At my design course, the first step to studying which aspects of a brand to communicate in the identity design was to create a mind map.

A huge part of generating the mind map is current research on trending styles and dominant styles in the market, both in the big companies and in the small boutique companies, all of whom are competitors to your brand.

I tried different combinations of logo ideas by focusing on different keywords. I finally narrowed down to my most successful concept and refined it further.

The first round of conceptualisation is nothing more than doodling endlessly on paper, without censorship. Here’s a snapshot of my sketchbook.

I decided to work with custom typography, rather than choosing a preexisting font. I played with various brushes and pens, experimenting with thickness and style.

After choosing a successful sketch, the design was digitised, traced over, refined to pixel perfection. This became the final typographic logo.

Logos are usually paired with brand colours and supporting fonts, so that all appearances, whether digital or print, of the brand is consistent across the board.

I chose these candy pop stripe colours to give the brand a playful retro feeling.

The first business stationery we learned to design was the ubiquitous business card.

How do you capture everything you are on a small rectangle of paper?

Why, with identity design of course!

Identity design implemented in primary print business stationery; in the letterhead, the envelope and in business cards.

I love the idea of using the stripes inside the envelope, though practically speaking it contributes to unnecessary printing and paper costs.

The best way to present a identity design to a client is to actually show what the logo would look like on various applications. This is a fictitious shopfront, a mockup of what the logo would look like in real life.

The retail experience starts with the storefront, then the objects in the store, to the labelling to the final bag you walk out with. I wanted the bag to be a work of art in itself. Something that looks great on your arm!

Shopping Bags, T-shirts, Merchandise. This is a mockup, or imagining of what the logo will look like when it’s in use. Mockups are an integral part of the design process, and are the step between finalising a logo and actually implementing it in real life.

I used the seastar from the typographic logo as an icon to be used as an abbreviation of the whole logo. Think of this as Apple’s apple and Nike’s swoosh. Truly iconic brands go so far as to be able to drop the typographic logo and just be recognized by the icon!

I created some surface patterns on a different project and it worked really well for this project. This one is a playful cat chasing a bird, inspired by a doodle penned by my sister.

The label design. also part of the brand experience, mirrors the styling of the shopping bag. The stripes turned out to be a successful print motif for all brand assets, and as I saw, on the digital medium as well.

This is an example of how the branding can be carried forward on the digital medium as well, such as on the product page of the online store.

The fabric design here is again courtesy of a personal pattern project drawn from one of my sister’s illustrations.

Great photographic mockup templates are available for free widely on the internet. These are a great tool to help the designer and a client to visualize an identity design before actually implementing it.

Mugs are a great way to see how the identity design works on objects other than business stationery. Here I’ve also used the icon on the bottom of the mug.

I mocked up how a page in the website could look, using the logotype and the distinctive horizontal stripe colour palette.