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What's going to distinguish you from your competitors if you have a competitor?
When we were coming up with our ideas for our project, I mentioned trying to distinguish yourself in terms of what your project is.
So that's one aspect, is for identification against others.
It helps with your tone of voice. Yeah, definitely. Tone of voice. So, reaching your target audience and forming an emotional connection.
Consistency, yeah, so definitely consistency. And consistency across everything, just how it looks, your tone of voice as well. Your design system, your component libraries, all of that is informed by your brand. You're not going to have to design it.
It will come in the values. Basically, your values have to align to what the value is.
Then, from your values, you can derive a name. The name, someone has to kind of, sort of, either explain partly what it is that the product is, for clarity, or for clarity.
Then, your name, your logo mark, word mark, is your name set in a visual way.
So this one, Nespresso, would be a brand that has probably hit that self-expressive part of the value.
This is one where, in fact, generally speaking, this is one that is maybe just a functional
Even just down to the kind of product that you use to make it, they're selling the machine as well as the pods.
You're maybe choosing Nespresso to see the adverts that they put out. It's to kind of say that this is a real, you know, I'm a real coffee-
And different products will have different values. It's not to say that you have to go for I'm going to be the best.
Okay, so from your values comes words and language. That's the next step. Before you actually try and create anything visual, you want to kind of establish what your communication is.
If you think about customer service desks and the types of emails that you receive from certain organizations, they will be heavily used. The tone of voice will be heavily used.
Frozen is stuff that's set in stone. That's things like religious texts, for example, something that is never edited.
And really it's kind of a sliding scale or a gradient ultimately of where you sit within these different tones of voice. So it's a personal version.
It doesn't really matter. It's just trying to speak to people on a level that they will want and understand.
It's great for the packaging that they use. It's always changing. And if you haven't bought a carton of Oakley any time...
It all kind of fits within that same kind of set.
Apple did this with their, in a very first computer, and just in terms of what the difference might mean for them and for how that ran.
So, visually and experientially, those two things are very, very different.
And then when they introduced the iMac, they did it again. So they even drew reference to what they had done prior and had the hello again.
So really what you have to ask yourselves when it comes to your brands is who is your ideal customer? What pain points do you solve? What kind of personality does it have?
The story around it was about bringing the ingredients to a new market. It was about taking inspiration from this area and taking inspiration from nature. I'm sure it's getting the best ingredients and bringing flavours to Northern Ireland, ultimately. That was kind of the whole story that we put in place for it. Ultimately, it wasn't really that.
That's why it's not particularly a great example. Ultimately, as a branding exercise, what we need to do is explain the story.
It actually isn't doing, at the end of the day, but a story that would connect with our audience, a story that would make sense of why this Mexican burrito place, the prop, sort of, came to be.
There's the intonations and the expression that you can't give because you're not there in a written format if you're speaking.
Your tangography choice should do something similar, so it should align with your tone of voice.
It should be something that can assess the character of your run.
So again, your tone, there's a real difference in typographic choice in the way this is written versus something like this.
Very, very different messages, basically only on tones, but they say the exact same thing.
They used to send these things out to design companies, these type specimens. And if you can still get your hands on one, they're very, very useful to look at.
They are great for whenever a typeface is designed. The type designers will almost tell you what the tone is.
You can see they are classy and a little bit sassy. They are trying to set a tone and set a mood.
Critically, what I would kind of say is to avoid the substantive...
It's designed to have no motion. It's designed to have very little character. That's why it's a sans serif.
And you can see what that looks like with fashion brands in recent years.
So this is a list of all the kind of, you know, ease and the wrong.
So they're removing all of their character.
And if you're just looking at it in isolation, yeah, maybe this does look a little bit more bold and proper.
When it comes to naming, there's sort of... I can only really talk about my process for naming something if I've done all the work in terms of...
It shouldn't be the first one that comes to mind, but really just kind of writing down words as they come to your head.
It supports the image the company wants to convey. So, tone of voice, story, values, those add to the meaning. So your name should reflect that.
Another technique I use is to go to idioms. I don't tend to go to the sources because the sources are...
Okay, some logo marks.
So, two different types of logo mark. You have your word mark, and you have your logo mark.
You just read the name. These things, there's no word to read there.
In addition to that, you would have a combination mark.
When you get to your local marks, there's two distinctions as well. There's pictorial and abstract. And we know what abstract means. It doesn't really have a particular meaning.
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Custom handwritten ones. These are much trickier to do, by the way.
The handwritten fonts that exist are not very good. They will look fake. They will not look genuine or authentic at all.
It's reflective of somebody's handwriting. Disney, same thing. I think I might be saying that this is all Disney's signature. And that's kind of what led to the logo.
So this is a digitized version of handwriting. There's no font to state that. That was just put together authentically.
That's a sort of fundamental of it. I think color obviously gets applied at some point, but it shouldn't be necessary in order to kind of...
Where they apply to brands is more to do with consistency. And the reason I'm just pointing out those four things is because...
where you maybe got an RGV value,
WeThere's accessibility, which we'll get to in a second, but in terms of color technology and how you might choose and draw different colors.
It means trustworthy, or that's the association is that it's trustworthy. That's why they go that way.
Most of the words associated with the colors, again, your tone of voice, your values, will speak a little bit to what type of tone you're going for in terms of color.
It is different in different cultures. Colors will have different meanings in different cultures. So again, if your product is something that is going to be...
So it's a quick way to get a nice color palette that you can start to work with.
There's stuff like packaging, signage, surfaces, speeches, spoken word, as much as it is written.
Story is a great example.
And then the language that they use around it as well.
and then they created this