PROJECT OVERVIEW
For this 14-week project, I chose the topic Branding and Identity Design and my deliverable (project) under the same was REIMAGINING an existing brand as selling something different and then, the fun part, RE-BRANDING it!
PROJECT GOAL AND SCOPE
The Ultimate Goal of this project was to entirely re-brand Under Armour from a sportswear retailer into a beauty brand and (ideally) make it more successful in the market!
The Scope of this project was to generate all the possible brand assets that are required to make a brand trustworthy and successful among its customers. The main focus was to design a simple yet powerful and responsive logo, create a brand-specific colour palette and lastly complete the set with typography that compliments the overall design.
TECHNOLOGY USED
This entire project spans upon a variety of software and resources:
Software:
- Adobe Illustrator - I crafted the entire brand using this application. From the logo to all the brand assets, and even the brand's style guide, everything is designed in Illustrator!
- Adobe Photoshop - I jumped to Photoshop for creating professional mockups for the brand. This was only after the entire designing process was done, that I started looking for mockup templates to place my designs on.
Resources:
- Unsplash - We all know by now that this is the best place to look for high-quality, professional, royalty free images, and so this is where I went looking for images to create the mood board for my brand!
- Mr. Mockup - This is a website that I came across on Instagram a few weeks back and I decided to give it a try for this project, and to my surprise, it really is one the best places to look for mockup templates! The website has an array of PSD templates to choose from and the best part - they are FREE ;)
- Milanote - I used Milanote for organising my research materials and my mood board in one place and shared a link to it with the professor during our one-on-one check-ins. This prevented me from searching for stuff on my computer during our meetings and allowed me to focus more on the feedback that I received :)
LEARNING AND CREATIVE PROCESS
I am aspiring to become a Brand Designer and the sole reason for choosing this topic is that I wanted to create a MASTERPIECE that I can proudly flex in my portfolio! Ever since I've decided to pursue this career path, I've being doing my research like crazy and this includes following a number of brand designers from all over the world on Instagram! This truly helped me learn how branding works in real life and what are the different workflows that a designer adapts in order to craft a successful brand. Hence, I used this opportunity to try out all the different things that I've learned so far and discover my own niche and workflow!
Phase 1: Research, Ideation and Mood-board
These were kind of like the initial stages of my project. I started off by doing some research on competitor brands and analysed how their branding works and what makes them successful in the market. Next, I moved onto the ideation stage wherein, I did a bit of brainstorming and sketched out some possible ideas for the logo design.
Sketches...
These are a few ideas that popped up in my head while I was performing the brainstorming exercise and I roughly sketched them out in my sketchbook to finalise later what exactly I'll be going for.
Finally after a lot iterations and feedback form the professor and my peers, I was able to finalise the logo for my brand - 1st one in the last row :)
Moodboard
I've seen a lot of designers on IG creating a moodboard and fetching the brand's colour palette from the images themselves! I was really impressed by this technique and hence I gave it a shot, and I am really amazed by the results. My brand really stayed true to the overall aesthetics of the moodboard!
Phase 2: The Design Process...
Now comes the fun part - DESIGNING! I now moved on to Illustrator and started designing the logo and all the various brand assets including business cards, letterheads, flyers, brochures, brand patterns, etc. Since the logo and the colour palette for my brand were already decided, I played around with different typefaces to try and see which best suits the demands of the project. I finally found a font named Glitther Syavina as the primary font for my brand and decided to go with my recent favourite Poppins as the secondary typeface for the brand.
Playing around with these typefaces, discovering what satisfies my needs and seeing my designs evolve was one of the most remarkable parts of this entire project!
Finally, after designing all the assets in Illustrator, I moved onto Photoshop to design mockups for my design. However, before moving onto this phase, I attended a branding strategies workshop in the Adobe Max conference that was held in October. There, I learnt a few tips and tricks to make the workflow easier when switching between different Adobe software and that is adding all the brand assets and logo to the CC Libraries! This made it really fast and easy for me to fetch my designs and bring them into Photoshop from the library without having to run both the software together, which would have made my computer really slow!
Overall, this was also a really fun process and it is evident form the number of mockups I made! It almost felt like my designs are coming to life :)
Phase 3: Logo and Brand Style Guides
Finally, I reached the last stage of the entire process and that is creating the branding guides. This required me to do a lot of research around what exactly a brand style guide is and how should it be created. I also completed a course on LinkedIn - Creating Brand Identity Assets by Justin Seeley. This course really helped me in terms of understanding what a brand style guide is and how should it vary depending on the scope of the project.
FINAL PROJECT SHOWCASE
FINAL REFLECTION
- Submission Goals - My final submission goals included having all the assets and mockups ready and have the brand style guide created. I also wanted to make a short video (IG reel) showcasing bits and pieces of my project, however, because of my tight schedule I was having difficulty managing my time and hence I couldn’t make it in the end.
- Constrains - I ran into different obstacles at different stages of the project. For example, at the very beginning I was stuck with my ideas for the logo. Moving on I was having a hard time figuring out how should I make a brand style guide, what content should be there in a style guide and so on.
- My Learning - I learned a lot throughout the course of these 14 weeks, both, about branding in general and about myself as well. By searching for various resources like mockup websites, fonts, brand guide inspo, etc. I discovered and learned a lot about branding and how it works. Moreover, I also discovered that I am pretty good at self-directed learning and time management, since I accomplished all the milestones that I had set for myself at the very beginning of the project.
- Portfolio Worthy - Yes, I am really very proud of this project that I have completed all by myself and I think it would look amazing on my portfolio :)
Credits:
Created with an image by Wokandapix - "thanks word letters"