We all know that effective brand identity is crucial to the success and longevity of any business. But, what makes a brand identity effective? When thinking about this, you’ll soon realize that brand identity is more than just a flashy logo and a cool name; it’s researching your audience, defining your mission and values, describing your brand messaging, and lots of iterations of logo creation. Therefore, the most optimal way of creating a brand identity (including your logo) is to develop a brand strategy that shows the process.
For this week, I created a new brand strategy of an existing small business called The Goblin’s Cavern, essentially giving them a rebrand with a new logo and more-defined brand elements.
Research
To better understand your own brand, the first phase in this process is to perform research. You should start this by looking into yourself and ask: who do I want my audience to be? What are the missions and values of my business? How do I wish to present it? It is also very important in this phase to analyze competitive businesses to see how you wish to stand out among the competition.
Having visited The Goblin’s Cavern many times before, I have plenty of prior knowledge of the store’s inventory and target audience. At this point, I just needed to pay closer attention to its brand messaging and put all the information together. So, I visited the business’s website and Facebook page to get a closer analysis on how it presents itself. I also went to the competitors’ websites and compared how they present themselves to my focus business.
Logo Design
Once you obtain substantial information on your business’s identity, the next phase involves creating iterations of the logo—the first impression of your business—that best represent your audience and brand message.
At this point, I was ready to start the rebrand of The Goblin’s Cavern by creating several new logo concepts using Adobe Illustrator. This step was definitely the most fun—but also the most challenging—aspect of the rebrand project.
Here, I decided to create four graphics and test two fonts for each of them, having a total of 8 options. The left-hand font depicts a fantasy aesthetic, while the right-hand font depicts a more fun, comic-like aesthetic. I could see it going in either direction, hence I used both fonts for each graphic.
Mood Board
Now, I needed to put the visual elements of my research together into a mood board, which usually displays relevant imagery, the color schemes used in logo creation, and a font guide. This could have been done before the logo options, but I was eager to get started on the logo options, and the logo options actually helped me with creating my mood board.
I wanted to keep the color scheme simple, with a maximum of three colors, to emphasize minimalism while maintaining charm and the core roots. For typography, I have two fonts used for the logo/header (depending on the option) and one font used for mainly body text.
Final Brand Plan & Final Thoughts
With audience research, competitor analysis, logo options, and a mood board established, I was able to put together the entire brand plan for this small business using Adobe InDesign.
There was not a well-defined mission/values statement on The Goblin’s Cavern’s website, so I created a new one based on my audience research.
Overall, through this rebrand project I learned that creating an effective brand strategy boils down to how well my research is and my ability to channel that research into my designs. The brand identity of a business, big or small, is extremely important for shaping how others view it, so ideally I hope that my rebranding makes this small comic book and game store appear more professional, inviting, and engaging.
You can read my full brand strategy here.
