Developing the Visual Brand

Developing the Visual Brand

In Logo Design by Corrie Oberdin       Leave a Comment      2

You’re developing a brand, and you’ve done your homework. The right questions have been asked (and answered!) and your branding team is ready to start developing your visual look and feel (and if you don’t know the right questions to ask, drop everything and read our earlier post on branding from scratch).

But what does that visual development look like? In order to show you what developing a visual brand looks like, we’ll take you the through our development process, using the logo & brand identity guidelines for Matco, Inc.

Before the pen hits the paper, we walk the client through a discussion on the needs of the look and feel. This can incorporate many of the branding considerations we discussed in the branding from scratch post. We discuss the desired look and feel of the identity: should it be whimsical, clean, masculine? What descriptive words should come to mind when thinking about the brand and viewing the logo? Then, we research industry visuals with an eye to what the competition is doing, what trends are popular in the industry now, and how the competition’s look has developed from the past. Only then do we sit down and start getting our visual ideas on paper.

Once we’ve sketched out a few ideas and made notes, we select the strongest visual designs and transfer selected sketches to the computer for more development.

This stage clearly leads to a variety of different logos to choose from, so we conduct an internal review of logo drafts. The design team discusses our options, and selects the strongest logo drafts to carry through to development.

Our designers then conduct a detailed revision of several different logo options, and create supporting brand documentation for each logo. Identity guidelines & documentation can include fonts, colors and appropriate logo & name display options. We meet with the client, and discuss the different variations with them.

Once the final designs are done, the client selects the final logo. Once that final logo has been selected, we make any final revisions needed.

When all is said and done, our clients are presented with a thoughtful brand identity, complete with guidelines designed to help their marketing teams present their brand in a consistent manner.