Branding is everything. While I am sure that whatever your business has to offer is amazing, very few customers will notice you without a unique brand. Finding the branding that best suits your business can be very tricky. Trust me, when I first begin a project with a client it is a lot of back and forth trying to meet a solution that both speaks to who they are and is also appealing to their clientele.
Initial Meeting with the Client
I always start the branding process by meeting with the clients to get to know their organization better. In order to create branding for a business, you must first have an understanding of the business. Is the organization a nonprofit? What is their mission statement? What goods and services will they offer? These are just a few questions that I ask when getting to know the brand that I will soon create branding for.
Before meeting the Knox County Community Artisans I was nervous because I had absolutely no knowledge when it came to woodworking. When I met with the group I gained a greater understanding of what they wished to accomplish with their nonprofit and I felt a lot more comfortable creating their branding. Had I not met with them, I never would have known that they hope to incorporate all different kinds of art into their shop, not just woodworking. If you visit their website, you will see that I stuck with woodworking throughout most of the project because it is their main focus, but that their main tagline is actually: Learn the arts. Use the arts. Enjoy the arts. I cannot take credit for that tagline though. This was just one of the many amazing pieces of information that I took from our meetings together. Meeting with the client is vital to successful branding.
Logos
After gaining an understanding of what the client desires, I begin with the logo. I always look at the first logo that I create for an organization and think that I hit gold on the very first attempt, but have never actually used the first design. Once I play around with design ideas, it is inevitable that I will create something even more aligned with the goals that the client has set. The minimum number of logo designs that I like to present to a client is 3, but prefer to show up with 5.
Multiple minds always work better than one, so I’m never offended when I present my designs and the client has changes for all of them. Even designing the logo for Marketable Moments, I did not go with my gut on which one to use. I asked my mom which one she preferred and then completely changed that design as well. The moral is, you have to be open to change when creating branding. You aren’t creating designs for yourself. The more people that your logo appeals to, the better.
When creating the logo for Knox County Community Artisans, I ended up combining a few of the examples that I had presented to the group. They envisioned the logo including a saw, so a saw is what they got!
While I have a Marketing degree, my program did not focus on the graphic design aspect of marketing. The saw on the Knox County Community Artisans’ logo was one of my first times using Adobe Illustrator and man was it an experience! I'm so grateful that I had challenged myself to create that design though, because both the clients and I ended up loving that logo. That experience even pushed me to take graphic design courses at California Institute of the Arts.
Branding Guide
The last major step to creating a company’s branding is to create the branding guide. The branding guide is the document that the branding creator uses to compile all of the branding pieces together. The branding guide is useful when an organization has multiple people working on marketing pieces to push out. The guide includes things such as the brand’s fonts, colors, and the voice that the organization wants to convey. Using the same colors and fonts across the board creates consistency and helps create brand recognition. Depending on what programs that you use to create your designs, you can plug your brand colors and fonts right into the program to create files that are ready to use at the touch of a button.
Branding is extremely important at large organizations like the one that I work for. United Way Worldwide creates a branding guide and then sends these standards out to the local United Ways so that local marketing professionals, like myself, can create marketing pieces that match the United Way brand. Large organizations want their image to be the same wherever you see it so that they maintain brand recognition. Even without the name of the organization or the logo on it, I can bet that you can guess which of the organizations that I work with that I created the image above for.
A great example of brand recognition is McDonalds. If you eat at a McDonalds in Galesburg or at a McDonalds along the highway on vacation, you are likely going to have similar experiences. This is thanks to branding.
Finding the perfect branding for an organization can be difficult, but taking your time and getting it right the first time around is totally worth it. While rebranding is a thing, you don’t want to do it too often because then people will never grow to recognize your brand. I find branding to be the most rewarding step in the marketing process. Watching a brand that I create come to life is so fulfilling.
Until next time,
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