Stephen Houraghan here at BrandMasterAcademy.com and in this video you're going to learn a
strategic brand design process that will help you to build brands more efficiently
and also help you to document the processes that will become your future design business now most
freelance designers when they get into freelance for the first time they wing it in terms of their
processes and that's certainly something that i did for the first couple of years when i had
a design project i would just jump straight into it and i wouldn't have any set system now i knew
what i was doing and i knew how to design my logos or my brochures but i wasn't following
any kind of process and then after around about the second year i realized that i really wasn't
moving the needle in my business so i started to ask some questions about okay well what do
i need to do and the first thing that i came up with was that i needed to start documenting
my processes so that's what i want to jump into today the first area that i started with when it
came to documenting my processes was within my strategic brand design so i want to go through
my design processes today and that will help you to think about your own processes and then
to start thinking on a larger scale about your own business and about the processes as a whole within
your business step number one review your strategy now if you're building a strategic brand you will
have built your brand strategy by the time you get to designing your brand so you want to review your
brand strategy as a whole so you want to look at all of the strategic branding elements everything
from who your audience is to your competitors are the position that you're taking in the market
and then of course your human brand persona and the characteristics that you've defined
that you want your brand to display now these characteristics are key here when it comes to
designing strategically as as designers as brand designers we're able to express a message within
the visuals that we design and what we need to be focusing on and what we need to be prioritizing
for a strategic brand are the characteristics that we've defined within the brand strategy that we
want the audience to understand about our brand that we want our audience to see that our brand
has so that is the first point you need to review that strategy you need to have a look at all of
those strategic elements and make sure that you're injecting those characteristics into your visual
designs now at the very least even if you're not developing brand strategies at this point you
need to be thinking on a strategic level in terms of your creative thinking so you need to at the
very minimum understand who your audience is and understand your competitors and that will really
set the tone and give you some tools to work with when it comes to designing your logos number two
review the brief now your brand strategy and your strategic thinking will come directly from the
brief itself and you'll have gone through that discovery session and you'll have gone through
that brand strategy session or maybe even a brand strategy workshop to really crystallize
the ideas here and gather the information from the client but before you jump into the design process
even if you have taken the time to develop a brand strategy you want to review that brief again the
brand strategy process itself can go on for quite a while and by the time it comes to designing your
brand you may have forgotten some key decisions or some some key conversations that you had with
your clients so make sure you review that brief and look for specifics within that brief look for
specific requests from the client or specific conversations that you've had with them number
three perform your design research now if you do have your brand strategy at hand this is where you
need to go to and what you're looking for here is you're looking for keywords now you'll find
keywords everywhere throughout the work you'll have done up until this point every conversation
that you've had with your client any strategic work that you've done anything got to do with
your audience or your competitors or the position that you're going to take in the market or that
brand personality tone of voice your brand message or your story all of these brand strategy elements
are going to have some keywords here and what you want to do is start to gather those and to collect
them within a master keyword document so just create a spreadsheet and start collecting all of
those keywords and essentially what those keywords are are the raw materials of your brand design
now you want to gather as many keywords as possible and then categorize those keywords
into lists but then you want to start expanding on those keywords with word association and a
very good tool to use here is power thesaurus so parathosaurus.com and just start taking those
keywords and popping them into parathesaurus and really start to expand your keyword list here so
what you're looking for in this case are synonyms and ideas to expand those original keywords now
once you're finished with that you can take that even a step further and start mind mapping or word
mapping your keywords so take the most relevant keywords and put them onto a blank document
and then just just start branching out from that in terms of keyword associations and this is a
very very useful technique because you can come up with keywords that you wouldn't have found
through the parathesaurus method or just from your brainstorming so really think about pushing out
the keyword list here and really go as far as you can with that list number four brainstorm
so you've got an exhaustive list of keywords now what you want to do now is really start to think
about bringing your idea to life visually now i'm not talking here yet about thumbnailing you'll get
to that later on really what you want to do is start visualizing your idea in terms of words so
start thinking about what does it look like physically what does it feel like emotionally how
would you describe it so really brainstorm your ideas here and really push them out in terms of
explaining what it will look like you'll get to bring those visuals to life later on with your
thumbnailing and with your illustrations but for the moment keep it within words and really just
push the idea in terms of how you're thinking about what that brand is going to look like
visually number five create mood boards now this is the next step in really bringing that idea
to life visually and again remember the key in terms of designing a brand strategically
what we really need to communicate to our audience are the characteristics
that we've defined within the brand strategy that we want them to understand about our brand
so whether we're going to be gritty or tough or professional or clean or elegant or organic
whatever the idea is whatever the characteristics that we've defined within our brand strategy that
is what we need to communicate visually and mood boards are a really good way to help us to really
put those initial ideas together so here we want to mood board everything we want to mood board the
color palette the typography the style of the logo the human brand persona the image style so really
capture a mood board for each that's really going to solidify that look of the visual and then when
you're done with capturing a mood board for each and every one of those strategic elements
then capture a master mood board as to the visuals that will best represent the idea of our visual
brand number six thumbnail and conceptualize now this is my favorite part of brand design it's
brand design and has raws for me and you know when i first got into freelancing and i
didn't have any of my processes this is the area that i would spend most time on because i just
enjoyed it and i would sit there for hours and hours on end regardless of the budget that had
been allocated to the job but you really need to think about your processes here because if it is
something that you enjoy like i enjoyed then you can waste a lot of time or invest a lot of time
when not enough budget has been invested in you so what you want to do here is you want to take
a series of pages maybe four pages and grid those pages so you've got a series of boxes
and then use a stopwatch keep an eye on the time that you've got and really push the ideas here
you'll probably have two or three really good ideas that came up in your mind as you were
doing the strategic work and they've probably been marinating in your head and if you're not careful
you can get stuck on those so get them out early and then just move on quickly just keep going
just keep pushing the envelope don't stick on that original idea and make sure you get as many out as
possible here and as i said use that stopwatch and make sure you keep an eye on that time
don't allow yourself too long here if you're if you put yourself under a bit of pressure with
the stopwatch then you're forced to really move on quickly and get as many ideas out as possible so
again make sure when it comes to your processes here that this is not something that you're doing
out of enjoyment it's part of your business as part of what you're doing as a service to your
clients and you really want to document that time number seven digitalize your best ideas now by the
time you're done thumbnailing you should have at least two to three ideas that can form the
foundation of your potential visual brand now if you don't have at least two or three solid ideas
give a little bit more time to your thumbnailing and go back and draw up some more grades get the
stopwatch out again and really try to push some more ideas out but what you want to do before you
move on to the screen is have some solid ideas in place if you jump on that screen too early
if you go on that screen before you have a clear idea of what you're trying to design
then you're going to end up pushing pixels around your screen and that is an absolute time killer
so make sure before you jump onto the screen that you're starting with a good foundation of
two to three solid ideas and then bring them on to your screen and here it's all about polishing
it's not about coming up with new new ideas if you feel that you need to come up with new ideas
pick up the pen and paper again and go back to the thumbnailing but here it's about polishing
it's about playing with those corners with those edges with those shapes and really trying to
bring some new ideas and you know to really push the original idea out into a visual brand
that you could potentially be proud of so again make sure that you have some solid ideas before
moving on to the screen and if you need to come up with some fresh ideas go back to the pen and
paper number eight typography time now i've seen inexperienced designers do this time and again and
it's actually something that i used to do early on in my freelance career they spend 90 to 95
of their time on the actual graphic itself so that is the logo the shape how it looks and then
when it comes to the the they'll grab whatever the business name is put it below the shape and then
they'll select from their list of pre-existing fonts that is in their database and they'll
come up with three variations and that's it that's the only time they'll spend on typography but the
more i learned about strategic branding the more i realize that typography plays a huge role when it
comes to communicating specific characteristics because typography already has predetermined
characteristics through their designs the designers that took the time to design these
typefaces design characteristics within them and you need to understand what those characteristics
are being communicated and then align those characteristics with the characteristics that
you've determined within your brand strategy so take a lot more time actually allocate a certain
amount of time for typography and go ahead and do a bit of research really go further
than just selecting the type from your database and really identify the characteristics that
you want to define that you want to display from your typography from your overall brand but then
identify those character characteristics within your typography so again spend a bit more time
allocate a specific amount of time for typography and you'll find that by the end result you will
have a brand identity that is more aligned with those characteristics that you've determined
within your brand strategy number nine strategic color selection now the work that we do with color
tends to be pretty intuitive because we all have this innate understanding of color and that's due
to our relationship with color from nature so we know that grass is green it's earthy it's healthy
we know that water is cool so we we know that that's what it communicates it communicates calm
so we've got all these intuitive understandings about color but it's really important to
understand the deep psychology behind color and what variations of colors make people
feel and then align that with what you want your audience to feel determined from within your brand
strategy so really take the time to understand the psychology behind color and go a little bit deeper
than just grabbing a few colors and deciding which color palette that you like and then that will
go further into the conversations that you have with your client when talking about the strategic
colors that you've put in front of them you can have a conversation about what that communicates
on a psychological level number 10 step back and become an art director now when i was in
my agency roles i always had an art director who would review my work and then give me a couple
of pointers as to where i need to improve or to tell me it was crap and to go back to the drawing
board but when you become a freelance designer you don't have that and what tends to happen is you
design the way you would normally design and then there is no filter at the end of that that goes
directly to the client but you really want to take a step back here and learn to criticize your
own work you know put ego to the side and really play devil's advocate here and look at your design
work and ask yourself what's the worst thing that somebody could say about this design it's when you
take a step back and you become that art director you can really improve your designs on the whole
but it really does provide an important filter before you start sending content out to the client
so really learn to take a step back to put your ego to the side play devil's advocate and really
point the finger and try to point out what's wrong with your designs and then that will help you to
go back and really polish them and push them to the next level and number 11 review your strategy
and your brief so you want to go back and have a look at that strategy you want to go back and have
a look at that brief before you send anything off to the client you want to make sure that the brand
that the client has asked for or that the brand that you've determined within your strategy maybe
you'll have ironed some differences there between the brief and the strategy in the early parts
of the brand development that it's aligned with the final visual brand that you've identified that
those characteristics that you've identified early that you want your brand to communicate are being
communicated through your visual design so really take that time to review that strategy document
to review that brief and make sure that the work that you're putting in front of your client
is based on what you've determined that you want your audience to understand it's based on those
characteristics it's based on that message that you want to tell your audience now most designers
wing it when they go into freelance for themselves for the first time and they
design exactly how they would have done in their previous roles but when you start to understand
brand strategy and when you start to understand strategic design it becomes apparent that you
need to include a lot within the design of your brand you need to include those characteristics
you need to communicate everything that you've defined within those strategic branding elements
within your visuals so it's really important to have those processes and again if you want to grow
a business then your processes are the bread and butter of your business if you don't have
processes in place then you're going to have nothing to hand over to anybody that you bring
in or if you wanted to sell your business at a later date if you wanted to build a business
that you could sell well those processes are what they will look at at the end of the day so start
building them now start looking at your design processes and documenting now your design process
might be different to mine chances are they will be because if there's one thing i know
about designers is that we're all different and we all work differently as well so your processes
might be different to mine but regardless whether they're different to mine or whether they're the
same or whether you want to take my processes into your own business here start to document
your processes so you can start to build on those you can start to you know really start to build a
framework around the business that you're building so that later on you'll have something to hand to
somebody coming in to help you and as i said this will be the foundation of your future business
now if you have a strategic brand design process that i have not included within this list then
please let me know in the comments below i love to hear different designers processes and i'm
always on the lookout for something that i can use to improve my own processes but if you've got
any questions or any challenges at all please let me know in the comments box below as well
if you like this video please give it a thumbs up and hit that subscribe button
or if you want exclusive tips like this well then head on over to brandmasteracademy.com
and sign up for the newsletter it is free and i will drop those techniques
right into your inbox and i do keep some exclusive content for that list but again i'd love to hear
from you let me know if you've got any challenges in the box below i'll do my best to answer all of
those questions until next time please brand like a master and i will see you in the next video