A Better Brand Sprint
4 steps to a beautiful identity
As a Product Designer at Founders Factory my role encompasses all parts of launching a scalable product into market, from ideation through to production. Part of this process is creating a brand that will live with the product through its launch and hopefully grow with the company over the first 2 or 3 years (startups inevitably rebrand once they reach scale because there’s no way the company at incubation is the same one after achieving massive growth).
Branding is primarily the process of taking 1000 thoughts and distilling them down into a single consistent expression visually. This article is going to explore the framework I use for managing this process to create a working brand, using relevant examples from two of the brands I’ve worked on while at the Factory. This is not a unique process, although I’ve yet to see it well documented and defined before now. For start ups the process that Agencies go through to deliver stunning work can often feel opaque. For business owners hopefully this article explains what’s going on behind the scenes, and for fellow designers gives a framework for you to follow through your next branding project. Whether this is the first run or the thirty first.
1. Define
Define is the business input into the branding process. Customer segment considerations, the emotional values you want your brand to express, competitor research etc. When combined these tools are effectively your success criteria, something for you to judge your later creations against. Are you communicating something core to your business or have you just created something pretty and meaningless?
Examples of tools to help you define:
- Design Principles
- Customer Personas
- 3 words that you want your brand to express (i.e. Disney might choose words like Magical, Family & Wonder).
- Team workshops on what the company means to each individual — define the company as a group.
As a side note, GVs 3 Hour Brand Sprint is a great starting point for your define stage so if you have the time, do that.
2. Inspo
Short for inspiration, this is really just a time for you to fill your head with all sorts of beautiful imagery from a number of different places. What are the brands that communicate a similar message doing? Paintings that have certain brush strokes. Videos that you love. Things on Dribble that you find visually appealing. What kind of colours are you gravitating towards?
The overall goal here is to fill your brain with as much visual information as possible. Think of it as building a well stocked larder for when you’re cooking up your ideas later down the line.
Shout out to the guys behind www.niice.co as my go to place to look at an aggregation of images based on search terms.
As you’re going through the process of gathering all of this content, you might feel like some of the images ‘fit’ together into a concept. This probably means you’re READY FOR THE NEXT STEP.
This step will generally take half a day to a day. Your goal here to get inspired and get motivated to create something beautiful of your own.
3. Moodboard
So you have a lot of visual stuff floating about and none of it really means anything right now… how do you turn all this stuff into something that you can start to coalesce a brand around. Moodboards!
The trick here is to start thinking of what is called a ‘creative route’. During the Founders Factory rebrand earlier this year we explored three creative routes, all of which were inspired by Moodboards and a creative idea we had created.
The secret to a good moodboard is to edit. A small number of images that form the basis of a discussion with your team is far more valuable than 30 barely related pictures. A picture says a thousand words and if you have too many your creative concept is going to get watered down.
Why three?
Three strong creative concepts will (in 90% of cases) have enough content for you to find something beautiful over the next steps. You can almost always expect your stakeholders to like something from one route, and something from another. I can only think of one time in my career to date where there have needed to be more than three creative routes. You may have more areas you want to explore of course and that’s completely fine, you’ll always get to a point where you find one concept is dying half way through, it’s fine to kill ideas and revisit this step later.
4. Creative Exploration
This is where things start to get fun. Start to explore graphic ways of expressing the creative routes you’re working on. This is really down to you as a designer nailing the vision behind each creative route. The output at this stage doesn’t need to be polished but you should try and explore different places the brand will appear. Spend at least a day on each creative route, and try to block time for each one, don’t swap and change, focus on delivering each idea like it’s the best thing you’ve ever worked on.
At this point you’re designing for sign-off and committing to exploring one of your routes further, so play with everything to show the potential in the route, you don’t necessarily have to formalise anything at this point.
When you’re at the end of creative exploration it’s time to put a deck together. This is the process of taking lots of exciting visuals and editing them down to a story that you can present back to your stakeholders. For each route you should show a condensed journey starting with the route’s name and high level vision. Use the moodboard you’ve compiled to set the stage for what you want to achieve against that vision to get them excited. Then show the creative exploration and end with applications (i.e. business cards).
5. Refine
After presenting your three routes there are three possible outcomes:
- They loved one of the routes SO MUCH that they just want to run with that route.
- They hated everything and you need to go back to the drawing board (highly unlikely)
- They love ideas from two routes, is there a way that you can make those things play nicely together? (It’s almost certainly going to be this one).
Refining is the most time intensive part of the process, here you start to define the brand in earnest. Creating rules and improving the base concept to be a useable living, breathing brand.
This is also where you can start to really invest in producing time intensive applications. In the case of the Founders Factory brand, this was generating 3D models of dots and the FF ‘Jenga’, these things inherently take a lot more time because they require craft. It may be that you need to do paintings or other more advanced renderings at this point.
6. Keep on refining
You’re now locked in a holding pattern where you keep iterating and building on the brand concept that you have created. Ideally you want to get the brand to the point where you can confidently put together a branding document that explains to other people how they use the brand.
A word on timing
This process can take anywhere from a week to a month. Depending on how much exploration you want to do and how many iterative cycles you end up going through. As a rule of thumb for moving fast as hell I would typically spend the following amount of time:
- Define: 0.5days
- Inspo: 0.5 days
- Moodboards: 0.5 days
- Creative Exploration: 2.5–3 days
- Refine: ongoing (but the bulk of work in 1–2 days)
Are you a wireframing wizard? Do you test with the best? Are vectors your vibe?
If you want to build businesses that will define the future, take a look at our current openings or get in touch.
