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As a visual learner (and just visual person in general), I love seeing examples for inspiration - but even better, I love a good before-and-after!
As part of my digital course, Create Your Career, students learn about, and then create, their own branding. This brand concept features one of my students for the Spring 2020 round, Dione Chandler.
Dione is a professional oboist and the oboe professor at Stetson University. Her goal is to build a thriving private studio in Tampa, Florida, and to land a tenure-track professorship. Through her work in Create Your Career, Dione worked through my Ideal Client Voice Hacking Workbook and the Brand Messaging Excavation workbook to help her get crystal clear on her target audience, and then formulate her brand visuals and messaging based on this information so she can speak directly to this audience.
Around here, we're all about "passion your audience can see."
When we came up with this phrase, we envisioned the struggle many of our clients have experienced: DIY'ing their branding visuals & website for their business. A business that they poured their absolute heart and soul into, and that has been built on blood, sweat, & tears. Yet no matter how long they spend tweaking and swapping in Canva, it never looks quite right. So it ends up being "good enough," then goes onto a website that turns into something you're "embarrassed to have people look at" (an actual client's words, not ours)!
But for all the passion you have for your business, we believe that your audience deserves to see it.
Through your logo, your cohesive brand appearance, and a website that's a visual knock-out.
So that's what we're about.
But back to Dione.
As part of Create Your Career, I provide each student with individual feedback and guidance on everything they create during the course. After finishing up the branding portion and providing some initial feedback on color palettes and the inspiration words, here is the brand board that Dione submitted as her initial complete branding concept:
Based on her words of "trustworthy, welcoming, inspired, calm, and earthy," I loved the color palette and patterns she chose!
My initial thoughts in regards to what we might improve were that with the accent script she selected (used in the submark), the D could easily be confused with an O. This also is a different script font than the one used in the primary logo (We like consistency, so definitely needed to fix that).
The primary logo also strikes me as very general. There's nothing about it that stands out or is unique to me, which is not ideal for branding. The entire purpose is to help your brand be memorable, right? So we definitely needed to create something a bit more bespoke.
I also wasn't completely in love with the subheading font. I have a real affinity for a good classic serif font paired with a thin and modern non-serif, so definitely wanted to update that as well.
Based on Dione's brand words, and also taking to heart that she is based in Florida, here were a couple logo concepts I created for her to better reflect what she is trying to visually communicate:
And here are the primary and submark logos together:
Concept 1 is obviously very Florida-inspired, and very in line with her words of earthy. Concept two I tried to communicate more of the trustworthy and welcoming vibes through the almost vintage feel of the background graphic, and for the submark I liked that this could almost be a spark of inspiration.
I also updated her font suite:
And there we have it! Love a good branding refresh.