H2K was an amazing group to work with. One of the original founders had put together a phenomenally experienced and stacked group of investors. This re brand was a signalling of the evolution of H2K and still one of my favourite logos.
LOGO DESIGN
One of the most unique aspect of esports is that most work is already done remotely. Until around 2017/18, Skype was such an essential tool in esports that it was literally where everything was discussed.
On the plus side, this means we get to work with people from anywhere in the world. It forced us to find ways that would help make exchanging ideas and feedback easy for others. Managing a creative process remotely changes the style of interactions you have with others.
When figuring out what tools to use, I first grouped our interactions into 2 categories: Conversations + Revisions.
A) Conversations– this is for the free flow of ideas that often happens between meetings (and sometimes during)
Conversations used to happen on Skype but it suffered from a poor search function, buggy media archiving and indexing of older conversations. When there’s a high volume of conversation, Skype just can’t cut it. I recently downloaded Guilded and on first glance, it’s a sort of discord+slack combo. If anyone’s spent time using it, let me know if you could see it replacing Slack.
Today, we use and prefer Slack. Slack deals fairly well when there’s a lot of discussion going back and forth. A lot of small/medium businesses already use Slack, but like most tools, never fully explore them.
Here are some useful tips for using Slack when working on branding projects:
Shortcuts
Just under the message field you’ll see a lightning icon. You can very quickly move a conversation into a scheduled call, move things to your cloud drives or set a reminder to google something later. Amongst other things.
Quick-create Documents
I often find that Slack gets jam-packed with conversations when you’re going back and forth on branding work. If you’re working on a branding project that is planned for a few weeks, it’s likely that during key conversations, you may want to throw up some notes. Quickly creating a doc from slack allows me to take key notes and share with others in the team that I’d like input from. Power tip: you can hide any images or gifs in the chat by typing /collapse in the message bar and /expand to show them again.
Keyword Notifications
Most people who use slack as a daily work tool get hit with a lot of notifications but don’t want to miss crucial conversations. Go into your Slack preferences -> Notifications and scroll down to My Keywords. You can add whatever you want in here so you’re able to focus in on critical parts of larger conversations.
B) Revisions- after you’ve huddled with your team, you agree on changes that you need to make to a piece of work. A place to keep these revisions and act on them is crucial so you can move to the next version.
I’ve tried a lot of different tools that help with revisions. The most popular tool on the market is InVision. I tried it out in the early days of 99 and really enjoyed it. We use Frame.io and have done for years now. It started as a video collaboration tool but in 2018 got a fantastic update that allowed for reviewing of images.
Frame just gives you a means to show branding work as it evolves and what impact changes have. You can add people outside your own team [pick roles], annotate media pretty easily and then in a few clicks, share or present the current version of the piece with anyone (which you can also custom brand yourself).
Having a tool you feel comfortable with for conversations + revisions will make working on branding projects flow a lot better. You keep an open channel for sharing ideas and make changes visible to those you work with and for.
For deeper insight into the creative process of logo design, I’ll work on putting together a Q&A with Mata + James. I’ll share these in my weekly email. Likely next week as the first one goes out tomorrow.
On Monday I’ll dive into colour palettes. I’ll touch on how we picked colour palettes for some of our defining logo work, talk on colour theory and share some tools that help you make a choice you’re happy with.
This marks the 5th write-up and 1st full week of getting back on here to write. I just wanted to say thank you to every single person who took the time to send me messages with feedback, kind words of encouragement, subscribed for the weekly email and took their time out to check this stuff out.