As a Product Designer at Founders Factory my role encompasses all parts of launching a scalable product into market, from ideation through to production. Part of this process is creating a brand that will live with the product through its launch and hopefully grow with the company over the first 2 or 3 years (startups inevitably rebrand once they reach scale because there’s no way the company at incubation is the same one after achieving massive growth).

Branding is primarily the process of taking 1000 thoughts and distilling them down into a single consistent expression visually. This article is going to explore the framework I use for managing this process to create a working brand, using relevant examples from two of the brands I’ve worked on while at the Factory. This is not a unique process, although I’ve yet to see it well documented and defined before now. For start ups the process that Agencies go through to deliver stunning work can often feel opaque. For business owners hopefully this article explains what’s going on behind the scenes, and for fellow designers gives a framework for you to follow through your next branding project. Whether this is the first run or the thirty first.

1. Define

Define is the business input into the branding process. Customer segment considerations, the emotional values you want your brand to express, competitor research etc. When combined these tools are effectively your success criteria, something for you to judge your later creations against. Are you communicating something core to your business or have you just created something pretty and meaningless?

Examples of tools to help you define:

Design Principles

Customer Personas

3 words that you want your brand to express (i.e. Disney might choose words like Magical, Family & Wonder).

Team workshops on what the company means to each individual — define the company as a group.

As a side note, GVs 3 Hour Brand Sprint is a great starting point for your define stage so if you have the time, do that.

2. Inspo

Short for inspiration, this is really just a time for you to fill your head with all sorts of beautiful imagery from a number of different places. What are the brands that communicate a similar message doing? Paintings that have certain brush strokes. Videos that you love. Things on Dribble that you find visually appealing. What kind of colours are you gravitating towards?

The overall goal here is to fill your brain with as much visual information as possible. Think of it as building a well stocked larder for when you’re cooking up your ideas later down the line.

Shout out to the guys behind www.niice.co as my go to place to look at an aggregation of images based on search terms.

Be like this kid with all of the visuals.

As you’re going through the process of gathering all of this content, you might feel like some of the images ‘fit’ together into a concept. This probably means you’re READY FOR THE NEXT STEP.

This step will generally take half a day to a day. Your goal here to get inspired and get motivated to create something beautiful of your own.

3. Moodboard

So you have a lot of visual stuff floating about and none of it really means anything right now… how do you turn all this stuff into something that you can start to coalesce a brand around. Moodboards!

The trick here is to start thinking of what is called a ‘creative route’. During the Founders Factory rebrand earlier this year we explored three creative routes, all of which were inspired by Moodboards and a creative idea we had created.