Transcripts
1. Introduction: Every person has some form of a brand, whether they realize it or not. Every decision we take as creatives in sharing content, creating content, or even down to the products we buy and the clothes we choose to wear, all comes together in projecting a message to the world that says, "This is who I am." My name is Sharon. I'm an empathetic and systematic thinker and an ever-learning designer from Dallas, Texas. Right now, I'm nearing the end of a rigorous design program and I've been freelancing for a few years along the way. My work has been recognized nationally and internationally by the Society of Publication Designers, Adobe Behance, and AIGA. I believe that everyone has something special to share and that you can learn something new from anyone. In this course, I'll be teaching you the basics to creating a cohesive visual language, with color, typography, graphic elements, and identity marks. You'll be creating a brand board, that will help you define an intentional narrative you wish to share with that world. This class is geared toward beginning freelancers, small startups, and emerging creatives, wanting to hit the next level of professionalism in their business, with the defined brand identity. To follow along, you'll need a basic level understanding of Adobe Illustrator. This brand board will be a great asset, because it serves as a reference guide to your freelance business and the template can be constantly reworked and adopted as your business evolves. By the end of this course, you will have a completed brand board that you can use to create consistent content and maintain cohesive, branding for your business. I'm so glad you are here. Let's get started.
2. Why Create a Brand Board?: Why does it freelance business even need a brand board? A brand board serves as a reference to the visual identity you want to convey. It's essentially the map that guides your brand. It's different than a mood would because it's not in the ideation phase, it's more like a definitive visual statement. Every freelance business can benefit from having a brand board because it helps to keep the content you create consistent and your brand cohesive. Creating a brand board leads you to take the first steps of controlling the unique tone you inevitably have as a creative and craft that into an intentional identity rather than aimless one. It's these steps of intentionality that speak to you and your business, because it allows clients to perceive you as an expert from the thoughtfulness and consideration you convey. These are the types of people that clients look to work with. To begin, first you'll need to download the brand board template for this class and open the file in Adobe Illustrator.
3. Practicality Check: The first category in our brand board template file are the identity marks. In this lesson, I will be walking you through a three step checklist in making sure that your identity marks are practical. We will be looking at color, scale and hierarchy. Once our identity marks take all the boxes, we will go into the application phase of these successful marks. Logos that are solely dependent on a color for recognition are not practical. This subset logos are unrealistically expecting to always have a great color printer at hand. Take this logo for example. It's the redesign of the Gap logo that emerged briefly in 2010. While it does read pretty well in full color here on the left, see yourself, how would this logo perform as a fax or an invoice sent to accompany with only a black and white printer? The mark would read like this to the right. The P is no longer legible, because it depended on the color blue to be red. On the other hand, here's an example of a familiar logo that does not rely on its color. It not only works in its primary color red, but in black and white too. Additionally, you know this brand is successful because we subconsciously associate the color red to it even when it is without color. Here's a quick tip. Ask yourself, can your mark be drawn by a client from memory. Logos comprised of simpler shapes tend to be more successful because the shape of the logo is ingrained in their minds and not a color. Now I'll walk you through how I completed a simple color test using my own mark in a brand board file. Right now, I'm looking at the art board labeled as Identity Marks: Primary. Right here in the top left, I already had the full color version of my primary mark. To make sure it doesn't rely on color to be red, I took a copy of it, selected the shapes, and filled them with black. It's still legible. Next, I'll make another copy and reverse it out in white against the dark background. But go via marks in full color, black and white, and make sure they're still legible. Secondly, you want to make sure your mark is practical in terms of scale. We can check this with a simple scale test. In this test, you're looking to see how legible your mark is at 150 and 25 percent scale. Now start by making a copy of each logo. You can make a copy by going up to the Edit Panel, press "Copy", then "Paste". To reduce down the strove marks to 50 percentage of its scale, select the mark, go up to the Transform Panel up at the top, and reduce either the width or the height by 50 percent. Right now it's at 200 pixels and I'll take it down to 100. You'll do the same thing with the logo in black and white. To see how it reads at a 25 percent scale, you'll make a copy once more, select the mark, go up to the Transform Panel and reduce it by 50 percent once more. This gives us a 25 percent reading of the original logo. What you are looking for is seeing how legible you mark is as the scale reduces down. Realistically, you won't always have this much space allotted to your mark, so you want to make sure it still reads well as you go down to the 50 and 25 percent scales. If your mark reads well at the 150 percent scale, it's a good logo. Getting it to work at the 25 percent scale is what takes it from good to great. The last box to check in our practicality checklist is hierarchy. Start by defining your primary and secondary logos and your sub marks. If you aren't quite sure what each of these terms mean, take a look at this example of a familiar logo. Your primary mark is the full expression of the mind and the most oftenly used. It should include your full business name and also be the fullest in terms of it's visual elements. The secondary mark is a simplification of the primary mark and it's used to improve legibility at smaller scales. Thirdly, the sub mark is a graphic or icon representation of the mark used in the smallest of scales. Thinking through the levels of hierarchy with the mark ensures that your marks are practical. Because you're thinking about its application past the isolation of the Illustrator file and thinking about how it would perform in the real world. I would suggest your secondary and sub mark to be more than just the removal of a tagline or slogan from your original logo. Don't think of it as a simple iteration of your primary logo. A simplification of the primary mark itself is a good sign that it'll be functional. Right here, when you look at my primary and secondary marks, this secondary mark isn't just the removal of my last name. It's a simplification of the entire form and an essence of the mark itself. An S and a subtle M representing both of my names. Once you have your marks, place them into the brand board template and do the color and scale tests like I have right here.
4. Applying your Marks: Think about where you envision your logo being theme. Some platforms that I have on my list for my personal logo are Instagram, Behance, LinkedIn, and my portfolio website. But for right now, I'll just be demonstrating with Behance and Instagram. The outputs of your mark will vary based on the type of freelance business you run. For example, Instagram would be a master photographer and Behance more so for a designer. Right here, I have a screenshot of how my profiles appear on Behance and Instagram. This is when we'll see the benefits of thinking through the applications of our marks. In this Behance profile section, I can already see that I'll need a mark that works at a fairly small-scale and fits well within a circle, same down here for Instagram. I'll also need a mark that fits in a ratio that is wider than it is tall. Doing simple research ahead of time like this will help you know whether you have a practical set of marks for your businesses application. For example, if I only had my primary mark, my profile would appear like this. Not only is there redundancy of my marks appear in the Behance profile, I've lost the overall impact and legibility that my sub-mark offers. This is why I knew I needed a sub-mark. From here you can resize and export your mark based on the dimensions that you platform suggests. Another example is in the case of your website's favicon. Favicons are great examples of when your mark will need to be read at an extremely small scale. This is why we did the scale test earlier. You can see my favicon as I begin to type in my domain URL in Safari and also up at the top of the tab in Firefox. Here it is up-close. When deciding on the application of my mark in this situation, I chose my secondary mark because of its simple forms and shapes. The simple and reduced forms allow my mark to be read even at extremely small scales, similar to the target logo example. Now let's talk about color.
5. Color: Have you ever noticed that many banks and hospitals have blue logos? This is because blue evokes a thought of trustworthiness in our minds which is critical for these types of businesses. Colors invoke and convey different thoughts to your clients, so you don't want to create a color palette simply based off of your own liking. While your taste is important to the palette, consider the cultural and psychological associations to the colors that you select. Even though this course doesn't dive into color theory, here are a few examples. This is a brief guide to color associations that will be linked as downloadable PDF in the class description. Feel free to press Pause and get a good read. Next, we'll add our palate into our brand board template file. My palette drives directly from my marks, so I'll swatch colors from my mark by using the eyedropper tool. I would suggest a pallet of 3-5 colors but feel free to add or take away anything you need from the template. It's also handy to have the codes for each color you choose written out as well. I'm doing that here by selecting a color in the palette, double-clicking it's fill color in the bottom right, and then copying and pasting its code. I'm pasting the code right above its color to make sure that everything is easily accessible. Another tip is to create proportional color palettes. Most palette marker CC have swatches that are equal in scale, where each square or circle of color is the same exact size. This isn't practical because colors are commonly used in different percentages. By creating a proportional color palette, you give yourself or your client a more accurate representation. Here are a few examples. By using palettes that are proportional like this, you more accurately reflect not only the colors being seen but also how they will be used.
6. Typography: When making typography choices for your brand, select typefaces that convey the same tone as the identity works. For example, here are a few screenshots of a mobile app I designed to be used by elderly men and woman shopping for medical supplies. Because my target audience was the elderly and this company has a rich history. I selected a serif typeface for this project that reflects the warmth of the company and the need for increased legibility from the consumer. These are a few shots from a packaging project for organic baby foods. Thinking about the brand and its practices, I selected a modern sans serif typeface that reflects the soft and inviting nature of little babies by its round characters. Secondly, you'll want to think about the application of these marks. Where will you be using them? Select a lab or print based font accordingly. Just a quick tip. I often find typefaces for my projects on Google Fonts and Adobe Fonts. Think about the levels of hierarchy you want to achieve as he said, I would suggest a minimum of two levels and a maximum of four levels when beginning. Remember, there are several ways to establish hierarchy with type. Four levels doesn't initiate a translate into four fonts can be done and weight color and sans. Now I'm on the typography art board of our brand board template. You can see that I already have my brands type choices laid out. When adding your type t or board, I would suggest noting the characteristics of the different levels of hierarchy like I have here. I have the caps noted, the color delay, and even the tracking. You should also check to make sure your typeface has all the characters, symbols, and glyphs that you need. You don't want to select a poor typeface to later realize that it's missing commas. Down here at the bottom I've checked for this. You can also check your typefaces groups by clicking "Window" at the top, hovering down to "Type", and then selecting "Glyphs". Scroll through this window to see all the glyphs that your font has to offer.
7. Graphic Elements: Graphic elements are like the icing on the cake when it comes to your branding, over use them and things become too sweet or in this case, visually cluttered. While graphic elements are not the fundamental core of an identity, it will set your branding apart in the minds of client. There's no finite definition of what a graphic elements should be, and that's the memorable magic behind them. Graphic elements are left to the choice of your creative juices. They are unique tip. To give you some context, here are a few examples of graphic elements used in brand identities. These are a few marks created for rocket fizz, in vintage soda pop and candy shop. You have a word mark, pick tour mark and combination mark. While these marks were created just as a branding exercise, we can still look into its graphic elements to get a better idea of what they are and how they can help your branding. Here's an overview of the imagined collateral for the company. There are a few graphic elements coming into play in this identity system. The use of halftime dots hint at the nostalgia the company strives for, as a vintage candy shop. This element can be used and allow pattern, like on the back of this letter head, or as a client addition, like on the edges of this business card and [inaudible] Rocket Fizz known for inventing the wackiest sweet tooth flavors. In this molecular and cosmic structure is a nod to this idea and functions as its second graphic element. It's on the front of this envelope and on the back of this business card. Without graphic elements, this brand's collateral would appear like this. Can you see how graphic elements can make your brand memorable? Without it the collateral becomes rather cold, corporate and bear. The whimsical nature of the brand is lost. In the graphic elements section of my brand board, I have these geometric shapes ready for me to re-purpose as needed. I plan to use the letters from my name in an abstract way so these forms can function as both plane shapes and letters. Be creative and have fun creating your graphic elements. Feel free to share your progress as you create these elements for feedback for myself and other students.
8. Conclusion: In this class, we created a brandboard for your freelance business. Along the way, we covered the practicality and application of the identity marks, discussed hierarchies and type in color, and wrapped up by creating graphic elements for your brand. Remember that branding is more than just creating a logo. It's about crafting a seed to be printed into the minds of clients and customers. Good brands are intentional. They consistently water their seeds and they have deep roots planted in the soils of our mind. With the help of your brand board, you are on the way to becoming a solid brand too. Congrats. You have made it to the very end of this course and now have your very own personalized brand board for your finance business. Share a screenshot of the template in the project gallery for some feedback and praise and thanks for following along.
Sharon Mathew, Designer
