On visual branding: A typical logo design workflow process with LeMasney Consulting

What is visual branding?

So, I just finished a project with a longtime friend and his wife who just launched a business. I saw their announcement of the new business, congratulated them, and quietly asked them about their visual branding, which seemed a bit… rushed.

He responded that they just needed to start advertising, and that they would work out the logo later. I asked him if I could create his visual branding as a way of showing my support, and he and his wife agreed. I decided to share the process here as a way of showing you what that typically looks like.

The first thing I did was ask them to fill out the design brief (on the navigation menu above)  because it asks some key important questions about what their brand is in a highly structured way that works to begin the thought process about branding. The result was the following brand profile:

The Design Brief and a visual brand profile.

Paradise Productions and More sees their key audience as being most attracted to the following descriptors: feminine, masculine, colorful, playful, sporty, and adventurous. Their key deliverable product is personalized specialty objects, like printed mugs, t-shirts, and phone cases. They wanted to see these products as part of the logo and wanted to emphasize their t-shirt personalization. They liked green and purple for colors. They wanted to use the logo in advertising, on product samples, on business cards and in the media. They indicated that since they were just getting started they were creating rather than modifying their branding, and that any individual may be a potential customer, as opposed to it being a gender-specific product, for example. When asked what set their work apart from competitors, they responded that they “give more personal care to each and every item that [they] make”.

Getting started

So after discussing and confirming these results, I got to work in choosing fonts, symbols, and colors to match their wants. I sent them the following for review and confirmation.

Refining choices.

They responded that they liked the first and last fonts, as well as the baseball-style font in the middle. They liked the palette I chose, and the general look and feel of the symbols. As a result, and with confirmation by voice and an explanation that I’d be starting work on flow and layout of characters, I created and sent this response.

Refining further

I decided to move towards a monogram for their main symbol with the option to use specific symbols later, because the urge to use a repeated P as a monogram was just too hard to resist. They liked it, and we decided to continue to refine the work. With this set, they said that they preferred the stacked P monogram in the upper left, the wordmark in the middle right, and so I responded quickly with this to confirm, while we were on the phone.

Final revision.

And they said that they liked everything but the light green background. I quickly made another iteration that we are very likely to move forward with, below.

I wanted to give them a square option, a horizontal option, and a vertical option as a starting point to get most social media and other advertising needs taken care of. I am also planning to share the SVG files with them, with all fonts as paths, so that if they wish to take this work to another designer to continue, or to work on it themselves in Inkscape or Illustrator, they can. This job took about 4 hours, including design time and confirmation/consultation. Some jobs move quicker, and some move slower, but very often they follow this pattern where the main product is a logo for visual branding. Congratulations to my friends and their launch of their new business, and thanks very much for letting me be a part of that process.

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