What I have learned

This being my first ever branding project I knew very little to begin with. To me branding was closing a colour scheme and a logo. However during this module I have learnt there is a lot more to branding as it is creating a whole personality for a company rather than just how it looks. First of all I didn’t know brands had values never mind them being such a huge part of the process, during my experience I made very decision with my values in mind so to think I never knew they were a thing sounds ridiculous now. I’ve learnt that brand values define a brands purpose and communicate its beliefs to its customers. They represent what the brand stands for and are a reflection of the brands vision.

During this module I also learnt the importance of a word mark and logo mark. This is something I found extremely interesting as it hadn’t crossed my mind that every brand has a word mark or logo mark. At first glance I thought many brands just typed their name in their chose of typeface and called it a day but after the lectures about word mark and logo marks I found myself looking at almost every brand around me and the majority of them had created a mark for their brand.

What challenged me

In the beginning of the module I felt I struggled a bit as I find research really challenging however with the amount I have completed this year I do feel myself improving. I feel that this was difficult for me as it was such a wide range to research and I maybe needed help to chose an area to research within banks wether than the whole topic as I got a bit lost. I also found it quite challenging to come up with a unique idea for the brand. I felt everything I thought of already exists. This was a big problem when choosing a name. I also found creating my brand guidelines quite challenging as I had never done anything like this before. Creating a large document to show my brand sounded quite easy however once I started I struggled with what to put in it and how to lay it out. They took me quite a long time to complete as I was very unsure of what to do. Looking through other brands documents helped with this.

What to improve on

I feel for my first branding project I done pretty well however there are definitely things I wish to improve on. In the future I would like to increase my amount of research to ensure I know everything before beginning a task. For example I feel like when completing my brand guidelines I was actually unsure of what they were meant to do, researching this further before starting would have prevented this and saved me time. I also would have liked to complete more research outside of the project work to expand my knowledge on the industry. I was unable to do this due to my time keeping, I believed that I could complete tasks a lot quicker than I could. Lastly, I wish I had completed my tasks earlier to be able to receive feedback as I hadn’t realised we would miss the last 2 weeks in class.