Hi, welcome to Brand New Brand. I'm Michael Worthington, Graphic Design Faculty at California Institute of the Arts, and this is the Capstone project for the specialization in graphic design. What we're going to do with this project is try and figure out a vehicle for you to take all of the knowledge that you've learned in the specialization and put it all together in one project, and that project is going to be a branding project. Now, it's quite a complicated project, there's a lot of moving parts to it, but I'm going to walk you through it piece by piece, so that you'll have a model to work with when you come to make your own brand. In a lot of ways, branding is the intersection between graphic design and marketing. What that means is, it's a way to take something that doesn't necessarily have a form or an identity, and to give it a visual identity and a strategic identity that's going to make it immediately recognizable. I'm willing to bet that when you look at this list of companies and products, it's pretty hard for you to look at them and not imagine their logo types. It's hard to look at Nike without thinking about its mark, the swoosh, and the same for other companies as well. You can't imagine Coca-Cola, without seeing its signature typographic form and it's red and white colors, or Adidas in its geometric typographic forms and its logo type. The same goes for all of these companies. They have a strong visual identities that become much stronger than just the words themselves. We're used to either associating a graphic mark or a logo type with them. For this project, we're not really going to look so much at the marketing and the strategy involved in brand design, we're really going to try and focus on the graphic design part of it. So we're going to be looking at typographic form, color, and shape and imagery, and all of the things that we've looked at already. Most identities comprise of a word-mark, or as I like to call it a logotype. These two terms are synonymous, and what they basically mean is, the name of the company or the client that has been treated typographically in a very distinct way. More often than not, this means tweaking the letter forms, so they might actually change unless be a typeface that already exists, and be much more customized. Part of this customization really involves looking at the letter forms in a particular word. So for instance here, we're looking at the word, logotype and we're changing it bit by bit to give it a more distinct look. So we might look at spacing, for instance, within the letter forms. We might look at ligatures, or scale and position of letter forms as well. We might tweak little parts of the letter forms to give them a better relationship. But a lot of these things are about the relationship between just the letters in this form. So it's less about using an alphabet that already exists, a typeface that already exists I should say, and much more about customizing letter forms, where their only job is to operate distinctly with the letter forms that they're sitting next to in a particular word, the name of your company. A brand is made up of many different component parts, a logotype being one of them, and color being another. Brands quite often have a corporate color, a distinct color that's handpicked for that particular company to work together with the logotype to form a strong and memorable visual identity. As well as the logotype and color, there's often a mark or an icon that goes with that particular company. Sometimes that can be an abstract mark, sometimes it's a pictorial mark. Normally, these things work together. Sometimes the logotype can sit next to the mark, sometimes the mark is embedded in the logotype. If you think of something like Nike for instance, the swoosh is the mark and the logotype is the actual word, Nike, in the particular script-based typeface that you see it in often. So the mark can operate on it's own, quite often as well if you think about Apple that has a very distinct and recognizable mark. These are all parts of just a larger kit, and that's what we're going to do with this project. We're going to develop each of these individual parts and try and get them to work together. Once you start to get them to work together, you'll have a logotype and you'll also have a mark, and they'll start to have a relationship. Whether they sit together, whether they're multiples, whether they have a flexible relationship, or a fixed relationship, but they'll become components that will help you give your brand an identity. One of the reasons we're looking at identity in terms of graphic design is because it's an area that's increasing and ever-growing. It seems that everybody these days has a logo type or a company that needs a logotype, and I think this is going to increasingly happen more and more, particularly as everyone has a visual visibility for their company online. It means that even the smallest company needs to have a logotype, and I feel like at some point we're going to reach the point where, every single individual is going to need to have a logotype as well. But for now, what we're going to work on is a brand development guide. So what we're not going to do is make an identity manual. So our brand development guide is going to be a place where we take each of these pieces of our brand identity and we figure out how to show our work in process, and put them together into this guide. So it'll become a way for you to showcase all of the work that you've done and have it culminate in some finished graphic design as well. So you'll get to show people both your process, and you'll get to show them the final results of that process as well.
