Strategic brand + lOGO DESIGN
Custom Branding Project
Your brand is the cornerstone of your entire company. It’s so much more than a logo, and it’s the single most important investment you cannot afford to overlook if you want your company to succeed. It’s about your story, and the feelings it evokes – about how your company solves a deeper problem for people. The visuals communicate that story, through color palettes, photos, illustrations – and the logo.
Creative workshop
Discovering your company “secret sauce” to get your product to stand out, and attract a cult following of loyal customers. This workshop goes through exercises together, where we discover what makes your company special.
Branding and vibe
Custom Logo Design and Branding Guidelines for the entire brand – the look and feel and soul for the company, colorpalettes, typography, photography styling, etc.
Tagline and messaging
Crafting the “big idea” for the company – what problem does it solve in the world and how to say it in a single, snappy sentence.
Strategic branding is much more than the logo design.
Working with Lilli was exactly what I needed as a small start-up, and in hindsight, I wish I had started with her sooner instead of spinning my wheels for months before that.
Mei-Ling, Higher Dama Consulting
OVERVIEW OF WHAT’S INCLUDED:
Branding
Creative Workshop
Branding workshop with a questionnaire to help you find the unique attributes of your business: your mission, capabilities, ideal client personas, target audience / marketplace positioning, and product differentiators. What will make you stand out in the marketplace, what sets you apart from the rest, who is it for, and why does it exist. This all guides the process, and tells us where you want to take your brand in the future.
Visual Research + Inspiration
Visual research of your competitors / other companies in the field. researching current design trends in the luxury products markets, fashion, artisanal food and beverage fields – finding inspiration for that will guide the discovery of your design. I’ll show inspiration images and moodboards, photos and colors to get your feedback on, which gives direction for our design, and also helps me understand what you like and dislike, and further clarifies the “why” of your brand.
This research phase sets the direction for the design work to come.
Custom Logo Design
This is the flagship piece of your visual identity. After completing research and establishing a visual direction with you, I’ll sketch and refine ideas until I have a few logo concepts to show you.
Your favorite solution will be selected and refined, new drafts presented, commented upon and the design gets finalized.
File Package and Brand Guide
The overall look and feel of the bigger brand universe gets built in tandem with the logo design. This includes the philosophy of the brand and what it means, the color palette, illustration and photo style guidelines, design examples such as a business card and social media post, icons and the like. Typography styles, typefaces, how to use and combine the color palettes, and how to use the logo are all outlined.
Your brand guidelines also has a cheat sheet that explains the file formats you’ll receive: vector vs. raster files, differences between file types (EPS, JPG, PNG, PDF), and the meaning of different color systems (CMYK, RGB, and Pantone). The guide will help you pick the right logo file whenever you need to use one.
First steps
INTRO CALL (Zoom)
We start here, we get to know each other, I learn about what you’re hoping to achieve with your company. Typically 45 minutes.
PROJECT SCOPE & AGREEMENT (online)
We get our project defined, budgeted, and you sign a contract and pay a deposit so we can begin our work together.
WORKSHOP MEETING (Zoom or in person)
This is an intensive meeting where we dive deeeeep into your company brain. We talk a lot, and think about the purpose and meaning of what’s special about you, your story, and the company you’re building. Everyone has a story, we’ll find yours. This lays the foundation for the branding work to come. Typical workshop goes over many things, among them:
SECRET SAUCE / Finding the unique attributes of your business: your mission, differentiators and competitive advantages, capabilities – the “what’s so special about you”
IDEAL CLIENTS / who your people are, what they care about, where you want to take your brand in the future. Customer persona guidebook to help work out who your person is and why should they care about your product.
ELEVATOR PITCH TOOLKIT / work through questions and exercises to find out your core mission statement
+ other exercises depending on the project.
HOMEWORK (yay!)
A few worksheets and exercises you get to work on on your own to show me, not just tell me, what’s inside your brain. Exercises include choosing descriptive mood words, gathering images that speak to you, and other guided inspiration gathering. This helps me understand what you mean when you say “elegant”, for example – for some it means sleek like an Apple Store, and to some it means ornate like a Victorian mansion, yet both can be described as “elegant”. Showing me pictures of things you like helps me understand what you actually mean. This is also helpful for teams to get on the same page on what the direction is for the company, beyond personal preferences.
Planning and strategy
EXERCISES
Creative strategy exercises we do together to refine the “big idea” for the brand. These will vary depending on the type of company yours is, and also choosing the best ways to work with you as a human. Some folks are more creative, some are not – some have put a lot of thought into the “why” for their company already, their purpose and mission, and others will need help digging it out.
COMPETITION + TARGET
It matters so much WHO you’re selling to, and why. Figuring out what problem your product solves, be it a practical one like “people need shampoo to clean their hair”, or one that goes slightly deeper, like “hair that is shiny and bouncy makes you attractive, and these scents in our product will make you feel like you’re on a tropical island vacation, even if for five minutes in the shower”, that sort of thing. So we need to figure out who the product is for (it’s not for everybody), how the price point, product specs, and other things align your product into the marketplace, who your competitors are, and what they do well and where they suck. Then we create an audience persona we can think about when doing any kind of marketing.
MESSAGING
Tagline and content creation – I’ll present the fruits of our labor, distilling the ideas into a cohesive, heart-string-tugging bit of creative copy, with explainers on why those words were chosen and how the audience might perceive it.
Design phase
MOODBOARD
This is where I present a moodboard for the project. This takes into consideration all the work done so far, and shows through visual examples, the overall direction the brand would go into. This makes sure we’re all in agreement on the vibe we’re going with. The moodboard will show other packaged goods, photos, illustrations representing a style and direction. Once approved, we proceed to the design.
CONCEPTS
This is where the true work begins! I will sketch ideas for your logo, and come up with typically 3 strong ideas for what the logo could be about. These will be rough pencil sketches of ideas. Once presented, one or a combination of two directions is picked for further refinement.
DRAFTS
At this phase we move from pencil sketches onto digital draft designs. At this phase we refine the icon of the logo, and start experimenting with typefaces and layout options. Usually showing 1-2 options, and one is picked for final direction.
REFINEMENT
Now it’s time to finesse the final logo. Experiment with tweaks to the typography, and continue refining the icon. Test out different layouts for the logo, horizontal, square, one-color, with and without a tagline etc. In this step we introduce color to the previously black-and-white drafts.
BRAND ELEMENTS
Once the logo is done, we expand the brand into color palettes, typography, icons, illustration style, photography style – your brand is everything the company is, so having guidelines and vision for all of it is important.
FINAL FILES & BRAND GUIDE
Guidelines for how to implement the brand into everything. Color values, fonts to use on the website, what the social posts could look like, rules on how to use the logo, this is all explained in the brand guide. You will also get a full set of logo files for any situation imaginable: for embroidering hats to social media profile images, you’ll have the right file for the right use (and the educational guidelines to know when to use what!)
CELEBRATE!
You’ve just made one of the best investments into your future.