Craft a visual identity you love

2. Sketching time!

Your visual identity includes your logo, color palette, typography, visual elements and possibly photography, illustration and a design system or brand book (a set of rules of lay-out specs to make sure your communications actually look coherent overall). You decide how detailed you want to specify the visual aspects of your ‘face’.

Let’s say you need a basic visual identity with a logo, color palette and typography. Some clients come to me with a strong color preference, which makes me want to start with defining the color palette first, before starting with the design of the logo. Others might have some rough ideas of what they want (or don’t want! Also very important information) for their logo, but no idea of the colours. In this case I will make my logo proposals in different color versions and derive a color palette from the logo. Typography can also be difficult for some business owners to visualise, so I always present different font choices in such a way that you can easily ‘feel’ if they work for your brand.

I will create 4 or more concepts of logo’s for you

The first round of logo proposals consist of 4(-ish, can be more) rather elaborated sketches (this means, they are not fully ready-to-go logo’s yet, but clear enough to choose from), in full-color. Within these 4 ideas/sketches (with possibly different color versions of each idea) there’s almost always 1 (or sometimes 2) winner(s)! If not, rest assured, we’ll figure that out as well.

Color palettes and font options, presented to you in a clear way

In this first round of sketches I will also send you 4 different color palettes to choose from. Sometimes it is difficult to imagine this color palette ‘in action’, that’s why I visualise these colours in a ‘standard’ web page, together with different font options (typefaces). This way, you can see the colours and fonts working their magic on a standard text with headings, body text and buttons.

Your logo and your color palette go hand in hand. Depending on our first talk I start with either your color palette, or your logo. Logo colours are then derived from your brand color palette, or vice versa, your color palette is an extension of your logo colours.

3. To the point

During our first talk we had a purely verbal communication. Now, we have something solid, the missing element, the actual visualisation of what we talked about. Your logo, colours and typefaces in front of you, make you instantly understand what you want, and what you don’t want! That’s great, because this time we talk, our conversation is already more to the point, more concrete as to where your visual identity should go / is going.

Working on the logo of your choice

I develop several versions of the logo idea of your choice according to our talk and the feedback/comments you gave me. At this stage, the color palette is usually decided. If this is not the case, I will work with the ‘winning’ color palettes to create several versions of the logo idea of your choice. This way, we will always get there.

At the end of this stage your brand new logo is polished and tweaked exactly the way you want it! Together with a solid color palette and font use, your basic visual identity is complete. Congratulations!

What if it doesn’t go exactly as planned?

The way I describe the process is the most common way this usually goes. This doesn’t mean that it couldn’t go differently. If it takes more than these 2 rounds, it takes more. Crafting a visual identity really is a ‘quest’, including a bit of soul searching even. Sometimes this goes fast and without bumps in the road, sometimes the roads to our goal are curvy. But I take it as my responsibility to create a final result that you will absolutely love. I wouldn’t take it any other way!