Process: Brand Identity

Process: Brand identity

1/Discovery

Interview

What?

This is where we gather an understanding of the personality, history and goals of your new or existing brand. It’s basically us asking you a lot of questions and listening to your story.

Why?

Here, we get to the bottom of why you’re choosing to create or redesign this brand. If you’re a startup, what’s driving you to start this venture? Rebranding? What’s not working for you right now?

Who?

An effective visual ID not only identifies you, it also resonates with your audience and attracts new people to your community. Getting to know those people informs many of our design decisions.

research

After we’ve had our launch interview, we get going on some secondary research to learn more about your industry. We gather details on your existing or potential peers. This helps us to see the landscape where your visual brand will exist. It helps to prevent any overlap and, most importantly, reveals where you can differentiate among your closest competitors.

outcomes

Creative Brief

Once we’ve collected enough information to create a clear picture we take an inventory of what we know. The result is a one page creative brief. This is a document to confirm that we’re on the right track. We’ll look at this together so that you can weigh in on whether you think it’s an accurate reflection of your brand and your project.

This is also a great tool to use during the process. We refer back to it occasionally while we sketch out our design decisions to make sure we’re on track. Often we revisit it before our initial presentation of suggestions as a way of fortifying our design decisions.

2/Sketching

This part of the process happens mainly in our office…or at home…or in the grocery line. Here is a simple description of how it works:

Talking it out

We usually start by dedicating a morning to collecting our thoughts about what we’ve learned. We’ll talk in detail about the kind of visual brand we see emerging and which design strategies feel promising.

flat concepts

In the Lakuna Design office we’ve developed something called Flat Concepting. It’s where we produce a large volume of ideas in rapid succession without stopping to reflect or criticize. We sketch on paper and virtually. This is a great way to get the weaker ideas out of the way and to invite happy accidents and avoid self-consciousness.

Once we have exhausted the Flat Concepting process, we take a look at the landscape and pull out the strongest ideas for development.

3/Development

Brand worthy development

At this point we take the best of the best (1 to 3) and fine tune them. We check for balance, legibility, and stability. Then we begin to apply the ideas to a series of applications specific to your business. For example, if you are a brewery, we see how the identity performs on beer glasses, coasters, banners, shirts, hoodies, and more. We make adjustments where needed and then we begin building our presentation.

Outcomes

Multi-page presentation outlining our design suggestions. We don’t usually present more than three and most times it’s two. Our thorough preparation allows us to narrow down potential choices to the most effective.

These presentations are comprehensive. We include a description of our thinking behind each idea. We also include a glimpse of some of the supportive styles that would accompany a given suggestion, along with a series of mock applications like merchandise, promotion, signage, etc.

Below are three sample presentation pages from a recent Brand Identity project:

4/Finalization

Review

After you have seen our initial presentation, the process will move in either of two directions. You may see a clear winner and we will jump right to the Collection phase. If not, we will review each suggestion in detail to get a clear picture of your impressions. After that, using the building blocks of this first round we will agree on a plan to finalize the identity. A second round presentation will happen to review these edits and the identity will be finalized. Our goal is to land on a mark that you will be proud to use as your identity and we will feel confident that it is going to work effectively for you in every application.

Collection

The Collection phase involves us gathering all of the styles of your new identity system and organizing them in a digital folder. Included is a simple visual identity standards document that will record your family of styles, your palette, and suggested supportive typography styles. We deliver this and review your identity system with you to make sure you have a clear understanding of what is in your toolbox. We go over best practices for any and all of your immediate usage needs. For example, gotta get those trucks wrapped asap? We’ll let you know which file and style formats are best suited for that application.

5/Follow through

We believe strongly in the collaborative process. We’re here to become an extension of your team and guide not only the brand identity design process but also to manage and develop your visual brand. We frequently stay on in a number of ways and are always happy to figure what the best fit would be for your company. We can help with a variety of design and strategy support including:

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Print & Collateral Design
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Signage
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Copy writing
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Website Design
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Visual Brand Strategy
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exhibit/interior design
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Point of Sale Design
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Ready to create your best Brand Identity?

Let's get started on your project!