Creating a brand or creating a logo for your business can be one of most confusing times for small-size to medium-size business owners. Logos are usually rushed or slapped together in the beginning of the business venture. Business owners rush out and spent thousands on printed material, without feedback, is that wrong? Nothing is wrong with it per say but does it help your business get more customers?
This happens because your business lacks a cohesive narrative or a marketing narrative.
Ask yourself what does your brand or logo mean to customers? Then ask customers. Don’t correct customers, it means customers didn’t have the same take away from your brand or logo, that you original thought you had about it.
As a service, I help business owners create a brand and a logo so their business and brand signal value or mean something to customers. So this our framework for taking customers through the process and you can do it yourself if you want to. We are not saying this the end all and be all process for creating a brand or a logo but this what worked for me & makes my clients happy.
How we create branding or logos
What does it take to develop a good brand & logo? Feedback, Critique, Creativity, Experience, and Iteration. Here’s a basic workflow or journey I walk all products, business, or services through, so if you want to develop a brand on your own just follow these steps.
- Create sketches and a collage of images that appeal to customers.
- Create a Brand Guidelines Document
- Contract a graphic artist
- Get the results back and review it from top to bottom with your feedback.
- Take that feedback, contract the same artist again.
- now use this logo, brand, colors, fonts and give it to a UI/UX designer or graphic designer. Get the brand/logo/prototype back, review it again, get feedback from customers write it down and past it back to UI/UX designer to fix the design again. (ireate with customers as much as possible if the budget allows it)
- Finally Implement the design or deploy your material.
Does it work? Yes, I believe it does. We can move from abstract ideas and sketches to an appealing logo that captures attention. For example, as a portfolio piece, we can transform rough sketches and vague ideas (on the left) into clear designs or prototypes (on the right).
An entire team of graphic designers and UX designers can then follow this new design to implement consistently throughout the entire business and for your Go To Market (GTM) you will have cohesive narrative, a foundation for your business. Now I will take you through these steps explaining how we got from sketch to brand, that I am currently developing/managing.
Step 1 . Create sketches and a collage of images that appeal to customers.
The majority of artists that I work with usually request reference images. If I request a 3D asset of a polygon for a video game, I am designing or an advertisement, I need existing references for that request. Another popular requirement is a vision board, which is a collection of images that showcases the aesthetic you are aiming for or the implied imagery you want to evoke in the minds of customers.
Then finally as a business owner you should take 10 minutes to sketch out the logo that you want and one that you believe will resonate with customers.
For example, we sketched this for a client its supposed to appeal to specific customers who attend pop concerts, punk concerts, enjoy IPAs, and have tattoos. It embodies the rise of popular counter-culture music, catering to anyone who resonates with that culture. It also helps also if you enjoy the same things as that culture, however empathy will always be a guiding principle here.
Think about your customers age ranges, what colors they love, what music they love, and fonts that are readable and appealing to them on the products they like albums, t-shirts etc. If the font is hard to read and your audience has poor vision don’t make the font small or thin, look at it from user-centric design point of view. As you can guess already for this brand/product is inspired from Liquid Death the $750 million canned water brand is disputing the water bottle space. For the brand, here was the customer vision board for this poison apple sketch.
When creating a target customer vision board, you’ll discover new insights & customer overlap like how the Liquid brand also appeals to customers who frequent the gym and aim to exude toughness while doing so, as well as entrepreneurs who admire the cleverness of the Liquid Death brand.
On top of that people tend to forget brands can be strategic, thoughtful branding can bring you opportunities you never imagine by disrupting a existing market. So why was Rotten Fruit sketch created? It was to drisput the fruit & vegetable juice aisle. The fruit & vegetables juice aisle is filled with plastic bottles, and on top of that it’s especially boring.
I would not be one of the few people who would be like “yea let me pick up a V8 at walmart” the thought just doesn’t cross my mind. I asked a guy what do you think about V8? he said V8 engines? So it’s good idea to talk to customers and take look at all the competing brands in the market to see if you can spot opportunity like this one.
Step 2 . Create a Brand Guidelines Document
Now that you did some research & compiled some images we are going put this into one document called the Brand Guidelines Document. This one page will contain primary color, & secondary colors, 5-6 fonts you like, images, and sketches. This is also going to be a “living document” a document that constantly evolves with the business, because brands evolve over time.
You can read more about Red Hat’s brand here https://www.redhat.com/en/about/brand/standards
I like to show RedHat’s brand guidelines because it covers everything so well and this will work for graphic artist or UI designers to fill out and consider. This document should be well kept, structured, and update to when global changes are made.
Why? Because all employees in your company should read and follow it in the future. This is a living document that evolves with a company’s intellectual property (IP).
See when a artist or graphic designer is going create your logo we need to narrow down a set of possibilities and defined a sandbox for the artist to operate within. Why? because if I tell the artist I sell hotdogs, I am going get lot of different images hotdogs that don’t signal or communicate that I sell hotdogs. Narrowing down with sketch or set of parameters and saying this belongs on a can or a side of van helps the artist narrow down on the purpose of what they creating.
Step 3. Contract a graphic artist
To translate your one pager into a rendition and ask them to use 3-5 different fonts on there own and chose a primary and secondary color. In our first iteration we got this mango fruit juice. Then in customers testing we asked customer which one they liked better and the sketch won out. So we had to ask the artist to do revision. Customer thought that the first iteration was a beer can instead of just a can of juice.
it’s not going be perfect but basically the more eyes and criticsm & well thought out feedback you get from graphic designers, customers, and artist the stronger your brand will be.
Step 4. Get the results back and review it from top to bottom.
Share it with people (strangers) to get honest feedback, not family or friends here. After we shared and showed people our first iteration we did a top to bottom review. So we start with the top part of the can. As we can see this marker style font doesn’t match our customers favorite fonts and it doesn’t communicate monster style.
I want the font to be 2 layers, as seen below and I want a font that is melting like a horror front. What I don’t want is to copy the front of Liquid Death, don’t get me wrong I love that font, and it looks good. I think should lean into the monster/horror aesthetic vibe more to be mor distinct.
Its ok be honest with your graphic designer what you are thinking and tell them what customers say this the Critique part of the process. This where I believe you should have no personal connection to the sketch. The sketch is clearly bad, because it’s a starting point. However, you or the graphics artist should not be offended, just take the feedback, implement the feedback and see what happens. Design is a process of discovery, that’s why pepsi spent $1 millions dollars on brand design and brand development.
Here’s some feedback I gave the artist
Revision the tamper on the can need to match the standard brite can
The tampering on the can here is too elongated. For manufacturing, I need to get the label right for 19.2OZ Standard Brite can because in presentations to manufacturing, they will ask whether you want it tampered with like that. Which doesn’t match a standard can. Or in commercials, it could be unfamiliar to customers because they will get confused.
4. Revisions requested 4 I love this drippy box you did on the left side of the can but I don’t understand why you didn’t try it on the black can?
On the left hand left there were these drip boxes that contained the word Monster Mango I like it make this box more melty, and add this melty box to the right in side of the black can. I think this is a really nice touch. Could you try a variation on a black can in white? Just to see how it looks
5. Revisions request I need you to redo the core logo.
To replicate my sketch, I need the fruit facing forward with its teeth fully open. Now for the core logo the skull, it needs to look less skull & more mango. I really want the fruit to become monsters, teeth coming out of its mouth if I could sketch over my sketch to get the same effect. Our team had an idea with a killer fruit monster killing people in our commercial. I need the overall fruit/monster/skull to face frontal & forward teeth opening the teeth dripping of juice. The juices are melting off the teeth.
6. Revision Request The bottom of the black can lack depth and definition. Its also missing details like these lines and “Tagline” we came up with “Acquire nutrients”
Finally ask the graphic artist for advice on next time or ask “What do you need to accomplish this?
Step 5. Take that feedback, contract the same artist again
Get customer feedback! As shown below
We are going for fonts with a monster horror vibe, punk, or metal. Would you have any variations or share a list of fonts that stick with the Groy font? Like the font should be melting just like fruit melting. I am not looking for drips but melting. Why I am focusing on this? Well if we compare the font and logo next to each other. You have this drippy logo but its line work does make the lines of the font. I we need this visual consistency across from the font to subtitle “Monster Mango” to the logo all to be “melty”.
Now because of that feedback from customers and being more specific with the artist we got a better result & I would say a more appealing logo and image.
and say this the feed I got. I want you redo the design according the feedback see what you get.
For example this was my collogues feedback aftercritiques and iteration
Overall much better! The green drip under the leaf draws the eye too much, makes an already busy design even busier. It’s spatially too far removed from important information or focal imagery to be that loud. Also juice doesn’t come from leaves lol. Only other thing is i would make the broken line at the top of the “19.2 OZ” bit solid to provide a clear divide
It will not be perfect yet and could go through another set of revisions
Step 6. now use this logo, brand, colors, fonts and give it to a UI/UX designer
Contract a UI/UX designer who uses adobe XD or Figma to create Prototype of website to develop a document or what is called a design system of your product and website.
Iterate again with the designer
Get the prototype back review it again get feedback from people write it down and past it back to UI/UX designer to fix the design again. UI/UX designer should establish your “Brand Standards” document for on contract. What you want to establish is a Identity, Writing, Illustration, Marketing material, and provide resources for future employees. Look at duolingo as a great example.
Step 7. Implement the design or deploy your material.
Get the logo on all documents, on the website, follow the branding guidelines, make sure the buttons use the secondary color for buttons and not primarily. When you implement something it comes down to one thing on every webpage, it should be the same style and consistent.
Or Hire Me! 👀
As a service with a dedicated budget, I can meticulously work through the requirements to provide you with a distinct logo, a compelling brand identity, and a comprehensive brand guidelines document tailored to your business’s unique needs.
I will make informed design decisions on-the-ground that could be pivotal in scenarios where there might be a potential for missteps due to uncertainty or lack of experience. Whether it’s selecting the perfect font or devising an intuitive UX flow for your software application or website, my objective is to ensure that every design element resonates well with your target audience and propels your brand forward.
Why does this happen?
Businesses that lack purpose or lack a matra that haven’t got feedback of any kind kind struggle financially, because customers and employees are confused by the lack of guidance or vision from the brand and its marketing content.
The employees within that business struggle because they don’t have a clear purpose or vision to follow that allows them to execute according to the needs of customers, they don’t know what they are delivering.
Don’t Rush the Logo
Rushing the logo creation process can signal that your business idea lacked the critical thinking cycles or iterations needed to arrive at a quality product or brand. Not having a well developed brand or logo is not really a problem on the surface, but it means that it’s highly likely that your brand & logo will mean nothing to customers, and that is sustainable and bad for business. If your product’s logo or brand mean nothing to customers that is the problem it doesn’t create sustainability for your business or word of mouth. Logos evolve over time, really good logos like art become timeless.
Ask yourself what does your brand or logo mean to customers?
Also just ask customers what they love about your product. If you have a food service business & that logo doesn’t elicit hunger or is not a reminder in the customer’s mind of a pervious meal that they had that is a problem. if at a glance I don’t see or understand what you are sell I am walking.
