Truly Deeply/Madly

There’s Design, and then there’s Brand Design
The thing about brand design is that it brings with it a com­mu­ni­ca­tion imper­a­tive. We are a cre­ative brand agency pro­vid­ing brand strat­egy and design to clients across almost every con­ceiv­able mar­ket. Our method­ol­ogy is built-upon the belief that the role of brand is to serve the busi­ness. It then fol­lows that the role of design is to deliver the promise of the brand. Many design­ers see this approach as unnec­es­sar­ily restric­tive, we we see it as not just com­pletely nec­es­sary, but also the launch­ing pad for unre­stricted design with purpose.

The pri­mary demand we place on our brand iden­tity design is that the solu­tion must com­mu­ni­cate both the brand propo­si­tion and the brand per­son­al­ity to the mar­ket — some­thing a solu­tion of style alone can never achieve. Whilst the defined brand per­son­al­ity dri­ves the style dimen­sion of the design, the con­cep­tual mes­sage pro­vides the cues for com­mu­ni­cat­ing the brand proposition.

What Makes us Brand Design­ers?
Our strate­gic process has been crafted to pro­vide out­puts which directly inform the design process. Those out­puts include a brand per­son­al­ity pro­file, which allows us to define, explore and lever­age the rel­a­tive code of visual lan­guage, and a plat­form made-up of sev­eral lay­ers of the brand propo­si­tion. That plat­form pro­vides the inputs to our con­cep­tual brain­storm­ing, and the mind map pro­vides the fame-work.

We’ve recently been work­ing with Australia’s lead­ing spe­cial­ist Gen Y recruit­ment brand. We pro­vided GXY Search absolute clar­ity around their mar­ket propo­si­tion and lay­ers of brand def­i­n­i­tion to allow them align and focus their brand and busi­ness activ­i­ties. As it often does, this new-found clar­ity of brand led to a brief to update the GXY Search brand identity.

We began the con­cep­tual stage of the design process by chart­ing the three key lay­ers of brand propo­si­tion on a blank mind map:

• Indi­vid­u­al­ism / Self Expres­sion – this was defined as both a key attribute of the Gen Y tribe, as well as the cul­ture of GXY Search itself;
• The ‘C’ Word — the indi­vid­ual nature if the greater Gen Y tribe means they’re as much defined by what they are not, than by what they are. This was high­lighted by the rev­e­la­tion dur­ing the strat­egy process that even for a recruit­ment firm, the term; ‘career’ was con­sid­ered ‘off-brand’ for their Gen Y market.
• Mul­ti­ple, Unique Excite­ment Tribes — the other thing about GXY Search is that their clients can all boast ‘excite­ment jobs’ — the kind of jobs most peo­ple would give their left arm for. But whilst this was a com­mon denom­i­na­tor, dif­fer­ent clients each were part of unique Gen Y tribes from sport to fash­ion, from lifestyle to advertising.

We brain­stormed a num­ber con­cep­tual direc­tions that sprouted from those three start­ing points. As the dis­cus­sion evolved, mind maps were drawn and re-drawn over and over as they refined into the rich­est expres­sions of the three key lay­ers of brand propo­si­tion. The project design­ers then trans­lated the three mind-map direc­tions into a num­ber loose brand iden­tity con­cepts. At each cre­ative review, the con­cepts were assessed against the mind-maps to find the rich­est vein of both rel­e­vance and cre­ative solu­tion. Visual lan­guage style was also injected into the design process, dri­ven by the brand per­son­al­ity out­puts. As the ideas evolved, the strongest solu­tions came to the fore, weaker solu­tions were aban­doned, and the first design con­cept pre­sen­ta­tion took shape.

As always we pre­sented the strate­gic con­text for the cre­ative, walk­ing our client through the jour­ney from strat­egy to brand per­son­al­ity and visual lan­guage, through brand propo­si­tion to the mind map, and through each of the mind-map jour­neys to the design con­cept. The result as we’ve come to expect was a great out­come. We thought all three solu­tions were A grade, but had a par­tic­u­lar soft spot for the one the client selected. Feed­back from the client was firmly pos­i­tive – we’d hit the mark with all con­cepts, and the deci­sion was about which style they felt was most right for posi­tion­ing the busi­ness for the next five years of growth.

We’ve found the mind map process to be incred­i­bly reward­ing, and a crit­i­cal part of our brand iden­tity process. Far from restrict­ing cre­ativ­ity, the process allows the cre­ative side of the mind to roam free, once the log­i­cal side has set the direc­tion. But just as impor­tantly, the mind map allows us to take our clients on the cre­ative jour­ney, show­ing the log­i­cal path­ways that lead to the cre­ative magic.

We think the proof is in the brand iden­tity out­come (Please note these images rep­re­sent design intent and include ‘posi­tional images’ only. Our client GXY Search has gen­er­ously agreed for us to use this project as a case study, even as we refine and finalise their brand identity).

If you’d like to get a clearer pic­ture about how our cre­ative process can deliver your busi­ness a bet­ter brand out­come, why not give us a call.

David Ansett, Bran­da­men­tal­ist
For daily updates of our brand think­ing, fol­low me on Twit­ter
Brand Designer

This arti­cle was writ­ten for, and recently pub­lished on the web site; Processed Iden­tity, which explores the cre­ative processes used to develop visual brand identities.

Tags: Brand Agency, Brand Design, Brand Experience, Brand Strategy, brand-designers-Melbourne, brandamentalist, Corporate Image, David Ansett, Graphic Design Melbourne, GXY Search, Melbourne Brand Strategy, mind maps, Visual Language

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 13th, 2010 at 7:00 am and is filed under Brand Agency, Brand Design, Corporate Image, Graphic Design Melbourne, Small Brands Big Personalities, Visual Language. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.