OUR BRANDING PROCESS

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.

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.

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 or we can undertake a detailed research process.

Note: the breadth of our research will depend on your selected branding package.

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.

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 a single page of logo assessment, or several pages of website assessment.

Based on your feedback we revise the design, while being mindful of the project criteria, until you’re happy with the end result.

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. 

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.

We present to you all final variations of your new brand to approve, and make any final tweaks that are required. 

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. 

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!).

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).

Brand guidelines are useful to make sure your brand is handled correctly by any suppliers in the future.

In the case of a Starter Package, this can be a one-page stylesheet that presents your various logo variations, fonts and official logo colour values.

If you have chosen a Growth or Market Leader package, you will receive a multi-page document that details clear space, typography rules, patterns, and an expanded colour palette, as well as optionally demonstrating stationery, apparel, and signage rules, etc.

Our Market Leader process includes an Accessibility Guide as well.

This is a proven method to explore, test, and refine rough ideas to see if they are worth developing further.

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.

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.

We experiment with different colour schemes, borne out of our research and project criteria. This process includes meeting accessibility best-practices.

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.