I started with gathering all the branding materials that we already had. Any versions of logos (and we had a good few of them), letterheads, promotional leaflets, adverts & press releases.

Another step was to gather research on competition, how they do branding, what kind of colours they are using, what feeling they want to achieve, what type of font they are using. During that stage, I had to reflect back on what I’ve learned during my design course about colour schemes, colour affiliation, minimalistic approach & typography.

With all of that gathered, the first step was to redesign the logo. And after many mind-maps, sketching, trying new designs, sleepless nights ☺  I’ve decided that the logo just needs a bit of updating in the form of new typography.  That was it, the new logo looked fresh & professional with new font & slightly adjusted logotype & spacing. It appeared very clear on printed material, even in small dimensions.

Another step was to come up with a colour scheme. As Phonovation didn’t have a consistent colour scheme, I had to come up with one that would look good, be corporate, yet don’t be too clinical, too sterile & have a little bit of humanity & passion in it. I went toward a slightly darker red colour for passion and a bit of aggressiveness & contrasted it with a quiet & calm navy colour for that professional feeling. Deciding on complementary colours was easy then, I went with bright blue to add more to the corporate side with neutral colours to finish it off.

The following step was typography. Choosing a font seemed easy at first, but as I realised soon, it wasn’t. I knew I wanted clean, crisp sans-serif but didn’t want to go too cliché. Of course, the first choices were Helvetica, Roboto, Futura, or Lato, but they were missing something unique like Phonovation. And then I came across the Ubuntu font. That was it; it fitted perfectly with the company core values. It was easy to read, confident, clean but not sterile. Ubuntu was standing out, was unique, and had a spark in it.

With all the core elements gathered (logo, colour scheme, font & all company materials, core values & mission statement), it was time for imagery. Again, at first, that seemed easy, but it was far from it. I was going through thousands of images to find ones that would suit our branding, first looking for matching colours a bit warmer and more humane. And it needed to have a person or persons in it using a communication tool. The most challenging part was to find a natural-looking person without what seemed like fake, overperformed smiles. That kind of natural human expression is hard to find among thousands of stock photos. So after hours of digging, I was able to find some that would suit perfectly.

The last step was to bring all of this together in the form of a Brand Guidelines document, create all relevant print & promotional material & design a website that would reflect it all.