“Simpler Samurai but more Samurai”. Carlos “ocelote” Rodriguez (2015) describing his overarching identity vision for the G2 rebrand. We have this quote pinned in our slack tools + used to have it framed in a previous office.
IDENTITY
Plug: Our Art Director (+co-founder) Mata is a genius (best follow of your life). I’ve showcased the G2 logo here because he made it and it was a re-brand. It’s often that a discussion around brand identity is skipped entirely when a re-brand is being done but very intensely discussed when creating a new brand. Don’t make this mistake.
We’ve changed the way we approach identity a lot so I hope this section saves anyone reading a bit of your most valuable resource: time. Whether this is something you’re looking to create for yourself or for someone else, I’ve found one constant in all branding projects throughout the last 5+ years:
The identity of the brand almost always mirrors the perceived identity the brand owner has of themselves. Seek to understand the person or people behind the brand. Ask them more about who they are, what they care about, what movies and music they most love and who they think they are in the eyes of others (persona). If you take one thing from this part, this is it.
Ideally, you want to paint a picture of the brands identity with the brand owner and reference this throughout the branding process. The best tool we’ve found to do this is Kapferer’s Brand Identity Prism.
There are 6 different parts that the prism forces you to fill in so you get a fuller picture of a brands identity. The recipient is your customer whilst the sender is the business/person that the brand is owned by.
Internalisation is the less visible things that are felt/experienced instead of seen. Personality is best described as who your brand would look like if it were a person (great description found in a few books on this), Culture is the values and beliefs that the company has. Self-image is the way a customer sees themselves by associating with your brand.
Externalisation is what you see on the outside when you look to a brand: The Physical look. The Relationship between customer+business. Finally, the Reflection of how we translate what we believe our brand stands for into something a customer can recognise.
That’s a lot of theory. Don’t let that bore you or the person you’re creating the brand for. Google Kapferer Brand identity prisms for brands you relate to and check them out. To simplify and not get too hung up on the identity process, we created a simple google sheet document with questions we developed that would help us fill in the prism for Nations. Here’s a snap of a handful of questions we asked that led us to the filled in prism above:
One of the most valuable things we found when deciding which logos to present clients was to run a little test group with those who you’d expect to be the brands ideal customers. If you’re creating something for yourself, ask people you don’t know to help you with this. Present your test group with the logos and ask them to fill in this pyramid for you. You won’t believe how much this additional perspective helps.
THE MOOD BOARD
Once everyone feels they’re on the same page with the identity, try and put together a mood board. This is just a collection of images that represent the agreed on identity. Most of our very early branding discussions started with the visuals then moved onto identity. Whilst everyone is eager to move to visuals quickly, agreeing on the identity first means that your mood board is made up of more focused images/gifs/videos and will make sure you feel good about the logo.
With your identity and mood board figured out, it’s naming time. This is easily one of the most exciting but excruciating parts of the branding process. We’ve gotten much better at it throughout the years but language is generally used and perceived so differently by people that the naming process becomes a lot more art and a lot less science.
If you’re interested in knowing how we got to the brand name for OG DOTA2, you’ll love what comes next. Way more of that to come in Part 4.
I just wanted to say thank you to those who’ve subscribed to my email newsletter. I’ve put together a v1.0 format for it and will aim to ensure it’s sent out every Sunday.