Branding Part 2

What Makes a Good Brand?

“The goal is not just to be recognizable, but to be so closely identified with your company’s defining characteristic that you become known for it.” - tailorbrands.com.

A brand is all about perception and trust - it’s about influencing what your audience thinks when they interact with your organisation, and keeping true to the image that you create. For these reasons, perhaps the most important facet of a good brand is to focus on your target audience and establish a connection with the ideals they value. Big companies spend a lot of time and money getting this right, but in the scope of this course it’s easy enough to boil down a brand identity to a few core ideals.

Establishing those ideals is a matter of keeping  your branding consistent, and making sure that your product or service lives up to the promises the brand makes. You can find out more about effective branding in this article on tailorbrands.com.

Next take a look at this great video from Trigger Communications for a breakdown of some popular companies and how their branding focuses on their core values.

Now that we have a better understanding of what makes a good brand, let’s talk about our second assignment. In order to create a logotype for our brand we’re going to dive deeper into Adobe Illustrator and create some beautiful typography to support our logomark from the previous workshop. 

Let’s start with some more insights from Ben Bowen on what makes a strong logo.

Working with Typography

Typography refers to the various ways in which text can be styled and arranged on a page. This includes font, text size, alignment, positioning, colour, and any other effects which give variety or character to the overall visual style of your text.

Watch this video from GCFLearnFree.org outlining the key elements of typography.

Don’t be put off by the technicalities of typography, there’s plenty of room to be extremely creative and playful when dealing with type and layout design. Take a look at this article from creativebloq.com, which gives some great examples of what can be done with typography.

‘Typography Portraits’ on Behance

The word ‘font’ comes from the french ‘fonte’, meaning ‘something that has been melted’. This is because early printed fonts were made from cast metal letters which were used in physical printing. In a digital sense, we use the same word to refer to the visual style of the letters that we type.

Take a look at this video from Techquickie to get a better idea of what we mean when we talk about fonts.

Working with a variety of different and interesting fonts allows the designer to express the tone and style they wish to portray. Getting students to experiment with fonts can be a great introduction to developing further understanding. However, it’s important that you consider whether the fonts you select are readable - it should go without saying that if the reader can’t understand what they’re seeing, the publication isn’t doing its job properly!

There are several brilliant font websites where you can find free fonts to add to InDesign and many other Adobe apps. Watch this short video to understand the basics of Adobe Fonts.

Here are a few more examples of sites that we recommend for finding free fonts:

• DaFont.com
• Google Fonts
• FontSquirrel.com

Now that we’ve got a better idea of the key elements involved in creating typography, let’s move on to our second video tutorial with Adobe Illustrator.

In our second video tutorial Ali Blackwell shows you how to marry graphics and typography together to create a logotype in Adobe Illustrator.

Your Assignment

‘Using Adobe Illustrator, create a logotype for your new brand.’