Brand Development

Creating something unique and memorable

Creating brands is something I feel passionate about. Taking an idea that represents a product or business and giving it live is such a satisfying experience. Over the course of my career I have been fortunate to work on brands ranging from goat cheese to a plumbing service. Below I am going to walk you through the steps of how I develop a brand using a pasta company as an example.

Step 1: Sketching

Sketching is my favorite part of the process. It is where all of my exploration and testing every idea I can think of. I usually begin by grabbing my sketchbook and start drawing any idea that comes to my head. If it is going to be a text focused logo I will also open up Adobe Illustrator and start exploring with text to see how I can get the name to fit together.

Step 2: Refinement

During the refinement process I gather my favorite concepts and give them some organization. I like to take each idea and give it a brief description of my ideas for this concept. The logo is placed in both a full color and single color version. This helps me visualize the logo usage in multiple formats and helps decide how strong of a mark it is. A general color scheme will also be decided in this step, however this color scheme is not locked in at this point.

Step 3: Mock Up

After showing my sketches to the client I will then create a rough mock up of our favorite concepts. In this example, we went with the more classy logo but we wanted to also see it used playfully. The other concept we explored was the eccentric and illustrative approach. Generally, I do not use AI at any point in the brand creation process. The only point in which I will use AI is for a quick render of designs I have already created. AI is something I generally do not like or use, however I find it is a useful tool in this one specific step of the process. I will then take these mock up to the client where we will then discuss our favorite version to move forward toward the final brand. From here a brand guide and brand standards are then produced.

More Brand and Logo Examples