When starting a branding project, a meeting will need to be conducted to provide a direction. In the meeting, topics of overall ideas and inspiration will be discussed. Many questions will be asked such as: What is the look and feel going to be? Who is the target audience? What is the intent of this brand? etc. Finding out as much information as I can to help create a startup style guide. This meeting is to create a smoother transition to the end product.
Once there is some direction given, the next step is to come up with some ideas and inspiration for the a few options in a style guide format. In this stage, I do my own research into what other companines and people are doing for similar brands. Then come up with a few color palettes that I feel with work. I look into different fonts that will fit as well. I will create a few options of style guides with colors, fonts and imagery inspirations. Also providing some examples of work for banners. At the end of this stage, I hope to provide at least three different options to further narrow down those options into the direction the client is looking for.
Also, in this stage, if a logo is needed then I will create some options for that as well. I take the same process as the style guide with looking at inspiration and providing multiple ideas to help guide everyone in the right direction.
At this point, I would have a more finalized look for the brand. Narrowing those previous style guide options into one. We should be close to a logo, if needed, colors, fonts and imagery. Once that is approved, examples of assets can start to be created. A illustrator and html style guide file would be created for this portion of the project.
Lastly, is submitting the final style guide to the client. From this step, other assets like landing pages, brand banners, print items and any other branding objective can be achieved with the finalized documents.
