OUR BRANDING PROCESS
When it comes to the branding process itself, whether it’s creating a new brand or refreshing an existing one, we have a robust process that makes sure that the end result does your business justice and performs well for years to come.
Depending on your market, goals, and budget, some of these steps can adjusted or not included. We can tailor this process to get you the best possible result for where you’re at right now and where you want to be. We’ve indicated with Streamlined and Comprehensive tags which steps are typically modified.
Our Streamlined process suits startups and small businesses and starts at $2,500 +gst.
Our Comprehensive process suits established businesses or new ones with big growth goals and starts at $4,500 +gst.
Learn. We meet with you to learn about your business and your goals. Knowing who you are and what you’re about helps us align our process with your needs. It helps us craft a brand that matches the experience of interacting with your product or service.
Define your brand. Based on our learnings we articulate who you are and what you’re about so that we can define your brand identity and design a brand that captures and expresses this. This can be a brief, but useful, summary (Streamlined). Or it can require an extensive customer and employee survey (Comprehensive).
Market research. We work to understand the context in which your brand will exist. Who are your competitors, and how do they present themselves. Who is your audience and what do they want and how of they like to be spoken to. This can be a step that be largely driven by information you provide us (Streamlined) or we can undertake a detailed research process (Comprehensive).
Brand criteria. Here’s where we work with you to establish and agree on the goals and requirements for your brand. This is our anchor for making design decisions throughout the rest of the process. A finished product that meets this criteria is considered a success.
Inspiration research. We research and collate an array of existing logos that have attributes that meet the criteria for your brand. This helps narrow down appropriate styles and approaches lead us into the experimentation phase. If your personal taste is articulated in the brand criteria then we involve you in this process to ensure that we are aligned before we do any creative work.
This step can be an hour (Streamlined), or several hours of research (Comprehensive).Brainstorming and sketching. This is a proven method to explore, test, and refine rough ideas to see if they are worth developing further (Comprehensive).
Trademark search. We do the work of searching IPONZ to make sure that there are no design similarities that may infringe on existing trademarks in your space If you opt out of this step then we can’t guarantee your brand won’t have ‘coincidental similarity’ with another (Comprehensive).
Digital experimentation. Here is where the rubber hits the road and the best approaches become clear. We work with just one colour as a foundation. Every brand must work well at one colour as it sometimes necessary and it is a useful constraint that leads to a strong and simple design.
Colour work. We experiment with different colour schemes, borne out of our research and project criteria. This step can be just an hour (Streamlined), or several hours of experimentation and testing (Comprehensive).
Refinement. Tweaks are made to primary details such as typography, spacing, proportions, negative space — all to clarify the visuals and nail the tone of the brand.
Concept designs. We present one (Streamlined), or several (Comprehensive), concept designs to you to review based on the agreed project criteria.
Revisions. Based on your feedback we revise the design, while being mindful of the project criteria, until you’re happy with the end result.
Further refinement. Once the design is locked in, we do the all-important detail work to refine the design even further. This is where look at spacing, proportions, and linework, in addition to testing the logo in various applications to ensure your brand looks great in colour, black-and white, and reversed.
Create logo variations. Every good brand needs several logo variations to serve a variety of needs going forward. We create logo variations that are optimised for tall, wide, large, and small use-cases. Custom icon-only and social media versions may also be required. The number of variations differs depending on your budget and requirements.
Final approval. We present to you all final variations of your new brand to approve, and make any final tweaks that are required.
Formalise all logo files. This is where we taking your designs from ‘looking great’ to ‘production-ready’ so that future suppliers will be able to use your logo files without issue.
Prepare your logo files pack. We output all of your logo variations in every colour combination and in a variety of formats to suit print and digital use for the years ahead. Our goal is to provide everything you need that you don’t have to come back to us to ask for anything (although we don’t mind at all if you do!).
Trademark application. If you require this, as an optional extra, we can assist with the process of registering your brand with IPONZ for trademark. We’ll issue you with an updated brand pack that incorporates the ® mark to indicate an approved pending trademark application, and a ™ mark to use when the trademark has cleared (Typical cost $1,800).
Prepare your brand guidelines. Brand guidelines are useful to make sure your brand is handled correctly by any suppliers in the future. This can be a one-page stylesheet (Streamlined) that presents your various logo variations, fonts and official logo colour values. Or it can be a multi-page document (Comprehensive) that details clear space, typography rules, patterns, and an expanded colour palette, as well as optionally demonstrating stationery, apparel, and signage rules, etc.