Logo Design: How to Create a Unique & Memorable Wordmark

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] I remember when I was still picking what to study in college, I had no clue what graphic design was. I remember googling what topography meant before starting my first day, so I just jumped into it and hope that would work out. Nine years and many all nighters later, here we are. I think what I love the most about it is that we create stories. Stories are emotional and so are humans and that connection you make between a person and the brand is what design really is. Hey guys, I'm sure Khadija, but everybody calls me Dija. Welcome to my first Skillshare class. I'm a freelance graphic designer based in Cairo, Egypt. I've studied graphic design for five years and I've been working in the field for four years now. I love building brands from the ground up. I've worked on a variety of different things, from ice cream brands to restaurants, to bakeries, to retail and even finance, you name it. My most notable clients are Coca-Cola in which I designed their limited edition cans for. For today's class project, I want to focus on one aspect of branding and that is the wordmark. A wordmark is a font based logo focusing only on the brand name. But how do we make a unique? How do we go beyond the font? How do we make it memorable? This class is for people who are more or less well versed in Illustrator and know a thing or two about branding and are looking to refine their skills even further, but if you're a beginner, I would still highly recommend you take this class anyways, because there are so many different tips and tricks along the way that'll help you understand the process better. That's what you'll be learning in today's class. How to create a unique and memorable wordmark for a brand. 2. Class Overview + Project: For today's project, we are going to be looking at a fictional brand that I created for today. We're going over its creative brief and identifying major keywords, then looking at a curated mood board for the brand, and then choosing fonts together, and then manipulating those fonts on Illustrator to come up with a wordmark, and then we're going to be choosing a color palette for the wordmark and then adding some final touches to it to really elevate it to that professional level. At the end of the class, I'm going to be assigning you a class project to do on your own pace. I'm going to give you a brand new project to work on with a brand name and a brief and a mood board that's going to guide you along the way. I want you to create your own version of that wordmark for this new round based on what you learn in today's class. Without further ado. Let's jump right in. 3. Brand Name & Creative Brief: [MUSIC] The brand name I've picked out for today is called brush hour, a spin-off on rush hour. Let's get to know the brand a little bit better by looking at the brief starting with what the brand is about. Brush hour is essentially hair boutiques along that offers not just hair siding and moving services, but also a communal area for customers to have a social and memorable experience. Next, we'll look out the story behind the brand. Imagine with me this hair salon is owned by two women who grew up with different hair types and struggled to find a service that accentuated their hair and gave them confidence. Together they wanted to empower women through their hair and offer them a fun experience they wouldn't forget. This is the emotional aspect of the brand and it's crucial to have emotions to drive your brand because those are what you're going to be basing a lot of your design decisions on. [MUSIC] Next, it's important to learn about the customer that will be using the service, because you are creating a brand that will cater to them. The target audience is mostly women who are looking to come into their salon for a new bold look or to experiment or to simply accentuate and groom their current hair routine. It's a place that caters to all women and aims to empower them. Last but not least, the experience of the brand, what it offers beyond the logo, beyond the aesthetics, and the services. Nowadays, a brand best functions by how it feels, not just by how it looks. Think of it as not just a hair salon, but as a warm and inviting place where women can come together and have a memorable and joyful experience and form a community. They can come talk about their lives, make new friends, or enjoy a good cup of coffee. This is important to take into account when you're creating a wordmark because you need to have a full 360 understanding of the brand in order to individualize that into a unique wordmark. This brand story and creative we've outlined, let's highlight some words that typically stand out a narrow down our thought process even further. Let's start with women. Confidence, fun, old, warm, joyful, experience, and empower. These keywords will help guide us when curating a moodboard, choosing our funs, manipulating them, and choosing our color palette. Whether a brief brand name and major keywords locked in and understood, we're ready to move on to the moodboard. 4. Moodboard: [MUSIC] For the mood board, I prepared it beforehand. Today we're just going to be brushing over it identifying some major things in the references, but I will be uploading new classes on mood boards specifically because I think they're such a crucial step in the design process. Let's have a look. I've got my mood board setup here in Adobe CC Illustrator and I usually do my mood boards in squares, three-by-three squares. I just find that it's much neater and less cluttery but it does give me enough room to diversify my references. I have a couple of things here that I want to shed light on. First of all, I have a tentative color palette here on the right side and this is not the exact color palette we will be using later on, but I do like to have a guide of colors from the very start so I can know what mood I'm going for eventually so I'm not lost later on when it comes to picking colors because I already have a guide that's going to keep me on track. Then I like to divide my references into two categories. One is typography, and two as photography. Photography can have subsections within it. It depends on the brand that I'm working for but usually I like to have photography that has humans or models because if the brand has a human aspect to it or a certain customer or a certain vibe that I'm going for, I do want to really show that in the mood board through human photography and a certain art direction way. Then the other type of photography that I have is what I like to call lifestyle or miscellaneous. It's more abstract, but it's very telling of the brand. You have something like the megaphone up here and it doesn't really have anything to do with a hair salon at first glance, but it is very telling of the keywords that we were discussing earlier of loud and fun and bold and confident. This is something that I was really drawn to a megaphone says, that women speak up and they're really confident in themselves. I really like the artistic direction in it where it has a little colorful background and a pink megaphone and even the green painted nails. It's just screaming vibes that I want to include in the brand. Then you have something like the hand gloves. Again, not at first glance, something to do with the hair salon, but this is where we're diving deeper, so when I saw this image, it reminded me of the gloves a hair technician would wear when they're about to dye your hair. I really liked that there are different positions for the gloves and different colors and it's really reflecting the different types of women who come in. If it's a career woman or a stay at home woman, this place is inclusive of all types of women who come in same place. These are different tips and tricks of how to include different types of photography that's not really in your face hair salon, so I didn't include photos of someone's hair being blown out, or brushed, or conditioned, I really want to dive deeper into what the brand really means and how it feels. This is important because when you're designing a brand identity later on, you want to have enough material to create depth and dimension to the brand and not just focus purely on what the brand does. Then I want to look at the typography here, so I'm just going to zoom in and I have these four different references. The one on the right is for the typography I may be imagining for the brand later on. But these three main references are my inspiration for what I imagine the wordmark to be. I'm going to start with the one in the middle. I was really drawn by this typeface for multiple reasons. The first one is that it's a very nice display typeface that has very bold features, which again, reflects one of our keywords, but it also has certain softness to it, where the letters curve into themselves into semi circles here in the Y, for example, and here in the E. But still it is very structured, so it's not all curvy and wobbly and out of place, it still has very sharp endings and sits on a very clear and distinctive baseline. I really like the contrast of the curviness and the softness and femininity with the sharpness and the contrast and the confidence in it, so that's the aspect that I'm going for. Another thing that I really like is how tight everything is canned and tracked together and that's what makes it very visually pleasing. It is very distinctive in that sense. Then a third reason I especially like this is the use of the colors here. I know this is for a later stage, but it is important to note that if I had seen this reference, for example, in black on an electric blue background, it may have been too aggressive for me and I think it wouldn't have suited this brand. But I like the softness of combining this orange and this pink which are close together in the color wheel and that makes it a lot softer, so when you put something this bold on a soft color palette, that's the balance that you're looking for. I'm going to scroll down and this is the other reference that I have, which is a lot different than the first one. This is a serve based typeface. I really like the detail of the ligature from the S to the I, reminds me of a hair strand in a way. I really want to try to incorporate something like that into our wordmark using the same characteristics as this somehow. We're just picking some different ideas from references here. We're not copying anything, we're just seeing, drawing inspiration from different references, and then we're going to combine them together into a very original outcome. Then the third references is this cheers typeface. Same reason as the first one, I like the boldness of it and the curvatures, but still very sharp endings, for example, here in the H. But what really drew me to it is the S. It reminded me of a hair lock that's being freshly cut, it curves back into itself. It's those little minute details that add so much character and dimension to the wordmark. It's not like you're literally drawing a lock onto a wordmark. It's not illustrative. It's more of the little details that you can add to the letters to make it have a lot of character really. On a final note, if I zoom out, you'll see that most of the references that I have, have the same color palette feel going on. You don't want to choose references that are so far off in their color palettes because that will really confuse you in the design process itself. I like to choose references that have nearly the same color palettes, even here, if it's a little bit blue, it does have the orange and the yellow to complement everything else and really tie in together. Sometimes this is a little trick I do, if I click on this reference, you'll see that it was originally black, but I really liked the detail here and I wanted to include it in my mood board, so all I did was layer on a pink background over it and using the transparency, I overlaid it. Now it's just a pink typeface to really tie in with everything together. The color palette here is just literally color picked from the references here. It's a very fast rough way of drafting a color palette, nothing final or anything. When I'm already seeing this color palette, I can imagine already something bold and feminine and loud and fun, and already we're cooperating so many of the keywords we derived earlier from the mood board phase alone. That's it. What we're going to do now is that we're going to take all of these insights and we're going to go look for appropriate fonts on certain websites that I personally use that help me a lot when I'm designing a wordmark. That's it. Let's get to it. 5. Choosing Fonts: If you are like me and you didn't have any access to resource websites like and Envato Elements or Creative Market or any resource website that has a subscription-based model to download fonts, I have another way that I actually want to show you and in my experience, I have found it very effective. You do want to go to Typeverything. This is a beautiful aesthetically pleasing website; when you first open it, you have all of these beautiful display typefaces in a very large format, and this website, in general, supports all of the beyond typeface designers. Another website is called, YouWorkForThem; YouWorkForThem also has tons of resources from fonts, graphic photos and videos. It's such a great website to look at because you can see all the fonts in action, and that already inspires a lot of your usage for the fonts, and I really like that aspect. It's not just a font. Another websites is a type foundry called the VJ Type. VJ stands for Violaine and Jeremy, they're two typeface designers in France, and I absolutely love the typefaces that they keep getting out occasionally. Another website is actually Behance. If I go to the search bar type display typeface, I'm going to get a lot of options, and I also like seeing them in action here. This is a great place to find different typefaces, because they also have different typefaces from other websites, so it redirects you to that. It's a nice collective of so many different typefaces that you wouldn't necessarily know where to look for. Another website is brandsemut.com. You can also filter the font that you're looking for here by Display or Sans Serif, Script or Serif,and you can also press "All Fonts," and I'll just get you so many beautiful fonts that have those beautiful ligatures that you can be inspired by and so on so forth. These are typically the websites that I usually gravitate to when I'm designing a wordmark. There are tons of other websites, if you have a library of your own fonts, be my guest, but this is just my personal way of approaching it and I have found it has worked so many times in the past. For this project, I'm going to go on these websites and look for appropriate fonts for our brand today, and I'm going to show you how I do that. For example, in Typeverything, if I like Sisteron for example, this typeface, I'm going to go here and it lets you type your brand name that you want and I'm going to write brush hour. Say I like this for example, what I'm going to do now is I'm actually going to screenshot this. The reason we're taking screenshots is because we want to image trace them later on Illustrator, and that's not to say that we're copying the font, we're just using it as the skeleton of our wordmark. Then we're going to build on it, we're going to modify, we're going to change things, we're going to play around with the thicknesses, we're going to add elements or remove elements. By doing so, you're creating your own version of that font into a wordmark. I'm also going to try it in lowercase letters. Let's move on to VJ type for example, I love this font, Dahlia. I'm just going to go down and write brush hour. I absolutely love this detail on the B, this very smooth wavy line reminds me of a hair strand in a way, I actually would love to use that somehow. If you scroll down, there are more weights to the font in different condensed styles. I like the boldness of this one. I'm going to go to YouWorkForThem, and I'm also going to write display and it's going to get me a lot of different display fonts. It also lets you test out the word so you can see what it looks like. At this point, I'm going to keep looking for different fonts across all of these websites. What I'm looking for, according to our moodboard, is something that has some ideal characteristic to it that it represents waviness or hair strands or that slow and central movement in the characters but also something very old. If I couldn't find something that's bold and had that characteristic, I might just combine both of them later on but this is what I'm looking for right now. I'm going to spend as much time as I can, gathering all these fonts, we're going to filter them out and narrow them down in the end. Guys, this is my setup in illustrator, I just dropped all the screenshots that I took from looking for fonts, and I have my trusty moodboard here on the side just to keep me on track so it can always go back to the references and remember why and what I'm envisioning for the brand. I know it looks a bit crazy right now, but we're going to filter out some of the fonts that don't have as much potential as the others. From here, you are not lost, you have exactly what you're looking for, you have your references, you've narrowed down your fonts into certain characteristics of categories that you like, you have them laid out in a way that's clear to you. Now, we just have to experiment and have fun with it, and have different versions flying around the page everywhere until we can really narrow it down and start refining what we love the most. Let's start playing. 6. Manipulating Fonts: I've added two more weights to this font category over here, the bold one and uppercase over here and the semi bold weights over here, I just wanted to have enough variations of the weights so I can play around with it and eventually see which one I like the most. What we're going to do now is that we're going to actually image-trace the fonts that we like. The way we do this, I always take a copy of everything. You'll see that quite a bit in my working space. I'm just going to zoom in here so we can see everything properly. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go to Image Trace. When I click on it, this is what's going to happen. But we may have lost some of the elements that are too refined in the word more because Image Trace is very quick and rough. This is a tip that I learned and it really made a huge difference. After you press Image Trace, you're going to go to this window up here, it's the image trace panel, you're going to click on it. Then you're going to go to Advanced then you have your a ton of options. What I'm going to do is there is no specific formula here, I just like to play around with the values until I get something that works for me really. I like that, pretty much looks good. It's a good start to start with. Eventually in the end we're just going to clean up all the lines, all the tangents, we're going to make sure everything looks great, but this is the start, this is our skeleton, basically what we're working with. I'm just going go ahead and click "Ignore White" and then I'm going to press "Expand". As you can see, it removed all the white for me. There it is. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to ungroup, and just group hour and brush so I can move them around easily. At first glance, I think because the name is a bit too long, I'm not really comfortable with this horizontal setup. The first thing that is going to my mind is to put it under each other. I would always suggest to zoom out when you're working and then zoom in again, because sometimes when you're too close up and really nitpicking and refining a letter, you forget to see the overall word and what it looks like. This is important to note. Then I'm thinking somehow I could connect the B with the H together using that curve from the B going down to the H. It can be the bar of the H. We can remove this and it can just be the line coming from the B and it can even go to the O and then over to the R. This is where I'm incorporating the aspects that I love about this. O here right here and the ligature here for it to make sense. What I'm trying here is I think the font might be a little bit too condensed even if this is the regular version. I think I'm just going to tweak it a little bit without distorting letters and just make it a bit more compact in that sense. I have two versions here, one that's aligned to the right, because I feel like when I attach the B to the H, I'm going to have a nice boxed logo in the end as opposed to here where have I connect to the B to the H, there will be awkward wide space between the R and the H. An important note when you're working on a wordmark is always work in black and white first. When you work in black and white, you can see the essence of the logo without the distraction of the color. If it works in black and white, it will work on any color. That's always an important tip. Let's just start with this version over here. Again, I'm going to copy it and just keep copying everything so I can go back to previous steps if I want to. The first thing I want to work with here is doing the line from the B to the H to the O to the U. It sounds like a song but that's what I want to have. The concept in my head is basically when you brush someone's hair, you usually start from the top and then go all the way to the bottom. I really want to incorporate that movement here. I'm going to go to Brush or alternatively, you can just press "B" as a shortcut. I'm just going to roughly draw this right now so I can see what it will look like. Then I'm going to go to my Pen Tool. I'm just going to Press "P". I want to do this in a different color, just so I can see what I'm doing really. I'm going to go for this lime green. The curvature here is a little bit wonky. I'm going to go to Smooth Tool and that just smooths out your curves and your lines so much better until you get something you're happy with. What I want to do now is I'm going to isolate the H, then I want to actually delete this middle bar here. I'm going to select my Eraser Tool, this is either from here, from the bar or "Shift E". It's a little bit big right now. I'm just going to make it smaller. I'm just going to go straight for it and just erase this part. I have to fix the lines and the tangents here. Go here, in that Anchor Tool and just Delete Anchor Point Tool, or you can just press the minus sign on keyboard. I'm going to delete all these anchor points that are making it a bit wonky. Our black strand will start from here. We need some curve up this part so it looks like it literally cut through the B and then down to the H and, the O, and the U. We're going to take our direct selection from B and then curve this part. We're going to go back to the B right now because this word is a bit out of work and I'm going to hold one of these anchor points down. Now I'm going to play around with the thicknesses of the strokes. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go to width tool, right here, or you can press Shift and W. You want to go to the anchor point itself and you'll find a plus sign on it. If you click on it, it's going to increase the width of the stroke, and if you push it back down, it's going to make it really thin, and you can do this in any anchor points. You can have different thicknesses and thinnesses all throughout. I think I like the B with more of a straight ending, so I'm just going to add that myself here. I started here with the thick part of the stroke and now I want to thin it out in this part. What I'm going to do, again, is go to my width tool, and I'm going to find the anchor points here, which I'm going to make quite thin. You do need to keep in mind that the thinnesses all need to be consistent. This is the thinnest part of all the other letters that we're not really playing around with. This needs to match that. This, for example, would be too thin in comparison to the H. I need to make sure that this area is as thin as the H. I'm going to isolate the U and I want to delete the top part. Now I'm going to adjust the way that connects to the stroke. Now I just want to adjust the B a little bit, again, after zooming out and looking at a little bit, I thought it could use a little bit more work. No. I liked one of the S's from the previous ones here. Let's try [inaudible] with the uppercase letters. I really like the S here. It's giving me that ending that I liked. Maybe I can play around with this part of it though, and I also like the S here as well. Maybe I can take both of them and try them out, and how we're going to make them look a part of the logo is that we're going to adjust all the sizes, and the thicknesses, and width of the letters to be pretty much identical and the same. It's going to measure all together. Again, we're going to copy what we have right now , paste our S's. It's definitely thicker than the rest of the letters, but I actually quite like the thickness. I'm thinking that I should thicken the rest of letters to compliment the thickness of the S because I do like the idea of a thick typeface like we had In our mood board. Well, let's just see what the other S looks like for now. This is also really fake. It needs to be much thinner, almost probably less consistency. We'll see. Let me just work on both of them and we can decide in the end. I have adjusted the thicknesses everywhere. I think looking at them both, I quite like the one on the right, just because I feel like the roundness of the S goes with the rest of the letters, and the ending here. But this is also a nice touch, I just might leave this a tad thicker. It's a really nice S I just think it might look a bit too different than the rest of the letters and I want to keep that consistent all throughout. I think I'm going to go with this one, and I'm just going to keep refining, you guys. This is just a process about how you can make it look better, how can you refine everything even further? I'm just going to keep doing that until I'm happy with the final outcome. Now I'm going to fix the smoothness here, so you see how it comes a bit [inaudible] here. I just one to delete that. You see, I made this area a bit smoother because it was a bit edgy. All those little details are really making the entire line and curve of hair that we want really be smoother. That's it, guys. I just kept refining more and more and trying to adjust all the thicknesses and all the letters so they can all be harmonious and balanced, and I just made sure everything looked very smooth. It's all about zooming out and zooming back in again, just to rely on your eye to see where the balances need to be fixed. Yeah, that's it. We're ready to move on and add some life and color into it and see what happens. 7. Picking a Color Palette: [MUSIC] I've got my trusty mood board here on the left, and that's just going to act as my guide for picking colors. What we're going to do now is just we're going to pick some shades right off the mood board and then keep interchanging them and playing around with them until we find a color combo that we really like. [MUSIC] Top two color palettes and combos that I really like is this one here on the right and this one here on the left. I really like the combination of the red and the soft warm pink. They really bring out the best monochromatic features in each other while still providing a lot of contrast. What I especially like in this version over here is the use of a really saturated color like the burned deep orange with the very desaturated lilac, and I think that really provides a really nice contrast between both colors. Psychologically, orange is this very empowering, fun, loud, bold color, and the lilac is a very giving feminine and caring vibe. I really like combining those two together. I think that they really reflect the brand keywords very well, and I do think that it looks a little bit different than what you usually normally see in terms of color palettes for hair salons. I like the novelty in that area too. [MUSIC] That's it, guys. I think I'm going to go ahead with this color palette here. Let's just add some final touches to it that's just going to really bring it up a notch and see what it looks like. [MUSIC] 8. Final Touches: For the final touches, I just want to add some slogan and descriptor that wraps around the wordmark and a really nice structure that reflects all the keywords as well. That's just going to envelope it in a really nice way. I'm going to go ahead and see how I'm going to do that. For the descriptor we have here hair salon just to invite people on the idea of what the brand is about. Also for the slogan, I just thought of your time starts now because I wanted to utilize the word hour in our brand name and mirror that in this slogan by saying ''Your time starts now at Brush Hour'' and it's basically your time to become whoever you want to be. You can embrace your alter ego at this hair salon. You can go maintain your current self. It just makes you embrace whoever you want to be in that time we give for yourself. That's the idea behind it. Typographically, I'm not sure about this hierarchy here. Everything looks a bit flat, and I want to add a little personality to it, a little flair like we did in the wordmark. This would be fine if it's a corporate or real estate logo maybe. But for a really nice and fun hair salon, I think we can add a little bit more personality. Guys, so this is what I started with on the left side and then this is what I ended with. What I did was basically put hair salon on a circle and I typed it on a path. Then I actually added here a timestamp of established 2021, to fill in the white space here. But also I chose a handwritten font to pay tribute to the fact that this hair salon was founded by two women and they were friends and it stemmed from a very personal story. I did want to add just a little bit of a personal touch by including hand-written fonts in there somewhere. I think it just makes it a little bit authentic, like a signature of some on the logo, and it just makes it that much more special. Then the logo, I just kept it as it is because I wanted it to be legible as much as possible and to balance out the arch on the top with a nice straight baseline slogan at the bottom. That's it. I think now it looks like it's complete. It's stacked. It looks like a complete logo with a descriptor and everything. I really like the outcome, you guys. That's it, guys. I just prepared a short brand video for you to see how this wordmark would look in a real-life launch video. How it would look animating it with photography, with video, with music. I think that all of these elements combined together can really show the meaning and the work that went behind a wordmark. I just wanted to give you a little preview of that. 9. What's Next: Your Turn: I hope that was helpful, easy to follow and interesting and that you like the outcome in the end, hopefully. Now it's your turn. I'm going to be walking you through this new brand with a brand name and a brief and a moodboard, and you just follow the steps that I showed you in today's class. I want you to share your work in the Gallery with me. I would love to see it. I would love to give you some feedback if you like. Without further ado, let's have a look. The branding for your task is called Benny and Joon named after the movie where Johnny Depp is ironing grilled cheese sandwiches. Just like the previous task, I will walk you through the brief I created for you. Starting with the brand, what it is, you guessed it a gourmet grilled cheese truck, that sources freshly baked bread and a variety of imported cheese to create the highest quality grilled cheese sandwiches on the market. Now the story behind the brand, much like the Inca's justice, founded by two friends who struggled to find feel-good, homemade, on-the-go food that was typical junk food. They personified themselves as Benny and Joon. Together, they brought their home-made recipes that they mastered at home onto the streets. Now to understand their customers better, they put themselves in their shoes and found two types of people. One, the ones who finish a night out and want to feel-good snack at the end of the night on the go and easy to grab, and two the ones who don't have time in the morning to make breakfast on the way to work and just want to grab a quick meal. The experience in the ground is one that aims to engage all your senses. Having a food truck means that you get to see the process in front of you like an open kitchen. Having the customers be a part of the experience makes them more inclusive of the end product they will receive the end and enjoy them much more. While they wait for their sandwiches, we want customers to be a part of a curated playlist for the ground, playing out loud, engaging their senses, and making it an overall enjoyable experience. Now that you have a good overview of the ground, I want to highlight some major keywords that will help you lock in essence of the brand. Let's start with feel-good, homemade on-the-go, cheesy, gooey, inclusive, enjoyable, gourmet, and quality. These keywords will help you have a good visual of what to look for when you're looking for fonts and have a general vision for the brand. The brand slogan in the scripture that I want you to include when creating the wordmark is feel-good food and establish 2021. This will add even more character and authenticity to the brand. As a recap, this is everything that you need to know about the brand. Feel free to take a screenshot at this point, but I will have this all written down in the description for your reference. Now, moving on to the moodboard. This is what you're going to be working with for Benny and Joon, and I wanted to include multiple references here that can have potentially different directions because I don't want to skew you to something specific. You really want to put your creative input on this yourself, but I do want to talk a little bit about the topography references here. First off, are these two references and they're emulating the same behavior of the melted cheese in the sense that they have like these droopy elements and they're very thick, but also they have these thin contrasting lines that connect with the letters to represent or reflect the cheese strings as they pull apart. They thin out in the middle and then they go back to being really thick pieces at the end, so that's something that you really want to play with and I think it suits the brand really nicely. As well here, you can see the dots and the letters are all really connected and it keeps the wordmark, just one wordmark as a whole, and it really reflects the same behavior as this photograph over here. Then you have something like this reference here and the one on the top, and that plays into the gourmet and the quality aspect of the brand more where it's just a bit more refined, it has a personal touch to it, but still, you can add a little bit of character of the cheese aspect melting through the letters as well as here. Then this reference here, as well I like the different hierarchy between The and Capri. You can play around with The and, and Benny and Joon and just make it a bit visually interesting, where you want some words to stand out than others. Then you have something like the badge over here. This is just an idea where if you want to collapse the wordmark into a monogram or an icon or something like that can work on smaller spaces, this is something that would suit the whole vibe of a food truck, and it can be printed on stickers on the packaging of the grilled cheese sandwiches and think how the brand can travel in that way, and the way the wordmark would serve the brand best. Overall, the color palette here on the right-hand side reflect the toastiness and buttery and hot and warm and cozy, gooey feeling of the brand, and that's exactly what we want to emulate and have resonate throughout the brand. So you can play around here with the black or the orange or a warm yellow or a buttery neutral cream color. That's it, you guys. Good luck, and I can't wait to see your wordmarks and go crazy. 10. Recap in 10 Tips: Just to refresh your mind and recap everything we've covered, I want to conclude this class with 10 quick tips. Number 1 is understand your brief. Read it several times, understand what the brand does, for whom it is, and where it wants to be. Number 2 is to identify your keywords by narrowing down major insights from the brief. Number 3 is to develop a design concept. You want to create a story from the brief you read and see how that can be translated visually. With your concept and lines, you'll want to start training your eyes by looking at a lot of references and images to build a mood board and a visual guide in your head. Next up, you'll want to invest in fonts. Invest in time for searching for the right fonts and try to imagine which ones will have the most potential to translate your concept based on your keywords and mood board. Then you'll want to narrow down your font choices so you can spend your time wisely crafting on a specific option rather than multiple directions. Then you want to dedicate time manipulating, modifying, and crafting. You can even sketch on paper first if you want, to quickly visualize how you want your to work to look like. Then you can apply that on Illustrator. Number 8, you're not done yet, refine, refine, refine and keep refining. Take a break, sleep on it and go back and start observing what areas need more balance or visual attention and refine those. Number 9 is to color with intention, pick colors that reflect your keywords and that are visually legible and that add meaning to the brand. The last step is to sprinkle the garnish. If you're wordmark has a slogan or descriptor, think about how to structure those around the wordmark in a way that compliments it and not just exist with it. A bonus step is to activate your wordmark. It's like building, designing, and manufacturing core. If you'd want eventually turn on the ignition, it will never go. Activate your wordmark and tell its story by engaging your photography, video, music, copywriting, and motion graphics. That's it folks. You can basically apply this method on any wordmark you approach later on, and remember that each brand is different, so tailor this process accordingly. 11. Thank You: Thank you so much guys. I really enjoyed making this class for you. I hope you found it helpful. I will be uploading new classes on aspects of branding. If you're looking to refine your skills or you just want to learn about the process in general, I am here for you. That's it. I'll see you next time. [MUSIC]