Startup branding

The success of the project starts before the actual work does. So before we start, we would like to understand the formal request from your team and real business and personal goals. We need to discuss restrictions, expectations, decision-making process in detail. We must ensure we are on the same page and understand each other.

It's also essential to do a risk assessment. One of the most common problems is changing a group of decision-makers on your end during the project. For example, if you are about to hire a new marketing director, it's better to wait until the moment they are on board. Otherwise, a new person with another vision could slow down or even wreck the project. It's not because this new vision needs to be corrected but because we are not synchronized from the beginning, and the rationale of past decisions needs to be clarified.

At this stage, we need to discuss and approve how we communicate and deliver results. Our usual approach to presenting results is a combination of the screencast, in which we explain our thinking process and rationale, and a PDF or Figma presentation. It helps to ensure that each team member from your end has a chance to hear the same information and avoid issues with finding a comfortable time slot for each teammate. After you check the update, we can hop on a call, answer questions, discuss and get your feedback. However, some clients are not used to watching screencasts and ignore them. We need to know this upfront, or else important information and rationale could be missing.

At this stage, we need to understand who you are, the intrinsic values of the team and founders, what's the brand equity, what are functional and emotional benefits of your product and brand, what the competitive landscape looks like, what the core archetype of your brand is, and what users think about your current brand (if it exists).

Teammates rarely talk about their vision of the brand and product or the values. Even if it seems you are synchronized, it usually appears that you are not. We challenge you with practice-proved questions, propose to do a workshop, and sometimes conduct interviews with team members. It allows us to understand how different people in your team see the brand, analyze it and make all the differences obvious to you. It also helps to understand the primary archetype of your brand. It's all about looking at your brand from the inside.

Analyzing the competitive landscape helps to understand archetypes and storytelling of other brands to range sweet spots for future positioning. Analyzing user feedback helps to understand if there is any gap between what you say about your brand and what people hear about it, highlight areas of disconnection and consider it in the future. Again, it's about looking at your brand from the outside.

It's important to underscore that we focus on building a brand that fits your vision of the brand rather than trying to please every user and follow their requests.

Now that we understand more about your team’s values, competitors, and brand reputation, we can recommend areas for positioning the brand in the minds of others. First, we came up with one of the few possible positioning hypotheses. Then, we explained how each would influence your visual and verbal identity and future brand behavior.

We also propose a conceptual metaphor rooted in the archetype and function of your product/brand. The conceptual metaphor at this stage is a simple yet powerful phrase constriction “Your brand is like …”. Once this metaphor and positioning are approved, and all your team inspired, we can move forward.

Functional results at this stage look like a document, the base for our future creative process. It’s like a compass for design experts and a set of acceptance criteria for you. Instead of judging future design concepts subjectively, which leads to a vast number of iterations until you find a compromise that pleases the visual aesthetic of different team members, you have more objective parameters which can even be measured.

Sometimes positioning or re-positioning requires creating a new name for a brand or product. We also do naming at this stage and link it to both positioning and conceptual metaphor. Depending on the requirements for the name, the process could vary. It's faster to create names for internal products, and it gets longer for international brands. We can research similar names, but we are not providing a trademark registration service. You may need to find a separate partner to register all legal rights for the name.

At this stage, it’s time to visualize what a brand with selected positioning and conceptual metaphor could look like. It’s not a final well-polished design asset but a creative vision, a direction.

There are a few parameters of a good visual concept. It should match the archetype visual aesthetic, extend and support the idea of conceptual metaphor and inspire you, precisely in this order. Remember, we are not doing visual identity for you; we do it for the brand. So it should fit the brand, not the exact person. If your team is ready to judge concepts according to the positioning, that’s great. If it’s hard to switch off a subjective part, we’ll help and conduct 7-second tests using UsabilityHub.

To be clear, getting the whole team inspired is essential. Otherwise, it might be hard to let the new brand land. But if we base our decisions on the opinions of the current team members only, it might not be a durable solution.

At this stage, we are not talking about the exact right tone of color, typography kerning, or even the font. It can be improved later. What’s important is the potential of the concept for further flexible growth.

When we approve the concept, we are not changing it in the future — improving, adopting, polishing but not changing.

Now it's time to decompose the visual concept, improve each part, and gather it back again. Depending on the concept and project needs, we'll work on the logo sign, wordmark, illustrative and illustrative systems, motion studies, and brand typography and create basic guidelines to explain the core visual principles of the brand's visual identity.

During this stage, we'll constantly compare results with the positioning, conceptual and visual metaphor to ensure it follows the approved direction. In case of need, we'll conduct UsabilityHub tests to measure accuracy.

You can decide whether you want to dive deeper into approving details or trust us to do this for you. Of course, certain decision-making is required, but you can choose the intensity. Basic guidelines and visual identity principles are not the ends. It’s the beginning — the beginning of the brand life. Sometimes clients want our help and support in creating actual design assets and applications of the visual language, extending the guidelines, or just calibrating your internal design team. Ideally, it’s the beginning of a journey of an ongoing partnership.