- Something that is always exciting
for an in-house designer
is when you get to design for a sub-brand.
It can mean a chance to get more creative
and break away from the color palette
and the style guide that you using every single day
as part of the main brand you design for.
'Cause with the sub-brand,
you are creating the visuals for a new project
that needs its own identity.
Recently, I got to speak to Damien and Remillia
from the Figma brand studio team
for interview for Inside Marketing Design.
And I want to share this insight with you
for how the Figma brand studio team
approach the design process of a sub-brand.
- I think a sub-brand is a good opportunity
to really explore and experiment
where the edges of the brand may exist.
I talk about this a lot and like always,
we're always trying to find
where are the edges of the brand?
'Cause I believe that a good brand
has a ton of texture to it.
It's not this sort of like singular aesthetic vision.
There are facets to it.
It evolves and changes for sure,
but depending on what it is trying to accomplish,
it will stay true to those core values,
but it will be expressed in maybe slightly different ways.
So a sub-brand, the latest one,
we had a conference a few months ago now called Schema.
It's a design systems conference.
And that definitely deviates from the brand,
the core brand itself,
but we do use some brand elements.
The typeface that we often use
for our brand expressions lives there,
some other elements as well, some iconography.
But really we wanted to create something
that when you saw it on social
or when you experienced the conference,
you knew that you were at the conference
and not necessarily remove the Figma brand in any way,
but just really make sure that you have
some wayfinding to know where you're at
or what we're talking about.
And because it was a design systems conference,
there's rich vernacular to kind of dip into as well.
So we really wanted to explore that with our color palettes,
some of the techniques that we used,
and we know that it's also like a finite thing,
like it's an event, so it happens.
There's a lead up to it, it happens,
and then there was a post event experience,
and it allows us to maybe be a little bit more experimental
because we know it is a little bit more contained
than say some of our core branding,
the core branding visual language
might be a little bit more universal
or a little bit more componentized
to be able to live on different surfaces over time.
- Sub-branding, we've done a ton of that in house.
I think about our Friends With Figma brand.
That was actually one of the early sub-brands
that we created right after the refresh.
And so it was like really close
to what the Figma brand looks like.
So we were using shapes, similar colors.
We grabbed like select colors from our palette
and we went with another typeface
that looks similar to our in-house typeface,
because we were sharing this out to the community,
so we wanted it to be as accessible as possible.
Thinking about that, yeah,
we were like how can we still make this feel like Figma,
but really special to our community.
And so like playing with these really fun shapes
and fun colors, and just thinking about our community
were ways that we kind of evolved it,
but it still stayed true to Figma.
- In my time so far at ConvertKit,
I've had the chance to develop
several different sub-brands,
and I've definitely used them, as Damien said,
to push the edges of our brand
and working on the Creative Sessions brand, for example,
we actually ended up bringing more hand-drawn stuff
into our main brand because of the explorations
that I'd done for that sub-brand project.
And I always try and keep a through-line in the sub-brands,
whether it's with fonts like the Figma team does,
or a certain brand color
so that they can feel connected to the main brand,
despite being visually different.
You can find out loads more interview
about the design process at Figma and the full interview
over on the Inside Marketing Design channel
linked on a card.
We talked in depth about sub-brands
as well as about how the brand studio team
is involved in feature releases
and the way that they use Figma themselves
to enable the marketing team
to create their own assets.
So check it out right over here
and I'll see you over there.
(upbeat music)