OUGD505 - Design Production 2: Build A Brand

Today we were given a one day brief to build branding guidelines for a given profession in a group of three.

My partner's were Daisy and Dan, and our profession was an Electrician.

We started doing mindmaps for electricians, and at the same time were thinking of ideas for names.

We quickly decided that we liked the name Plug, and Dan thought of a strapline for it - Don't Shrug, Call Plug. We thought it was catchy, and wanted the company to be quite friendly and approachable. As it is a start up business, we thought it wouldn't be too corporate, and electricians as people wouldn't be very serious.

We said we wanted it to be a sans serif to match the less serious tone, and Dan put one on a van to start experimenting, and I said I would create a custom font and vector plug.

It started going well, but I had a little trouble with getting the G to look right.

I got it looking right in the end, and Dan and Daisy liked it so I sent it to them both.

I did the colour version when we decided on those.

The colours are yellow and green, because electricians use a type of wire called the 'earth wire', which are in these colours, so people who know about the trade will recognise what it is - as our audience is housing developer companies so they will already know.

We then split into what tasks each person was doing. 

Dan was in charge of van mockup, business card, uniform mockup and newspaper ad.

Me and Daisy worked on the guidelines together, bringing it all together in the presentation.

For the presentation, I looked at existing brand guidelines, and wrote down what we should include in ours.

I was doing the look and feel of the presentation, and tried a couple of things before settling on the final design. I wanted to include the yellow strip which is featured on the design work so that it fitted in.

Here is a run through of the presentation. 

I put the logo as the first page quite big so that we could introduce ourselves.

Then it goes into Who We Are. For the style of it I wanted to have a contents on each page, with each page highlighted so the audience knows whereabouts they are. I kept it small and simple, and had the key information on the slides, as we would talk further about it.

This is the mission statement. 

Here is the strapline Dan thought of.

I wrote the content for the logo, and had the minimum size featured, which is on the business card. I also included the icon, which can be used on its own - for example as the thumbnail for an app.

Daisy wrote the Do's and Don'ts for the logo, and I put these onto the slides.

I also did the colour slides, but we all picked the colours we thought would work best for the brand.

Here are the typefaces that we used, including the custom one that I made.

Here is the tone of voice of the company.

Here are the business cards Dan made.

Here is the van Dan made.

Here is the website I made.

Here is part of the uniform Dan made.

Here is a newspaper ad Dan made.

I also designed a homepage for a website.

I put it together quickly, but made sure I used both of the weights we have specified, the yellow angle as well as the colour scheme. I think it fits well with the brand, and it is clean and simple to match everything else.

To present it I made a quick rectangle to frame it rather than put it on a digital mac, to save time and make it look cleaner.

Here is the presentation:

I really enjoyed this brief today, as I liked having the opportunity to work in a group that I wouldn't normally work with and create something from the bottom up. I really needed a lesson on how to create brand guidelines, and it will come in handy for the next brief. I'm really impressed with how much we achieved today, and it just shows how much can get done in a day.