Build the best brand you can
Years of working within brand guidelines and designing them myself, has helped me understand the needs of marketing and product design teams.
Let’s dive in.
Do any of these apply to you…?
Your brand was designed by a design agency. It looks great on paper, but your design team struggle to apply it or keep it fresh day-to-day.
This happens all the time… Brand guidelines should be created in collaboration with the team using them, to make sure they are seamless to implement. The only way to be sure that a design system works, is to test it out on the trickiest examples, not just novelty visuals like homepages and bus stop ads. And most shockingly, a lot of brand guidelines don’t include a design system for the product design team.
You want to rebrand but design agencies are so expensive and often quote a few months to complete a project. You’d also like your team to be involved in the process.
The allure of a famous design agency working on your branding is totally understandable. But in reality, this approach will work best for you if you want to have weekly check-ins on progress, that leave little chance for feedback. You could also get a junior designer assigned to your project, or a designer who is working on multiple projects all at once.
And worst of all, at the end of the project, you are left with no support if anything in the guidelines doesn’t work in application.
Your brand is undergoing a fundamental shift in offering. None of your in-house designers are senior enough nor have the time to take a full brand refresh.
It can be daunting for designers who are entrenched in the everyday running of the business, to turn their hand on a full-on branding project. Having a new and objective design perspective is always helpful to a redesign process, and with my experience managing teams of designers, I enjoy getting the design team excited and hear their thoughts on the project too.
You’re a startup in the process of creating your brand from scratch. How thrilling! But, you need a brand that can evolve with you, as you’re not sure where the business will be in a year’s time.
Even if you can afford to get a design agency onboard, I’d say it’s most likely not worth it at the early stages of your brand. My time spent working in startups showed me how fast-paced the environment is, and being able to change things quickly was essential. You don’t want to tie yourself down to a brand you’re evolving day-to-day.
I once worked with an agency guidelines at the early stages of a startup, and it wasn’t useable so we completely changed it all. And the brand continued to evolve over the course of a year.
My approach
Getting the strategy right upfront makes the visual elements so much quicker to establish and a lot more successful in that it’s insights-led and customer-focused.
A collaborative approach always leads to a useful brand guidelines for all the teams using it, and a much more enjoyable process for all parties involved.
Brand Strategy
I relish working with brand managers to define the brand strategy, and would ideally be heavily involved in this process from the start of the project, if possible. If I’ve joined a project at a later stage, I usually spend a bit of time upfront getting to understand the brand as it is now, and where it wants to go next. I value all the details I can get with regards to customers, market insights, and really pinpointing what sets your brand apart from everyone else.
It’s good to have these areas nailed before starting any design work:
Vision
Purpose
Positioning structure
Personality
Tone of Voice
I thoroughly enjoy working closely with copywriters and I believe that copy should never be treated as separate to the design - they are equally important in getting the overall brand message across. A lot of my design ideas are routed in playing with words, and I usually contribute to the copywriter’s brief when I can.
Visual Guidelines
My design process is very collaborative, which is very much the opposite of how branding agencies work. It’s a lot more of a personal journey for you and your team, and makes it much easier for you to get behind a brand that you’ve been heavily involved in creating.
These are the deliverables I usually include in a brand design or refresh, all communicated through the use of Figma (so you are involved the whole way and the files are developer-ready when handed over):
• Logo design & social elements
• Colour system
• Typography, type sizing & CTAs
• Icon treatment (or direction)
• Illustration direction (if required)
• Photography direction
• Applications: Homepage; email; paid social; print/packaging; advertising; product flow examples
• All the above are included in a brand guidelines document (your choice of format).
I use Canva a lot for these sorts of files, so your guidelines becomes an online link that doesn’t require reissuing every time a change is made. Half the battle of getting designers to stick to the guidelines, is making it easy for them to do so.
My fee structure
Brand design
£450 a day
You have no brand just yet, and want to start something from the ground up.
The time this process takes depends on whether you require a system for other designers to implement vs everything designed by me.
Redesign/refreshes
£400 a day
You are undergoing a change in strategy and want to refresh what you already have.
The time this process takes depends on whether you require a system for other designers to implement vs everything designed by me.
Digital or print brand application
£350 a day
Any design work that means I’m working within an existing brand guidelines.
I also design investor decks at this rate.