Brainstorming Your Brand — A Step by Step Guide.
Created by eGuide’s Digital Manager and Owner of Neise Designs, Erin Neisewander
What goes into developing a brand?
From the initial “brandstorm” meeting to choosing colors, fonts and eventually creating the logo and supporting brand elements there are many important steps that will put you in the right direction on your journey to developing the right brand for each individual client.
Step One
The “Brandstorm” aka the meeting to discuss wants and needs:
When we first start any new brand we always schedule a meeting with the new client to get to know them a bit better. This helps us to “get into their shoes” and really learn what they want their brands to represent, and how they want it to be perceived by their clientele.
Step 2
Questions to ask in a Brandstorm meeting:
What is your story? This could be your goals for the company and some basic information about the company background.
What does your company offer and how do you differ from your competitors? This is a great question to help determine target audience
If they have current branding and are making “the big change”, make sure to ask what they like and dislike about their current branding, and why it isn’t working for them anymore.
What is your Brand Vision? Getting pinterest boards from clients is always a great help, some clients are very honed in on a style while others are a bit more open to new ideas. If they haven't explored pinterest and made a “Dream branding board '' to encourage them to do so, it may really help in the process and it helps us understand what they are looking for.
What type of fonts do you like? Serif, Sans Serif, Script, etc
Do you have any certain colors that you want to use or any that you want to avoid?
What best describes your design style? Clean, Classic, Minimalist, Artistic, Natural, Geometric etc.
Step 3
After the brandstorming meeting we move into the moodboard phase, this could be using images from their pinterest boards or collecting images that resonate with what we talked about in the meeting. This includes color swatches as well.
Step 4
Now it’s time to take to the sketch book or computer to start playing with what we've learned from the client.
Will their brand be icon and text based or will they just be using typography alone? Don’t be afraid to play with TONS of different fonts and icons/imagery to bring the logo to life.
We always start a logo in black and white because your logo should always be able to work as one color as well as full color.
Step 5
Once we have a logo designed in black and white we then bring in color that we have chosen from the color palette that we’ve have created. Try to stick to 3-5 colors for your color palette (you don’t have to use them all in the logo itself either, we usually don’t), using too many more can become overwhelming and your branding can become lost in a sea of colors that don’t have any rhyme or reason behind them.
You can have a secondary and tertiary color palette if you want but just be cognizant that they harmonize with your main color palette, maybe just using different tones or shades of your main colors.
Once everything is done it’s time for the client to review!
There is so much more behind the scenes that goes into developing a brand but these are some of the main highlights that we go over with all the clients here at eGuide. We know your brand is important to you and it’s important to us as well!
Making sure you get in front of your target audience and your business pointed in the right direction is our goal and we can’t wait to help you get started.
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