Keeping things together is kinda necessary for developing anything, from making illustrations to editing videos and developing a brand. This post? Blog? Whatever ya wanna call it, we're gonna walk through how I have and still putting my brand together. Yes, this might be a lot of nit-picking and annoying self questions but it's kinda part of the whole process. The worst part is putting what I can do into a box. As an artist of many monikers and talents, I can do alot, and that's not a bad thing but to help focus this whole brand journey, we have to start somewhere. That starting point was the colors.
Colors (color pallete)
I like keeping consistent with my palettes and I thought the best place to start is the color I use the most: my dark brown linework color. I did some minor tinkering with which hue of brown I liked and landed on this one. Light enough to be a color but not dark enough to be confused with black.
But not everything can be one color. Oddly during this time, I saw there was an art trend with the cartoon network, “draw ___ using only the CN color pallet”. It was something kinda quick but after posting it I started experimenting more with my color palette. Wanted something similar to the CMYK Cartoon network had, so i started to look back at my own works I've done for years. A very obvious pattern showed up pretty quickly.
Lots of reds/pinks, blues, and yellows. Seems I favor a lot of red and pink.
I took some time to do some AB testing with variants of each color. Using colors I used in projects I love and tried everything I could. Color overlaying, gradient blending, color map overlays, I played with these colors until I found the ones I loved.
These five are the base of the colors I use daily and added 6 sister colors (3 lighter versions and 3 shades of the main color three) to help round out any adjustments needed. Some extra personal fun I've been doing is naming these colors to make them feel more mine, something that shows i picked these lovely colors for a reason.
I highly recommend naming them, as it makes a better connection to the brand.
It might be a bit much but color is important to my visuals, and my identity as an artist. So it's something I needed to be annoyed over!
Logo
A brand mark or a logo is pretty important but oddly enough, I figured mine out years ago in college. I did stay in the concept phase for awhile, working with different styles and aesthetics that would work for me but none of them stuck.
Until one day…I just looked at a doodle I did of myself, and how I drew my hair. A simple bun spiral with a pin in it. I’ve had this hairstyle for over a decade at this point and it's pretty recognizable. After trying out some variations, it kind of just stuck, worked, and has stayed that way since then.
Text font
I've tried tons of fonts over the years and nothing quite worked that felt similar to my style of art. Until I found Noodle Monoline by Wahyu Aji Prasetyo and Autoguard by Suby Studio, these two fonts were perfect but to cover bases, I wanted a less script-ish font. Something that isn't loose cursive, and Overlock by Dario Manuel Muhafara worked perfectly!
So sewing these elements together isn't too bad for a start. If I wasn't needing anything extra as an identity this is a pretty good place to stop.
Butttttttttttttttttttt.......
I'm not gonna, ‘cause we aren’t done.
Let’s GrindStone This idea
Let's get back into, a quick TLDR; in making my brand I’ve worked out my color pallet, Logo, and fonts using my art to help make everything cohesive. Since we have specific elements that can make the bones of a brand let's refine some of the uses of these elements.
Brand guides importance
SO! From me research, a brand guide is to help show/figure out how to use elements that support the visual identity of your brand. This document is basically a research paper but for you, and your brand! It's just putting it on paper and making it referenceable for future use.These guides can technically have anything you need to outline rules and ideas, but here are some basic but standard sections you should have;
Overview page, just something quick that has your logo, some simple logo alt versions, basic color palettes, some vibe imagery, and maybe some patterns and iconography. Should be on a simple spread, very common.
Brand voice, this mainly contains information thats useful to help figure out the audience and how your brand should sound.
Logo use page, shows you examples of how to use different versions of your logo, different colors, sizes, simplified, etc. It's to mainly reference like most of this document.
Yah Nah page, basically a “this works” “this doesnt” page, some larger brand guides will have this split up as part of other sections.
Typography usage, very similar to Yah Nah page but with a text spin, who gets to be the header, whos the font that needs to be part of TOS?
Brand imagery, Basically a moodboard. Photos, imagery, art, words, when put together have the vibe of your brand
Examples, a sample of brand assets, like banners, icons, posts, websites, business cards, etc
Credits page, this helps keeps all information together, like if you're using a specific font you can find the original file or site.
Putting all these together makes a brand guide identity. There was NO PLACE I could find that has very specific check boxes to tick off when trying to figure this all out. Just mainly places trying to sell ya a custom brand guide, which was hugely out of my budget. But with hine-sight, the head ace of figuring all this out from scratch the cost might be worth it tbh.
A lot of the information when I was putting mine together made me question certain aspects of my brand? My Art? Me? It really helped me figure out certain questions I’ve been having early on, like what I wanted to place myself in different industries. Without making this too long, this line of thinking helped me; work goals, industry placement, dream job, ideal audience, style of work, maturity of work, and more.
Working on this version, we all know I'm gonna adjust this again in 2+ years, has made me want to experiment more with different aspects of graphic design. It's so odd but also so fun putting this together. It has made me feel more secure in certain brand decisions. I do notice I do need to try greater variation for my posts and style, but I do like the direction its going in!
You’ll probably see some of this put to the test, new standard thumbnails, image posts, and normal brand stuff. This is a trail, test, try, as this isn't my normal thing, but this might be a way to improve slowly. Ever so slowly~