Project Summary
Wordmark Logo
The Process
Preparation and Creating a Brand Concept
The objective of the Personal Learning Plan (PLP) writing project in this Applied Professional Writing was to prepare students for the writing tasks that they will encounter in their professional careers. Because I am wanting to work as a designer, my writing tasks needed to address communications reflective of and in response to visual works. This is why I decided to explore and take steps to develop a brand identity design project as part of my PLP project.
Because the primary goal of this project was to practice writing tasks, I wanted the brand I was designing to be somewhat relevant to writing composition, so I came up with the idea of a writing assistant app called Revisr. Since I would be working on a project within a project, the layered meaning and self-referential nature of the brand concept made the experience more rewarding and engaging for me.
The Design Brief
The first stage in this process, as with every good design process, was creating a design brief. However, I would argue that when you are working as part of a creative team (or a design agency as I was pretending to for the sake of my PLP activities) it’s necessary to develop two design briefs to address your internal and external audiences separately. In other words, one brief will be composed with the intent of sharing it with the client and will be more concise, while the other will be developed for use by team members and include more detail and jargon.
Design briefs can take on many different formats. I developed this project’s design brief with a tool called Milanote which makes use of “boards”, so my brief resembled a moodboard and included several columns for the different topics I needed to address.
This brief board was sort of like a sandbox, from which I was building a sandcastle. In other words, it offered the perfect balance of flexibility and structure I needed in order to define the brand and project goals more clearly.
The sections I included in my brief were:
- About the Client
- Details about the company
- Key people
- The Product
- Value Proposition
- Supplemental Products/Services
- Project Goals
- Objectives
- “The goal of this project is to develop impactful brand visuals to convert ad viewers to users during the company’s digital marketing campaigns.”
- Deliverables
- A true brand identity can call for a long list of deliverables, but, in this case, I focused on creating the wordmark logo
- Objectives
- Target Audience
- Competitors
- Style Direction
- Brand Personality
While all this information is valuable when working with any client, the most important information for me to keep in mind when moving forward were contained in the “style direction” and “brand personality” sections.
Style direction refers to a more nebulous description of the client’s taste or ideas that they have for their brand based on other work they have seen. Brand personality refers more specifically to the impression of character traits you wish to leave on the audience. In other words, if the brand was a person, how might you describe them?
I determined that I wanted this brand to:
- “look classic and well-established while also staying current”
- “reference to element of human error for which the tool is designed to compensate”
- This is why I removed a letter from the brand’s name so that the word “reviser” is misspelled!
- emphasize the permanency of ink (printing) as a motive for thorough revision
- I wanted to also evoke some nostalgia by subtly referencing the days of the typewriter, and I did this by using a slab-serif font for the wordmark logo
…as well as take on these personality traits:
- Authoritative
- Innovative
- Creative
- Efficient
- Dynamic
- Academic
- Resourceful
- Expert
- Empowering
Another method that I found to be useful is to assign an archetype to the brand.