# Designing a brand identity for a real client

Channel: Flux Academy
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWYjJ28YlVY
Duration: 54 min
Language: English
Words: 10013
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/HWYjJ28YlVY

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[0:00] hey designers we're back with another case study video and in this one I'm taking you behind the scenes so that you can see all the nitty-gritty chaos that goes into developing a full brand identity for a boutique clothing brand let's jump in all right so I'm going to break this video up into three parts we're going to hit the strategy and Discovery part where I'm going to talk you through how we developed a proper vision and personality for the brand we're going to touch on how we did that the second phase is going to be the design phase where I'm going to show you my illustrtion artboard and all the

[0:31] delightful MTH that's included in there and how we actually eventually got to the logo you're going to want to stick around to that part because I changed everything at the last minute and then in the Final Phase I'm going to show you how we applied all of the design elements to all of the collateral and then move towards creating sort of art direction for photography and planning what we were going to do with a basic Shopify website that she was going to launch right at the end of the project so stick around and and let's jump in before we get into the process of the video and I start

[1:03] jumping straight into the brand strategy and Discovery phase I want to introduce you a little bit to the clients so natal came to me at the beginning of last year looking to revamp or create from scratch the brand identity for her new Boutique cing brand now the journey to creating this Boutique cling brand was quite interesting she's an avid golfer and on a golf trip she stumbled across the fact that her and a couple of her friends were struggling to find golf wear that was resonating with the style they wanted to sort of exist in so they really were looking for clothing that was a bit more classy athleisure that

[1:45] was tailored well fitted classic stylish and sort of very longlasting and she was actually really struggling to find items that she liked and so being the ambitious and creative woman that she was she decided to create her own and thus in the RB was born and she came to me looking to establish a more clear brand Direction and voice for this brand she wanted it to have a professional look and feel and she wanted it to be able to be presented to wholesalers and direct consumers in a nice professional way so we jumped on a discovery call and she chatted me through all of these ideas and in our discussions I realized

[2:32] she'd already done a huge amount of work to establishing a brand story and vision for the business but there were a couple of gaps and so I suggested to her that we do a comprehensive strategy process where we discover the heart of the brand we work out what that message is really going to be and we work out what the sort of pillars of the brand personality are going to be and how we're going to present a to the world in a way that's going to resonate with the right customer um you know we want to build a loyal solid following we don't necessarily want to go viral we

[3:10] just want a nice solid brand that's going to stand the test of time so she agreed and we booked in the project and when it came time for the discovery and strategy process we actually broke down the strategy process into I think it was three or four different sessions and and I structured it a little bit differently to what I normally do in the sense that I structured it as almost three of full coaching sessions where I worked oneon-one with her through all these various exercises to develop collaboratively the ideas with her so you know we discussed the why of the brand together we discussed the

[3:51] personality of the brand together we went through all the standard exercises that I usually take my clients through in strategy and Discovery processes but the structure was a bit different nany was the type of client who was very well educated on these things and so I didn't want to necessarily talk at her just for the sake of the fact that that was how I do things and I really wanted to feel collaborative I wanted her to feel like she was learning about how to build a brand and she was learning about how to interact with Brands and I really wanted to be a part of helping her do that and

[4:24] so I took on in this role of a bit of a brand coach and together we developed a comprehensive strategy for the in aring brand which we've now had almost a year to start implementing and getting the story out there and so far the reception has been really good so let's jump over into the strategy document we created now for anybody who seen any of my previous case study videos you'll recognize immediately that the strategy document books very different to what I usually do and there's a reason for that there was a lot of information in this strategy document this is one of the most comprehensive Discovery and

[5:00] strategy sessions I'd ever done and I wanted a slightly easier simpler format to use what we did is we just kept it type based and you can see that we flew through all of these different exercises and we wrote down a bunch of interesting things one of the things that was the most important for us and I'm going to stick here on this one was creating L RB customer Persona so we wanted to work out who the ideal El Abby woman was and who the El Arby Persona was so you know the customer and the brand talking to each other what were those two personalities and we spoke about this a

[5:43] lot and we ended up with this manifestation of Timeless class meets modern lifestyle refined yet authentic independent and ambitious with a twinkle in her eye her want is magnetic and incest for Life infectious she's many things for every invol involving creative courageous she's vulnerable she's an any Obby woman and so we really want to create this Boutique feel where this wasn't just a clothing brand this was a movement this was you know a quiet gentle move to celebrate all that women are and all that nley the founder is she is a very Dynamic very multifaceted and talented woman and we really wanted the brand to speak to other women who love

[6:26] doing lots of different things and you know really value timeless style they want to dress classic they want to feel confident and they want to feel equipped to sort of move throughout their day with ease not having to stress about what they're wearing not having to stress about looking good they know that if they Chuck on an L RB piece they're going to look good no matter what so that was kind of the whole idea around that and so we've got a couple of different elements here in terms of the Brand's promise Brand's most love trait and Brand's goal and we really wanted to position the brand as a person so El

[7:06] Arby is a person she is a woman in and of herself and so we really positioned the strategy in that way and we went through this entire process we've created a whole bunch of different things as well as a strategic positioning statement for her to state where she was going to fit in the market so that we could make sure that we were designing if effectively so in that we had sort of what makes her different who she is for what she's known for and kind of the various words that we're going to be using throughout the creation of the brand process now the brand strategy

[7:45] inevitably has evolved a little bit over the last year as we've worked with the brand I have actually continued to work with Natalie on the brand and its sort of voice um and it's been lovely to watch it adapt and I think it must be noted that brands are adaptable and they should be a solid core foundation on which everything revolves but Brands grow just as people do and I think it's important that as a business owner there is a level of Education if you are doing brand strategy and brand development with clients help them understand how Brands work help them understand how they'll work with their evolving brand

[8:25] how not to just copy paste a rule from a style guide how to understand what that is and so that they can use it and move with it as a business owner and be equipped to work with their brand going forward um and that doesn't mean that eliminates Your Role it just means that the business owner doesn't obliterate the beautiful work you've done it just means they can work confidently with it so that was the strategy phase and this led us into the creative Direction phase where we now start putting these beautiful words into images and working out how the brand should look and feel and show up on the shelves and on the

[9:02] customers themselves so bear in mind during this process the product development had already begun so her and I were chatting a lot about what the products look like what Fabrics she was using Etc and here's the beautiful thing is that as we moved through this process sort of as we defined the creative Direction and the color pad and all of those things Natalie actually went ahead and resampled all of her original pieces into to the brand color palette that is how powerful branding can be because originally she had a color palette that was totally different and now she's got the color palette that fits beautifully with this brand and says what it needs

[9:40] to say to its customers and so that's the interesting thing about this process is is that this phase can really influence everything and so it was beautiful to watch that happen but let's jump into the creative Direction and I'll show you what we ended up doing in terms of the visual look and feel okay so let's jump into what developed after the strategy phase which was the creative Direction and creative direction is one of the most critical parts of the design process and this is the part where ironically I spend a lot of time with the client and the reason being is instead of presenting 300

[10:21] different logo ideas to my client we hash out the look and feel in moodboard format before I move move into design this allows me the confidence and the clarity to move into design to know which logo Styles my client resonates with have we discussed why it's going to work have we discussed the color palette that we think is going to resonate you know have we looked at textures illustrations emblem Styles Etc fonts all of those things we can discuss all of that beforehand and I can use mood boards to educate my clients about what certain fonts work for what certain situations so that when it comes to them

[11:00] looking at the logo presentation they are actually equipped with practical knowledge about how design works for their brand and now this is critical because as a professional creative your job is to take your client on a journey they do not often times understand what goes into these processes and so really it is your role to help them learn about this process and to give them type of experience which makes them feel comfortable and confident because without that they're going to doubt everything you know what it's like to walk into a space that you know nothing about and the nerves and you asking all these questions because you're unsure or

[11:44] you don't ask any questions at all and you sit quietly and wait and then you walk away with a solution that you're not happy with anybody who's been for a haircut and has been too scared to say anything to the hairdresser that you don't like like your haircut and so you leave with a haircut that you don't like I've been there so the point is you want to get to a point with your client where they feel comfortable and confident enough to question your decisions as a designer politely and respectfully so anybody who's been for a haircut and has not liked the end result but has been too

[12:20] scared to say anything to your hairdresser and you leave with a horrible haircut that you don't like because you were too scared to say anything you didn't feel confident enough and that's how your clients might feel sometimes if they are not equipped with the clarity and the confidence or the security in their relationship with you as the designer to say something about how they feel you risk a client walking away with a result they don't actually like because they don't feel comfortable and while some of us might sit and go okay well that's the client's fault there is a lot that you can do as the creative professional to make them

[12:56] feel comfortable and the creative Direction phase is one of of my favorite phases to do that so we jumped into the creative Direction presentation by explaining to the client why the step is super important I then touched a little quick summary on the brand again um this is straight from the strategy and then I focused on what we are creating so what are we after with the creative concept what are we trying to do here because we want to make sure that anytime we're presenting something creative which can very easily become subjective that we are anchoring it on something practical like the strategy or the story you're

[13:37] trying to tell so that it can be contextualized within that you also want to avoid your client sort of changing the minds halfway through so you you want to be able to Hash all of this out now so what I ended up doing was presenting three slightly different concepts to her and these were all designed to pull out a certain Focus so this first one was focused very much on the editorial look it had these big tall serap fonts bold Blues texture strength structure all of those things um and it was very focused on ambitious women so it was a little bit stronger and it had

[14:16] a little bit more weight to it the second Direction was old school refined classy so this was sort of a little bit more old money it was a little bit more Hollywood glamour and it was a little bit more muted in terms of its color tones a little bit more focused on the neutrals less bold color and then we had our elegant look and this one was an interesting one for me because even in the strategy phase we discussed that she didn't want the brand to be feminine I wanted to double check now it's funny because often you know a client will say to you oh and I don't

[14:53] want it to look bold or I want bold and you go well what does that mean what does bold mean what does it look like what does it feel like and so she said she doesn't want it to look feminine and I went okay but this could technically be construed as elegant rather than feminine so I wanted to check and I'm glad I did because there was actually a bunch of elements in this mood board she liked and it was like okay cool now that's clear so we went through this whole process where I gave her these three concepts explained some of the examples and kind of the focus

[15:28] points and she came back with a bunch of feedback and we actually spent sort of the middle phase of this part of the project hashing out different looks and feels pulling out things that we really liked and trying to blend the two concepts and we went back and forth quite a lot in this phase and it was really important because I think we had nothing to Anchor onto so we had no Baseline and it was you know we had no existing brand to work off of or to refine we were really working from scratch on this one so it was really important that we get clarity very early

[16:03] on and I was happy to add an additional round or time into the creative Direction phase but ironically we didn't actually need that time and by the time we got to sort of round three of the creative Direction we'd ended up with basically two concepts that we were very happy with and we were going to try and blend them so I wanted to to create two directions based on the back and forwards that we' done option A which had its own focus and option b which was very very similar but it had a more of a muted look with straight lines on the packaging and a little bit more of sort

[16:44] of a yeah a warmer look she ended up going for this concept with a blend of sort of the strength the packaging of the second one so this was definitely the one that was chosen and then I compared them for easy sort of reference for her so the right hand side one also had the handr illustrations which she wanted so we ended up creating a sort of a blended mood board which I'll show you when I move into the design phase um we actually ended up sort of blending the two and then we also talked about patterns and illustrations and this is a nice thing to do inside the mood board

[17:20] now often I find Within These nine squares it can be difficult to actually represent all of it but it's a nice way to get an overview and then what I actually do is I expand the creative Direction and we talk about things like pattern styling are we going to do Vector illustrations or are we going to do fully organic handdrawn illustrations we ended up doing a mixture of both ironically um and took a little bit of tweaking and sort of refining but it worked really nicely so it was handrawn but vectorized if that makes sense so you'll see that in the design phase shortly and so we ended up chatting

[17:54] about that and we jumped on a call and we hashed it all out we spoke about about the various elements that were working really well she actually in this phase mentioned to me that she wanted to see blue and I was a bit nervous about that at first and I was like okay well we'll have to see but in the second mood board or or the final mood board that we created I managed to bring in a bit of the deep blue from the initial concept on this mood board here and it actually worked really beautifully and I was very happy and this is the magic about

[18:26] working collaboratively with your CL s because you know as a creative you have preconceived ideas in your head off of things that you've seen before or whatever and it can be difficult for you to cut your own bias out of the picture and sometimes your clients little ideas are worth trying because it might not work exactly as they've suggested but it might spur something on for you and you might come up with something really cool and interesting as a result and that's exactly what happened here so we ended up moving forward with the mood board on the left um with a little bit of option b and a

[19:01] bit of blue and it ended up being a really great foundation for the design phase so let's jump into my illustrator board and I'll show you the behind the scenes of the design process okay so we are jumping straight into my illustrator art board for the logo development process of the lb brand and as you saw in the mood board and creative Direction process we went through quite a few iterations of the mood board itself and so we ended up with sort of this extended mood board which was a blend of a different couple of different concepts and things that we really wanted to capture within the brand so I pulled

[19:38] this into illustrator as I always do and started off by pulling out a couple of colors cuz I really wanted to sort of see what we were working with and really in the beginning we were leaning very much towards this sort of foresty green color but you'll see as we develop that we moved away from that color quite quickly um but anyway I did what I always do and I jumped into trying to load in a bunch of fonts now let me explain my thinking for this process first when I was thinking about the logo I was thinking about all of these like super high luxury Brands but I didn't

[20:13] want the logo to not have any personality now I am definitely one of those designers who is against this whole Blanding movement where logos these days have got no character at all I understand that they're legible and flexible and blah blah and great fonts and all that stuff but I will always be a lover of a personality filled interesting logo so um and I think there's really beautiful ways to do that so I really wanted Elie Abby to have a logo that felt classic and classy and felt a little bit old money old school um but still had a modern touch to it I I we

[20:54] wanted the brand to have a very classic and feminine look but we didn't want to look outdated so it was a very interesting balance to play with and instinctively I was just hooked on this typography this honet I don't know how you say that so pardon me if I'm saying it wrong but basically this typography over here was the main focus for me in my head I knew that I wanted this sort of semi serif um wide based or WID set font because I wanted that space and that elegance and that presence um but when I started playing with the fonts I just sort of kept getting

[21:32] irritated because the words El Obi themselves like while they looked good it looked too masculine so I was looking at these fs and I was going okay I'm going to have to see what I can do about trying to balance the look the other thing I really wanted to bring in was sort of this um I wanted there to be a script element but I didn't want it to be Overkill I wanted it to be very subtle um the signature look it was not going to be a main feature it was was just sort of going to be a little bit of an accent um definitely not a priority

[22:01] for the brand um Natalie really wanted a bit more structure she wanted the brand to have strength and character as opposed to looking girly so we wanted feminine Elegance without it being girly so we wanted soft illustrations but they needed to be quite classy so this was all the sort of the dichotomy of various elements that I was playing with so we jumped straight in and now usually in this phase I've done a bit of sketching as well for El I'll be straight honest I didn't pop into sketching straight away for this one I actually wanted to find that font so I came into illustrator straight away to try and find the font

[22:43] first and then cuz I knew I was going to bring Illustrated elements in later on I wanted to find that font so I jumped in and started playing with this and you can see I tried it in lowercase and it wasn't really working for me and I tried this and it looked too like Health Brandy and it looked too playful and I was like no that's not going to work I then tried this lovely font here which I think if I move myself out of the way is quite a nice one so you you'll find that there's like a lot of quite unexpected oh this is a screenshot that's

[23:16] why that's a screenshot so I do this a lot like I'll go onto font foundaries and things like that and I'll type in the font on their previews and screenshot it bring it and Illustrated to have a look at what it looks like before I purchase the font so sometimes you can't purchase or you can't download test versions of fonts and so it can be a little tricky to actually test what they look like in the proper wording of the logo so I like to take a screenshot and bring it into illustrator to come and see now under no circumstances please desid this if you're new to this

[23:49] do not screenshot image Trace that screenshot and then use that as the logo please I beg of you don't do that it's not allowed um there are plenty of situations where image Trace can be super helpful but that is not one of them so don't do that I've been very tempted in the early days of my design career when fonts were like super expensive um but remember that you can also chat to your clients about paying fonts um so you can discuss that with them at some stage I then happened across this font here which was starting to get a little closer to the vision I

[24:25] had in mind originally I would was definitely quite interested in it I was very curious about it so I sort of had that there I expanded it out and then I played with some of the characters a bit and then you can see here that I started bringing it in to play with it a little bit with the tailored athia uh subtitle which we were going to use for the brand so I played with that for a bit and then it just didn't feel right it was it was still feeling too masculine it was feeling too strong and I really needed this be some Elegance some softness to

[24:59] it it was missing it was also feeling a little too equestrian and it's a very difficult sort of thing to try and explain but I kept thinking of equestrian and English Countryside which was not really the vibe we were going for so I was like okay I've got to modernize this somehow but without losing anyway so I started playing with slightly more elegant fonts and I came over this way to look at sort of instead of going wide going tall and bringing in that sort of romance in that way um and so I tried it in lowercase and you can see I like copy and paste in the mood

[25:41] board like a 100 million times all over the place so that I have to keep like dashing around the artboard looking for references but you can see here that I started working with the E and the A and I thought you know I spent a whole bunch of time like trying to make a custom be to try and bring in a a bit more elegance and like when I zoomed into this I was like okay this is all right like I don't mind this I think this is quite nice it's quite it's got quite a statement the Ellie particularly looked really sort of visually interesting and

[26:12] I thought it looked quite statuesque and I thought it could be quite nice but I was missing that organic element and so I was trying to make a custom bee here um and then I thought no the bee looks a bit funny so I moved on to just doing this um and bringing in that vertical line or horizontal line sorry didn't really love that that much but I liked it enough to keep pushing it so I then started working with the E and the A and I wanted to try and bring in like the swing of a a golf club and I was trying to bring in like this the folds or the

[26:53] heels of the green and all sorts of things like that like a golf course and trying to make it look sporty in some way without it being like cringy and obvious I really hate literal logos that are like super obvious like if it's for golf then you've got a golf club in your logo I I'm the kind of person that really I'm a more of a conceptual designer I prefer things to have a bit more of a subtle feel than a literal representation of what you're talking about even though there can be definitely times and places where that is super useful so anyway I started playing with these Monograms and I moved

[27:30] around a bit I was very heavily inspired by this design here with the overlapping and sort of the cut outs and was like that would be quite nice but the broken lines I wasn't sure was going to work for this brand anyway I do this a lot when I'm trying to test logo Concepts I'll bring in an image or a stock photo or something like that that I imagine would be relevant for the brand so in this case it was a clothing shot and I start putting the logo over the top of that to see what it looks like in context because while your clients also

[28:00] struggle to imagine what designs look like in the real world I also sometimes struggle and while I've got an idea in my head can be difficult to see what it looks like for real I played with that a little bit and wasn't loving it but I stuck with it a little and then you can see here I jumped over to this side and was like okay enough is enough this font is not working I'm going back to my little honet concept um and again sorry if I'm saying that wrong um and I started bringing in a font that had a little bit more sort of this semi Sera

[28:33] Vibe going on and then I went in and actually tweak the letter forms to look a little bit more accentuated it was like okay how am I going to bring something interesting to this typography now don't you don't need to force type to look interesting okay you can also just leave it if it's a beautiful font you tweak the king and you get the composition right and that's totally fine you don't have to force yourself to customize type just for the sake of it because what you'll end up doing is creating a complicated logo that doesn't need to be complicated the reason why I was customizing this is I wanted the

[29:11] concept surrounding it was beautiful classic El Elegance with a flare so Natalie herself is one of these incredibly classy women she's multi-talented she's super passionate about lots of things but she she's a firecracker so she has lots spice and she has lots of personality and I wanted the brand to represent women like that so it it was definitely a a girls girls brand and it was supposed to be about you know celebrating wanting to be a bit more classy and reserved but still have a little bit of spice and personality when you're comfortable and when it's necessary so I wanted the logo to have that little flare in it and so this is

[29:55] why I was trying to do the EA in like a nice interesting way and the curves on the a um and then I started going okay well what if we moved away from the structured EA and into like a handdrawn ea and so I started sketching out these um this started off as an illustration on my notebook and then I brought it into illustrator to try and test it um and you can see I tried all sorts of things and then I was like okay move away from the cursive the cursive wasn't doing it like let's move back to the structure and so I came into this

[30:30] structure and I started trying to construct something that looked maybe like a tennis court or something along those lines and I was just like this is looking so bizarre it's looking like a Japanese restaurant or something and I'm like I don't know what I'm doing it's going to it's going to be construed completely incorrectly let's move away from this I then sort of struck upon this where I instead of bringing in a totally custom um sort of stem or stroke or whatever to the typography I decided to just soften out the corners a bit and it created this very interesting look which I quite liked which reminded me

[31:11] sort of the soft edges of the clothing that she was designed which is fully tailored by the way so it's properly tailored clothing but it's got like the softness to it and terms of the fabrics and so I was like okay so we'll go tailored structured font but we'll soften it with some curves so that we've got that feminine feel and then we'll have the taor that Legion and I did really like this I started playing with it and you can see I started popping it over images and looking at it and I really did think it looked quite nice like I was enjoying the look of it sort

[31:48] of bringing in the colors and then I was like wait I've got an idea and this idea came to me quite literally when I was was making coffee one morning and i' had been wrestling with this for days days and this is the interesting thing about this creative process is is that I always build in a buffer zone for myself because I know sometimes I can crack a logo in a day and sometimes it takes me 3 weeks now obviously I don't always have three weeks for a logo so I'm going to have to try and like ramp up the process but this project for some

[32:24] reason even though I was so connected with the client and even though I fully believed in the concept that we were developing and I it was so clear in my head the look that I was trying to get across I just could not get the logo right and it was driving me insane so what I actually did was I stepped away from my desk for a day or two and I put the project down for a bit and I worked on a couple other things and this struck me one morning while I was making coffee and I went I know what I'm going to do is I'm going to go for lowercase EA

[32:53] because they're the same shape so I was like like I know what I'm going to do so I quickly sketched it out on and I was looking for the sketch the other day and I couldn't find it but I sketched it out on a piece of paper there while the um the espresso machine was busy making me a delicious cup of coffee and I struck upon this idea here and this is kind of where it began so it was this e within the A and then I decided to extend the stem out because it it reminded me of a whole bunch of different things and then as I was sort

[33:31] of refining this shape it suddenly struck on me over here I went it looks it looks like a golf club and it also looks like a riding crop and it also looks like a bunch of other things looks like a hockey stick like so I got very excited and was like oh look at me being subtle but literal so anyway I got very excited about this idea and I was like this is perfect this this is it this is the thing because I knew for an iconic clothing brand and sort of the boutique thing you need an emblem of some kind you need an emblem that's going to sit

[34:07] smack bang on the design and it's going to look amazing so this is what we ended up with um we ended up with this monogram style emblem and you can see I here just moving through the the layout of it working out the spacing a bit um and just fixing what the actual EA looks like um so you can see I'm tweak tweak tweak tweak tweak and my tip that I always leave for anybody who's watched any of the videos that I've made before copy paste copy paste copy paste so take a copy paste it in make your changes and then leave the original so that you can

[34:42] go back if you need to and anyway then I brought in the type and I was like okay now we're talking now we're getting close we've got this EA symbol which looks great it's got a you know there's a whole Sy symbolism behind it you know it's got the golf stick it's got the riding crop it's got everything that represents the sort of the sports that natal really wanted to focus on for the Range golf Etc I then whacked it into this outline and popped it into an embossing mockup to have a look at what it would look like nicely embossed and I was like okay we're very close we're

[35:19] very close I'm liking it a lot so then I started playing with what you could do with the monogram in terms of making it super large and using the big shape I brought in the sort of the corners to match the typography made some of the edges wider to fit the font um so that the monogram really despite being lowcase fit with the actual main font and I started tweaking you know what does it look like in black and white with this all black and cream I then started playing with it in color with that water started playing it with image sort of renderings like this I could

[35:54] wrap the EA around the model and then started looking at various ways to play with the logo and then I did this interesting thing where I tried to make a pattern out of the emblem and in making a pattern out of the emblem I struck Upon A delightfully happy accident which was this symbol right here and it was a trip triple repeat of the main emblem and it created this flipping Epic monogram symbol emblem for the logo and I just went that's it that's it done it's perfect it's amazing it reminded me of golf balls it reminded me of tennis records it reminded me of riding crops

[36:41] golf clubs and it also just had this very cool like Infinity abstract look to it it patented really well it I was very happy so I knew that that was it so we stuck with that and you can see now I started pushing it then I jumped into my iPad and I started doing the illustrations cuz we knew we wanted some organic illustrations so I drew these out on my iPad and brought them in and I started playing with them over there and then you can see here I'm now starting to play with the designs that I want to present to her so I start doing this

[37:16] inside illustrator where I create all of the different variations of the pattern so I did a embossed pattern and this is when I was starting to get really excited about the look of the brand and I was still playing with the green at this stage um you can see I started doing some faded art things this is where I brought in the script font so here we were trying a couple of different phrases um and I started looking at a label for inside the clothing like at the back um I started looking at what that might look like I then had a complete mental breakdown and woke up

[37:54] the next day after doing all of this going I did the full logo presentation for her so I put out the entire thing and then I went it's not right it's not right I don't like it it's not right that uppercase is too strong it's too masculine it's too bold it looks too much like I'm trying to be Balenciaga or something like that I just went that is not what IL Obi is il Obi is classic and elegant but soft spoken and encouraging and positive and it didn't feel right and this was the day I was supposed to present to her and I went what am I

[38:36] going to do because I don't I don't like it and I want to change it so I literally at I think it was 8:15 that morning I sat down and I went what am I going to do and I hit the drawing board and I went I'm going to fix it and I can't work out exactly where the idea hit me but I think it was here somewhere where I went I'm going lowercase so first of all I had to try and find a Bas font that was similar to the EA shape that I'd started creating and I managed to find sort of this one which um I think I've customized and

[39:19] like I think one of the two or three of the letters I actually created myself but I went lowercase and immediately I was like okay that feels way better I'm much happier with that I initially played with sort of extending out the E on the various letters to have a look at what that looked like but it felt just like it was too much it felt like I was pushing a little bit you can see here I was starting with the badges see I did all of these markups this one over here where I was doing this and I was trying all sorts of different things with the logo just on

[39:51] its own and then as a badge like this and then eventually just went no and and then landed on this version of the logo here where it's just a beautiful simple minorly customized with our little L's and our B over here just to make sure that it fits and it's got its own character it's own personality it's subtle it just works and it's not overly complicated and now I was happy so now I raised through to try and create the presentation and of course in the pattern making realized this green is driving me nuts the green is so obvious for a golf brand and I was like what can

[40:35] I do that's different so I went back to all of our mood boards and realized that a lot of the conversation we'd been having was about this beautiful deep blue and I went that's the one so as soon as I paired the deep blue with the quadrupled emblem the new typ face and I updated the type face for the slogan I went yay woo we've got it I then started updating the badges to have um this script font as well I mean this uh serif font as well which looked so much nicer um and it just looked a little bit different it looked a bit more unique it wasn't like

[41:19] your typical badge that you see the logo on the blue just looked amazing I then started like layer ing up all of the illustrations and creating the various patterns that I was going to use and moved along to mocking all sorts of different things up and playing with it you can see here I even tried making little golf carts which they were too way too playful for the brand but you can see there um started putting these next to the mood board and realized that those color tonalities were perfect and started playing with a typography a little bit more in terms of looking at different ways that I was

[41:57] going to write the catchphrases and things like that for the dynamic Modern Woman what I was going to do with different fonts um there's a picture of lovely Natalie and one of her initial clothing sketches for the brand um wanted it to feel really authentic and fit with the spirit of what she was trying to do and once that was done we were good to go and I was like right now I've got to Chuck this in to the logo presentation so so let's jump into that and I'll take you through what that ended up looking like Okay so let's jump straight in to the brand identity

[42:34] proposal that I prepared once I was finally happy with all of the design elements so thank goodness for templates because this didn't take me that long to actually pull together one side whipped up a couple of mockups and I was happy with the overall look so I jumped straight in by just recapping the mood board always just to remind the client of where we were and the kinds of visuals that were very important to us I then ho straight into presenting the logo now typically it's good advice to present the logo just black and white um so that they can see all the features but personally I've found that often it

[43:12] can be offputting for clients to see that first because it's like oh is that all um because let's be honest we we judge things by how they look and often times if you present them the most boring representation of the logo without any cont T whatsoever it's very difficult for them to connect emotionally to the design and so what I always do is I try to add a little bit of oomph and a little bit of pizzazz to the initial presentation of the main logo and then I show them the boring versions later on so I did a little bit of a copper embossing here just to show

[43:44] off a little bit of the concept I then walk into to actually breaking down the logo and the various aspects explaining what is involved and I do this for all the different logos and then the emblem was a particularly important one for me because in the strategy we discussed that IL Alby was a brand that was for multifaceted Dynamic and multi-passionate women who you know have many different facets to them and this emblem was a visual representation of that and so in the rotating of the symbol and looking at it from any angle it still looks right and it still looks good this brand was a celebration of

[44:26] women who can do anything and who can be anything and who are more than just one thing and they can be mothers and they can work and they can do all of these different things it was very important for Natalie to represent that because that's who she is and that is the type of woman she is trying to attract into the brand women who appreciate doing all sorts of different things who are interested in a whole bunch of different things who are not just defined by one role Etc so you know even though the brand doesn't shut all of that from the rooftop that was really the concept and

[45:01] so it was important that the emblem represent that so I made sure to spend some serious time unpacking that for her I then showed a couple other logos and then we jumped into the markups so it's very important obviously to Showcase to your client what the brand is going to look like in the real world and this is where mockups come in handy and now it's very important to note that yes this does take more work it does take a bit more time to prepare these assets and sometimes it can be quite high risk in the sense that if for example they don't like the work you've then done all of

[45:41] this stuff for almost no reason and you've got to go back and start again but let me tell you something ever since I started doing this process where I've built out a brand in more detail and I've really added structured to it right from the beginning and I've added all this storytelling to it I very rarely get massive pushback from clients we usually get approval within the first or second round and usually by this time I've worked with it for so long and I'm so ingrained in it I'm so confident in the concept that there's very few changes and I'm happy to present this single concept now this do take practice and it

[46:22] takes time to get really good at listening to your client really well so that you can produce something that works on the first round so you know if you're in the beginning of your career and you've tried the one concept method a few times and it hasn't worked stick with it and just make sure that you are building out your process in the earlier stages so that you're really listening to your client you're understanding what sort of things are super important to them you know I realized very early on from Natalie that while she wanted the brand to have elegance and class she did not wanted to look girly and so that was

[46:58] a very key balance for me when it came to creating these elements so we jumped straight into doing a couple of mockups where I pulled the pattern ared the badge we've got a shopper bag with the logo on it with some tissue paper the embossing the logo over an image and then of course the actual clothing label which I thought would be really really helpful for her to visualize what the emblem and badge would look like on her actual items we then moved into doing a couple other mockups so tissue paper designs using the logos that we've already done so you know no extra work here in in that sense

[47:39] um and then typography color secondary color so it was very important because it's a clothing brand we needed lots of color to work with so whether it's the range itself or whether is online or on social media we just needed more colors to work with than the sort of very muted limited Bas palette so we brought in the greens and showed her what those look like now initially I was actually a bit worried about working with all of these colors at once but in hindsight it's actually worked really really well for the brand and I'm really enjoying having all these colors to work with on all the

[48:13] supporting materials that we've been doing for her and that was pretty much it so it was a short shop and sweet presentation sometimes I find you know it's actually easier to make it a little bit more condensed for the client so she's not sitting there watching a 20-minute long L video or something like that and she can go through it or they can go through it um as quickly as they need to and I sent that off to her and presented it to her and was so nervous about her feedback but she sent me a voice note and I think for anybody who has presented creative work to a client

[48:47] you will know this feeling very very well it doesn't matter how confident you are in the concept it doesn't matter how confident you are in the idea or how happy you are with the design as soon as you send something for approval to somebody The Imposter syndrome kicks in and I I was so nervous that she wasn't going to like it but she sent me a voice note and she was in tears and she was so happy with everything and she said we nailed it and she was really excited to move forward into the next round so there were a couple of very small tweaks that we had to make but other than that

[49:19] we were done with the design phase and we could now move on to finalizing the collateral and finalizing her brand stationary and applying the sort of the brand look and feel to everything else that needed to be done so let's jump into that part next so now that we've gone through the entire sort of development of the project what actually happened is we then took a bit of a break because she needed to go into finalizing the production of the actual products and anybody who's worked in clothing or product development knows that this can take a while and so what we did is once the branding was done and

[49:59] everything was sort of applied as it needed to be we moved into sort of a bit of a standby mode where I was working on some sort of sticker designs for her and I was working on some Social Media stuff for her and I was doing a bit of other things but we took a bit of a break to also strategize what we're going to do about her website we decided that in the early days of the business until we could gain a bit more momentum that a basic sort of shop fi site was going to do the trick so we didn't go hugely custom on the shop on the on the site we

[50:29] built her a basic Shopify website we used a template we we got all the beautiful customization up the website in my opinion I think looks great and I think it's a testament to the fact that you don't as a startup business owner you don't need to break the bank all the time on everything fully custom and it functions beautifully and the user experience is easy and effortless there is really no need to spend a massive Fortune there are not a huge amount of products that are Al at the moment as more develop the website will also grow and we will look at updating and customizing as we go along but we were very happy

[51:06] with where it was at so what ended up happening then is that a couple of months later she came back and we were able to sort of finalize the brand and this is where it started getting really exciting for me as the designer because I started to see the brand really come to life so just a quick couple of snapshots about where we're at now we sort of did a bunch of stickers for her which she uses on her packaging and here is a quick little preview of the illustration that I did there was a couple of others as well um where we characterized sort of the Ed RB woman um

[51:40] quite fun with some illustrations and we have all of these cool stickers or or labels that go into the back of the clothes so that was amazing then we've got these labels that go onto the back of the clothing and they've all got like a different set saying on them so you look great today you look on par today haha it's 4:00 somewhere and actually in can and you have great style and it's a great day to be you so the brand is very affirming for for women and it's just a nice little sort of something something and then this was very cool for me was

[52:14] to watch the pattern I'd actually designed come to life on products themselves now this was very very cool and it was cool to see her sort of testing the colors and working out what was going to work but there's the brand emblem and there's the beautiful leaf pattern that I Illustrated and designed actually showing out on the products themselves which is the coolest thing in the world and then we moved into sort of art directing proper photo shoots and with very little guidance Natalie was able to sort of take this to a professional photographer and go and get some really amazing beautifully lit natural shots of her and some of her ear

[52:54] OB l ladies wearing the clothing items and obviously there's a lot more to show and a lot more to come if you guys are interested in looking at how the brand is showing up please give El Abby a follow on Instagram and have a little look around at what she's got on offer if anybody of you are in the United States and you happen to enjoy golf then definitely check them out I can take seriously testify that the clothing is incredibly made beautifully hand crafted to detail is impeccable and it was really quite an adventure getting to work on this brand and looking at all of

[53:31] it come to life now we have also managed to work on some of the social media and I have helped her with some of the design and it's been really great to sort of have a handson feel with the brand on an ongoing basis we've done some mails for her and it's really been amazing to watch hub's brand has evolved from the beginning inquiry where there was nothing but an idea and an illustration on a piece of paper to a fully fledged and fully designed brand if you guys found this helpful in any way then please let us know down in the comments if you got any questions about

[54:09] the brand development process and how it happened and how it took place any details that I've left out that you want to know more about drop it in the comments below and I'll be sure to reply to you and if you want to see more content like this also let us know thanks for watching and see you in the next one cheers

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