My Branding Process — for an E-story app (a passion project)
It’s a tedious task when it comes to branding. It takes a lot more than just designing while we are creating a brand. It is not just about the logo but a whole lot of other things such as what the business represents, what are its goals and motivations, who are its users, etc.
In this article, I will be sharing my thought as well as the design process that I follow whilst creating a brand.
A short brief about my passion project
Being an avid story reader myself, I thought of building a mobile app for reading and writing stories from scratch. This app is for those who enjoy reading and writing stories digitally. Since it was a passion project so I had the freedom to choose a name for it. After brainstorming, I came up with the name ‘Book Owl’ for the brand. I will explain later why I chose this name for the brand.
The following are the steps that I usually follow in the process of creating a brand.
Competitors’ logo analysis
So, the first thing that I always tend to do before starting a branding process is doing a competitor’s logo analysis. For this, I go to the internet and search for all the possible competitors of the business that I am branding for. I collect their logos and then place them on an artboard. I then make a scale where I write ‘simple’ at one extreme side of the scale and ‘complex’ on the other. It represents how simple or complex the logo is.
Then I place the logos within the scale as per the simplicity/complexity of their designs.
This step helps me know what kinds of logos are being preferred by the competitor brands.
In this particular case, I observed that the e-story platforms didn’t prefer extremely complex logos for their brands and have tried to keep their logos simple or moderately complex with the use of either font or font-illustrations or font-icon. Thus, I decided to go with a similar trend and opted for a font-icon look for my brand logo.
Making a mood board
For the next step in the process, I jumped to Pinterest and curated the ideas for the brand. I then made a mood board for my brand. The mood board consisted of the vibe, color palette, fonts, design, etc that I wanted to incorporate into my brand.
I wanted my brand to have a feeling and touch of a good old book reading vibe. So, I decided to go for dark brown color with serif fonts that would give off the old books vibes.
Then, I wrote down all the words that would represent the vibes and feeling for the brand that I was going for. I did this so that I could keep these words in mind throughout the process of designing the brand and design accordingly. I wanted my brand to represent peace and give off the calm feeling which a book nerd feels while reading his/her favorite book.
Choosing font/s
Then, I made a font board to select the font for my brand. So, I tried about 8 different serif display fonts. Then I used the elimination method and eliminated the fonts that sparked the littlest of joy for me. Doing so, I was left with only one font that I liked for my brand so I chose it as my primary font. And then, I chose ‘Poppins as my secondary font.
Making a color palette
After, the fonts were selected I moved on to making my color palette with the primary, secondary and tertiary colors for my brand. I curated the colors for the palette from my mood board.
Designing the logo
After the colors and the fonts were selected I then tried a lot of different designs for my logo and then came up with the design of the logo as shown below. I was really happy with my logo design as it depicted exactly what I wanted the brand to represent.
Designing the splash screen, icons, and patterns
I then went ahead and made the splash screen, icons, and patterns for the brand.
For the splash screen, I made an illustration of a girl reading a book in her cozy room at night. It sort of gave off the vibe of a cozy reading environment. I then placed an overlay of my secondary color in lighter and darker shades over the illustration and then placed the primary logo on it.
I excluded the font and just used the icons of the book and the owl as the secondary logo as it is always a good idea to have a primary and a secondary logo for a brand that can be used for different screens.
I also came up with a short slogan for my brand; ‘For booklovers’. I think the slogan suits the brand as it is for the book nerds who love reading.
Break down of the logo
So, I incorporated three elements into my logo.
First, the full name in the font that I had chosen, then I added a book that represents a storybook. And finally, I added the last element i.e. an owl which represents the book nerds who love reading till late at night.
Creating mockups
I also went ahead and made some mockups for my brand. I used the patterns and the logo for the mockup designs. I mocked the designs over the thick covers of a book, on the phone case, and also made a splash screen mockup to represent how the brand would look like in real life.
So this is my design process for building a brand logo. I am currently working on wireframing its UI and would love to share the final UI design of this app so, stay tuned for my next article.
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