original pictures that we put in the moodboard, but we added these ourselves because we had so much information about the clients, we were able to create these very custom moodboards. This was the second mood board that we showed them and this was their least favorite. Were elements that they liked. The reason we put this together was not only to be a contrast to the other ones. But a lot of the work that Petra does is that she travels to different places, she experienced things, she hikes, she surfs, she does all these things. A lot of the things that she shoots is in these different natural environments. We thought this could be a good angle to go down. But they felt like it wasn't as bright as positive as the other ones. We are essentially going with mood board one with maybe the swirls or the movement from the third one. Now, we asked why they picked specifically these ones. They were mostly talking about the energy, it feeling very energetic, positive and happy. It's really important for us to know why they picked a certain mood board over another one. That's really helpful for us. You could probably see quite a clear connection between the way they describe their dream office and these mood boards that we ended up presenting. In a little debrief session after the meeting, Jeremy and I both had a lot of ideas around movement. The first direction was to be able to think about incorporating ligatures or something into the logo itself. We had the sense of movement in the mark and to be able to take that mark and expand it into a dynamic visual identity. We really wanted to have this either cutouts or the swirls incorporated together with the photographies that we would cut out portions and things. I feel very integrated and a bit more custom than just layering them on top. We also had a second idea for a concept that would be more of a building blocks dynamic movement that could be adapted to any situation in anybody. This is really coming from that idea of being able to work with whatever situation you have. In the sketching stage, we try to incorporate a lot of different organic elements, and we tried to play around with how these different cutouts and shapes could actually work in practice throughout the visual language, not just in the logo, because it's quite a long name, Petra fisher movement. We decided to keep Petra fisher together because it's the name and then put movement underneath. We did this in lots of different ways to create different hierarchy. Sometimes Petra fisher was really big and movement was smaller, but we felt like movement was such an important portion of it that we wanted to give it the same hierarchy as Petra fisher. We ended up creating a couple of different alternatives here. At the end, we presented three concepts to the clients. Concept one is most similar to the mood board. And here we have ligatures in the logo to create a sense of flow. We have bright colors, and we have these organic shapes and swirls to create a balance of movement and being grounded. The icon is very flowy and it plays with the first letter. For the second concept, we have the actual movement in the first letter, which creates a really nice icon as well. With this shape, we can also create really interesting cutouts and use the sense of motion in a way that would be really easy for the client to implement. For the third concept, we're using the AD of building blocks. The feeling of these two shapes coming apart creates a very light and open impression. We can then use them as a way to frame different people like case studies. Now for the feedback, overall, the client loved direction one. But they felt like there were some aspects that needed tweaking. One thing they really wanted to do was to highlight the turquoise color because they have this in their original branding. It was really core to the visual identity, and they wanted to make sure that we brought that back a little bit more. They also felt like the P icon that we created was a little bit too complicated. They wanted something that was still the same concept, and still the same feeling, but they wanted different iterations on that P icon. They also felt like the color that we picked for this very highlight poppy color. Maybe needed to feel a little bit less synthetic and a bit more natural. With this feedback, we created lots of different versions of the P. And we ended up presenting these three options to the client. This was just about drawing different ways, making sure it was still readable as a P because as you're creating a lot of swirls, you could be creating something that looks like a D or a Q or something else. We really want to make sure that the legibility is still there. We also wanted to create a little bit more of a natural feeling with that color. We created it as more of a sunshine yellow. We also wanted to make sure we had these natural elements like the sand color and this darker navy color as ways to ground these elements like the rocks, for example. I asked Petter what they were thinking when they were in the concept meeting. One thing that they brought up was how important it is for them to really think about the end use cases of everything. They're thinking about how their sales page is going to look, how their landing pages are going to look, how social media posts, e mail, signatures, everything is coming together. For them, they're thinking about all those things that they're going to need to then go and create with this brand. They were really thinking about individual elements, having enough to build up very diverse sets of designs, but still feeling very cohesive. This was really interesting because we ended up actually creating rocks and swirls and all these different badges and things very specific for specific use cases. I hope this case study can help you see the connection between the discovery, the research, and the final concepts. And how to approach feedback because getting feedback is not a knock on your designs. It's something that we all get and it is a very collaborative process. In the next case study, I'm going to share a concept that I really wanted to actually make work, but I just had to drop it in the end. Let's go and check out second case study. 11. Case study - Unhide: Second case study I want to share with you is for an organization called Unhide. It was founded by three women who has a lot of experience in research and academia. They all have children who have experienced mental health struggles, and they were realizing that in a lot of the academic literature, there were signs that brain inflammation can be causing mental health issues. But the actual research is just not strong enough. One of the big causes of that is that we just don't have enough data from real patient stories. A lot of patients get misdiagnosed and they feel like they can't really trust the doctors because they don't really feel listened to. Anh came to us to create this brand from scratch. They just picked out the name and they wanted something that can really appeal to pulls the doctors, patients, and the researchers. In the discovery, we kept coming back to how the patients were so central to this entire organization, because even though you needed all three, the patients really was the core or the heart of this operation. Made a note of this and knew we had to represent it somehow. For the dream office, they described a big open space with lots of light. They wanted it to be colorful but not garish. It also should feel really welcoming and not like you're coming into a clinical environment. More like you could bring your kids there, lots of round shapes, cushions, things like Our research found that brands either felt very confusing and they were using a lot of scientific jargon, or on the other hand, you had very high end expensive products that were more for tracking your heart rate, tracking your sleep, a lot more about optimizing things and for a very high end price ticket, compared to these people who are their audience who just want to feel better and be seen by medical professionals. In the research and Moodboard meeting, we quickly got some really interesting feedback We showed some examples from organizations that are more like tech companies that are trying to address mental health. We got a lot of feedback from our clients that they really didn't like when it felt like a little cheeky, or it felt like they were using really bright colors and these really funky illustrations. What they really wanted was for it to feel calm, for you to feel like you're being taken seriously, and they didn't really want all this humor around it. With all this information, Jeremy and I sat down to debrief. Since the name is Unhide, we thought there was a good opportunity here to come up with a concept where we are revealing this patient's story. Being able to somehow shine a light on the actual data on the one hand and the stories and the personal aspects on the other. Another part, of course, that we remember from our discussions earlier was this patient being in the center. We knew that we wanted to somehow represent these different stakeholders and having the patients be the heart of everything. At the early stages of sketching, I had this idea of making something blurry. So I wanted it to be unblurred as a way to reveal the actual story behind it. I tried so many different variations. I tried having it be like slats going from showing the entire image to just little pieces of it. I use different blur effects, I try using cutouts. As much as I was trying to make it work, I was starting to realize that even though I love the idea of it, it was not feeling like the type of natural, warm and friendly company that they wanted to be. I was able to come up with some ideas that visually look interesting, but it felt more like a tech company, a museum, something else that was a little bit more modern and harsh in that way, and not like this company that they wanted to be. I had to be able to let go. But before I did that, I did try out lots of different versions. I probably spent one or two entire days just doing experimentation with this one concept. That's okay because we need to be able to fully flesh out the different ideas before we can know which ones are going to work and which ones are not. But in letting go of this idea, we ended up having a much better one. One thing that kept coming up in discussions was how the family is often so involved. We thought about using this hand painted brush idea and using that as a way to reveal the portion that we want to highlight. It could be scratched away, it could be something they could use for quotes. It would be a very dynamic visual system that would be easy for the client to use. Then we have this patient at the center idea. Because we were thinking about all the work that happens with these different parties. It made us think of n diagrams. When you have those different circles and then there's a different color where they overlap. We thought each of these different groups, they bring their own set of values and their own set of information. But the thing is it's more than the sum of its parts when it comes together. We wanted to show that the important part happens in this meeting. Of course, we wanted the patient to be in the center. We created these three shapes and we put them together and have this little overlap where they This way, we can also break this apart to use only one of them for a cutout, for example, or as a little speech bubble to bring up a patient story. For the photography of both of these concepts, we made sure that we really brought in pictures that felt like real life, like family images and that didn't feel so stock inspired. We asked the clients about their thoughts in this meeting and here's what they said. I was a little nervous at first because it's just such a huge undertaking and wanting to find just the right look and feel can be really hard. But we soon realized we were in good hands as they took their time and really listened to what we were saying. And they nailed it. I think hearing this portion about really taking your time is something very important here. I think hearing this portion about being able to take our time and presenting ideas slowly to clients is really important because it can be really nerve racking when you're presenting your concepts and it can be easy to try to rush through it to get to the end where you can start getting into which one they like. But clients are also nervous because this is such a big undertaking for them. And being able to feel like you're actually being able to process the information as it is being presented to you is really important. Unhide ended up choosing this concept and they essentially had no notes. One thing that we often tell clients in the early stages of the process is that they will not be surprised when we show them the concepts. This might seem a little boring, like you're not being dazzled by a design. But as you can see, there is such a clear connection between the different meanings, the different stages of the process, it's a very collaborative process. We don't want to be throwing something at them that's completely from a different direction that they didn't expect because that wouldn't be suitable. I hope the second case study made it a little bit more clear how you can be able to lack of ideas because you know that they just won't fit the type of client that you have and the aesthetic and feelings they're trying to create. 12. Summary: Now that we've gone through the entire course. That was a lot of information. I thought I could do a little bit of a key summary to make sure that you're taking away these different key points that are the most important for your process. I'm also going to share some things that have really helped me in my projects. The very first one is you might have picked up one, having a really clear process that you can repeat for every different client that comes through your door. Not only does this save you a lot of time for making templates and thinking about what the next steps are. But I think it also really shines through to your clients. They feel a lot more confident. Always know what's happening next, and you can also anticipate a lot more how much workload you can actually take on. You know exactly how much work you can actually book. That doesn't leave a lot of money on the table, which is really helpful. I also want to highlight how important it is to not just get bogged down in the logo design, but thinking about how everything we're doing, all the different design choices from photography to layout style is really going to pull together that brand visual identity. That's way more important, the entire image that you have and having a clear direction that you're following to create a specific emotion. That's way more important than having the perfect logo, for example. I also find that involving your clients in the process is absolutely key to making sure the project runs smoothly and that you get very few revisions. It might seem like you're saving tons of time if you just do a survey, and then you share the concepts with them, they pick one and you never have to have a lot of long meetings, a long discussion. But it usually means that you have a lot of confusion and misunderstandings, and you just end up in an endless cycle of, well, that wasn't what I wanted, that wasn't what I meant. It's an easy mistake to make early on. I've definitely done that. Having tried lots of things for the last almost ten years now, I really think having a clear process where involving your client, not only does it help with the project at hand, but it helps build a long term relationship. They will come back to you and ask you for more work later on. I also think that these different brain dump sessions are one of the most overlooked sections because As we're coming out of meetings, we're excited to jump on designing. Although it feels like you're saving time, it's a bit similar to having a clear process. If we're able to sit down and really define what the concept is, write it down, make bullet pointed lists, maybe create another mood board for yourself. It really will focus you and it will save a lot of time feeling uncertain or confused in your process. Also want to give a big gold star for how might re questions because they really are a game changer, to be able to have something that truly guides the project that both you and the client have agreed is the goal of the project. That is something that is going to make your job a lot easier to be able to point and say, I made these design choices because this is the how might re question we post. Lastly, I just want to say that creating your own process and workflow and realizing that everyone works differently is really, really key, I think to having a good and happy creative career. It's really easy to look at other people's process and think, well, that's just how it's done. This is how the professional way of doing it is. Although I think that overall having a structure is very important, how that structure workflow looks like is completely up to you because all of our brains are a little bit different. We have different experiences, different strengths. Try something out, notice where you have a lot of friction and then try to make tweaks along the way. 13. Class project: Now it's your turn. The class project for this class doesn't need to be creating an entire finished concept because that is quite an overwhelming task. Instead, I thought what we could do is you do this portion where we really break down, describing what the concept is, making sure you bullet point out what kind of inspiration and what kind of things are really defining this idea. You could even put together a little mood board of your own. Have as the direction for the concept, and make sure to put all together and share it in the projects tab. If you have any questions at all along the way, make sure to post them in the Discussions tab. If you enjoy this course and you want to see a lot more actual real world designing and how we're creating brand identities from scratch. You can go and check out my YouTube channel where we have tons of videos on exactly this. Thank you so much for taking part of this class. I had so much fun creating it, and I can't wait to have lovely discussions and seeing your work in the discussions on the projects tab. Thank you so much. Good luck with your projects and see you for the next class.