Creating a Brand

This is the first part of my 4-part series taking your behind the scenes of my web design process. I’ve always loved a good“making-of” mini-documentary about any film or TV show I watch, so I figured I’d do the same and take your behind the curtain, if you will, as I work through a project.

 Every project is different and I take a lot of effort to tailor my services to your unique needs, so I’ve created a concept project for this little series so that I can share all of the nitty details with you as I go!

Defining the Brand with a Creative Brief

The very first thing I do, after booking in the project of course, is start to get to know my client, their business and their customers.

As soon as they’ve booked their spot in my production calendar I send over a Brand & Style Questionnaire, which includes the option to share a few websites they like and a Pinterest board with any images that speak to their brand. I don’t care if these are photos of cats (I love kitties too!), the idea is just to communicate the direction they want to go in.

I also send them an Ideal Client Questionnaire which helps me a get a better sense of who their clients are and what they’ll be looking for on the website. To me, a business website is just as much for the potential clients as it is for the company (if not more so!), so it’s super important to get a clear picture of who they are aiming their business at.

I pull all of this together to create a simple Creative Brief to act as a guide and touchpoint for us as we work through the website design process.

In this case, my fictional business is a Baby Sleep Trainer named Jessica Knight. She is based in Boston and offers digital workbooks and 1:1 video consultation to help tired new parents get their babies to sleep. Her ideal clients are new parents aged between 28-35 from the East Coast who have a young baby anywhere between 0-18 months old. They’ve tried a few other solutions without much success to help their baby sleep better and are ready to work with a professional to finally get some sleep.

Creating the Moodboard

Once I have the client’s questionnaires and their visual references, I get to work creating a moodboard.

I may pull a few images from the client’s Pinterest board or inspiration websites, but I like to use this as an opportunity to translate what they’ve shared about their business into the visuals that I think will best speak to their ideal clients.   

For Jessica’s brand, I pulled together a few references for photos to help guide the style of photography to be used on the site. The client might have liked the idea of more abstract images of baby’s feet or hands for this project, such as the one on the top right of the moodboard. However, when thinking about their ideal clients who would be looking for clear clues that this is the place to help with their baby’s sleep problems, it would seem like images like the one on the lower row of the baby yawning would be abetter fit.

I also like to include some ideas for potential fonts, colours, and textures or patterns that I think may work well for the brand. Here, the idea of a more handwritten, signature style, font for the logo was explored with two font options.

A moodboard may include a variety of visual directions and images, it is really just a tool to help us discuss the branding with visual references!

Designing the Logo

Now we have a clear idea of the business and who their ideal customer would be, I sketched out some ideas for a logo.

 From my rough sketches I develop the best design into a vector design to present to my clients. I use the One Logo solution for branding as it offers my clients a more tailored solution from the start which we can then evolve together to the final design.

For Jessica’s sleep training business, it was clear that she would be the centre of her branding and that her name should therefore be the focal point of her logo. Since she works with infants and centres her work around creating a calm, sleep inducing environment it felt natural to use a script font for her logo. I paired this with a sans-serif modern font for the tagline under her name to offer some contrast and speak to the structure of her sleep training methods.

I create all logo designs in black and white to start with to make sure that they work at their simplest form. After we’ve defined the brand colours, I can also create versions with these shades as well.

Filling out the Brand Identity

For Jessica’s branding I chose to work with cool colours to evoke a calm, sleep-inducing environment. Powder blue was an obvious choice for a baby brand, but I wanted to set her business apart by pairing it with a soft and darker purple and a dreamy teal. The opportunity for mixing and matching with this pallet is great, and the more vibrant colours would serve very well for emphasis on her product pages and blog posts.‍

For this project I also created two patterns to compliment her branding. This isn’t something I usually include but can create upon request when it will add that little something extra to the overall brand design and website.  

Lastly, I like to offer some photo styles in my Brand Style Guide to help establish the overall visual tone for the brand and identify the type of images to be used on the website. Sometimes these are pulled from the moodboard if we were close to the right style right away, but other times I’ll hunt down a whole new collection of images to represent the desired style. If appropriate for the brand, this could even include some illustrations or 3D graphics. 

All in all, creating the branding for a project like this is a really fun undertaking and a great way to not only define the visual style of the brand but also help set up the new website design with a super clear direction and aesthetic.

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