Today I wanted to go over the design process and the exact process we’ve used with countless clients to layout their logo design, and essentially become the catalyst of their entire marketing strategy.
So a lot of times, when we bring clients in that are fresh, that are building their brand, that need a new logo, they need branding, and that acts as the main piece for everything that we do moving forward–whether that’s design collateral, website design, social media–so that we have a catalyst or main derivative to use to scale out all that content.
Now I want to walk you through the design process, and this is something that you can start to implement. So if you provide branding services, instead of just saying, "Hey, we can do your logo," you can say, "Hey, we can build your branding, build your assets and help you keep concise within your brand name."
Number one, the brand discovery. This is probably the most important component. Just shoot me a DM or shoot me a comment, I will send you a direct link to the brand discovery template that we’ve created.
And so, we conduct a brand discovery to get information on the company brand. We find out the vision, their goals and the ideas for the overall brand and logo design. This info is given and explain to with the designer, with a video brief and general sketches.
So a lot of times, I’ll do this with our project manager and the client will get a ton of notes. And then we’ll sit down with the designer and tell him, "Hey, these are the general sketches and ideas that the client is looking for." A video brief just gives him information about the brand and what they’re looking for.
That way he has the entire piece of the puzzle and it’s not just like, "Hey, let’s go create a website." It’s more so, "Hey, these are the colors, the components they’re looking for, these are some competitors that they really liked the design and aesthetic for," and that really helps us in the long run.
Next we have the design process. This is when the designer takes the tool supply to create four art boards. Art boards are images of what the logo could look like in a normal circumstance, and I’ll show you some of those at the end.
These are added to Asana or Task Manager for review. And so these logos are reviewed by the team and submitted to the client. Now a lot of times, it’ll be the back and forth internally with myself and the designer, until we get the specific design that we want to go with.
The next step is design edits–because I’ll tell you right now, it’s probably one percent where the client will be like, "Hey, I love the logo, let’s go. It’s approved." A lot of times they have feedback, and we take that feedback into consideration to design out the logo.
Sometimes they like components for one or two logos and we combine those. And so all edits are made on Asana, then we have a constant stream of all that information coming in.
Next up is digital assets. So once the design is finally approved by the client, the 5four team provides digital assets. These include logo source files, and versions, business cards, brand guidelines, bonds, social media assets, we provide the whole gamut. So, by doing so it makes us add additional value to what we’re doing.
Instead of just giving them a logo, we’re giving them an entire brand identity that they’ll then go use to make digital billboards, they can do signage, they can do a ton of different things with all of these source files. And it just adds value, so you can charge more of a premium.
Next we have backups. So all the designs are backed up on Google Drive by client name, design and then a folder for each asset so that they can always access it. They can save it to their Google drive, they can save it to their computer or hardware, however they want to take care of it.
And then the last step is we mark that project complete. And so now that we have the brand identity, assets, we can go and we can do a logo design. We know exactly what logos, what designs and everything to use.
So I’ll show you guys some brand guidelines to give you an idea on what we provide. This is probably one of my favorites from one of our recent clients. They’re a mobile app, Showmigo.
So we did their entire branding from scratch. Alot of times you’ll see the design we did, their pitch deck, so I’ll show you that. And then I’ll also show you the design elements that we create with each client.
And again, I’m showing you this to give you an idea of how to go and pitch new clients, and how to provide additional value to what you already do.
Now here is the pitch deck that we created. We do it in Google Drive, using Google Slides so that the client can go and edit it and change it. So this is the logo we created, the gradient, the color, the fonts, all this is original content created by us.
Here we have the UI and UX screens–this is a little bit different, because it’s for a mobile app. Sometimes you won’t have that, you’ll mostly have derivative assets like social media and other things like that. So you could see some of these are the screens from the actual live app here.
And then we have the pitch deck here. You can see the cover. I don’t want to go into too much detail, but this is all editable. So once we create this, the client can go in and change this content.
And in addition to screens and a pitch deck, because this is a startup, we also did their business cards, as you can see here. Sorry, it’s loading so slow because the video is running at the same time. But you can see that we did their business cards as well.
Also if I go to this, we do the social media collateral. So, we usually only focus on top three: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. If the client requests it, we can do more, but just to give you an example of what that looks like.
Here is this, and then we also always provide the client—once they pay the final payment—all the source files for them to be able to make changes long-term. If they have a design team or want to delegate that, they can do so also.
And then lastly, my favorite piece of this are the brand guidelines–and this is essentially your Brand Bible. This is where all the information is stored about your brand, regarding the fonts, the vision, everything. And we do this for every single client we designed for.
So they’ll get a vision, their core values about—of course, this is all in line with the brand, this is all original content done by our agency. How we come up with the logo anatomy and the wordmark, and then the local variations, colors, and the icon application. So that way the client can see it in real time.
So quick recap for you guys, I hope this adds value to whatever you do. And again, if you’re doing branding, if you’re doing logo design, I implore you to incorporate some of these tactics into what you do, It’ll really help you grow and scale your business.
