Blog Post #2: Prototyping Logos, Corporate Workflow, and Brand Style Guides 03/01/2024
Hello all, as you have most likely seen my second side post, there has been a major restructuring of this project. DFX 452 is now entirely incorporated into my workflow at Junietta, where I am the Lead Designer. I am at the forefront of our product placement advertisements, logo design, and other design-oriented works. It is a fusion of 2D and 3D digital illustration, and is extremely dynamic. It is one of my first tastes into corporate culture and workflow, and it is fantastic for me to experience this.
This year our workload has increased significantly as our minimum viable product is almost complete, the PCB boards, shell, and product layout have been finalized. The first few months of 2024 we were extremely busy gaining more funding from stakeholders and innovation events at University of Cincinnati and abroad. In collaboration with:
- The Founder (In charge of operations, connections, CPU architecture, product shell, knobs, rotors)
- Chief Financial Officer (Finances, marketing)
- Lead Operations Manager (Autodesk Fusion360 project managing, electronics R&D),
- Lead Designer (Myself, product placement w/ CFO, meetings with the team, rendering the product (2D, 3D), logo development, brand development, advertisements, relations, social media)
We are tirelessly working towards our goal of finalizing our brand/logo/style, and releasing our portable synthesizer product, which we call a universal music device, the J-Cassette.
This post, I would like to go over our current draft of our brand style guide. This comprehensive guide at the moment includes...
1. Brand Style & Definition
2. Color Scheme
3. Design Layouts
4. Typography
5. Font Weights & Sizes
6. Shapes & Design Elements
7. Capitalization
8. Punctuation
9. Logo
10. Social Interactions
11. Social Media Accounts
12. Product & Design Philosophy
13. Working Principles
14. Projected Employee Pay & Basic Financial Overview
This can be a lot to take in, and brand guides are rather long. While I can't post the entire draft brand guideline as it is in the works and includes sensitive company content, here is the first page.
Here you can see, even in this basic version of the guideline (Which right now it sits around 6 pages), we are using our selected fonts, color scheme, and displaying our mission statement. Each piece of content is recognizable as something that is Junietta, the center purpose of a brand guide.
Early this month, most likely over spring break, I will be finalizing this draft with the founder and we will send it to a seasoned style guide professional who is familiar with Junietta, and we will seek his feedback and suggestions.
Moving forward, as detailed in the second side post, we continue to prototype and experiment with logos for the company, with input from the team as well as myself. Shown below are a few of our logo prototypes:
In this very basic collage, you can see just how much the logo has changed. The earliest logo, the hexagonal "J!" gives off a very different feeling than the most recent prototype iteration (Not currently our final logo), the multicolored cosmic planet, seen below by itself:
The workflow of collaborating with a design team is constantly going back and forth between iterations, thought processes, and opinions. It's a collaborative exercise, but I think it is important to understand just how long it can take to find a finalized logo or brand, no matter how simple it may seem on the final product. Most of the logos displayed on the above collage were created in the past 6 months or later (A good half of them were just from this semester alone). Somewhere near my workstation I have plenty of sketches and notes from past weekly meetings about how we are to approach the logo, ranging from the idea of the Earth's cores as audio waves, a cosmic J, to the planet above.
We must be prepared for when we graduate to understand this industry. It is fast-paced, but it is also slow in many aspects - there are so many working gears. For example, when I design a logo for Junietta, when we are finding out brand - I do the following...
1. List out a moodboard and my thoughts.
2. Seek the founder for feedback.
3. Create a prototype, showcase to the team.
4. Note the team's feedback.
5. Modifying the prototype with the feedback given.
6. Rinse and repeat.
While creating your brand, you must be careful in choosing something that appeals to your customer demographic as well as exemplifies the product as you see fit. We've met with a few clients who enjoy our current in-progress branding, and that is what we are building off of. However, in some products there are so many different brands that are modified constantly. You can see the color palette and geometry in our original "J!" logo is very different from what we have now.
I strongly recall the sheet amount of test logos, team meeting notes, and more that I was shown while shadowing at Mertz Design Studio earlier this academic year. It was even more so that what you can see in the above Junietta logo collage.
I'm very satisfied with how I am learning so much about the industry in this aspect prior to graduation!
Shown below we have a very basic mock-up that we had presented to University of Cincinnati earlier this semester of the J-Cassette itself with one of our prototype logos... we can take into account our primary colors and how they give the instrument the "playful" and "accessible" feel that we are going for... below that picture you can see a very basic prototype shell of the product as well.
I look forward to posting more about this project!
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