Course Reflections and Project Documentation
The Brand Development course has been very demanding and beneficial for a number of reasons. The most important takeaway for me was my understanding of what a brand encompasses as a whole. This was referenced in last month’s course, but real synthesis of this concept and the process of developing a successful brand was necessary in order to properly complete this month’s assignments. The Brand Gap (Neumeier, 2006) proved to be an invaluable resource in identifying each step in this process and how to approach this development properly without getting ahead of myself. This information came in handy when diving into the vision board project, as I very likely would have just started designing with the singular goal of “beauty” in mind as opposed to placing the focus on communicating brand attributes. The required LinkedIn Learning course (Adams, 2015) did a great job of very succinctly explaining key elements and the designer’s role in branding. These are concepts that I’ll carry with me through the rest of my mastery journey and certainly into my career.
Color and typography were other facets of this month that required a great deal of research and synthesizing. Understanding the differences between color systems and their application was a foreign but necessary component this month. The descriptions of these concepts by Precise (Donnelly, 2015) was a perfect introduction to them for someone like me from a motion graphics background who has only ever dealt with RGB. I have always loved typography, but only ever thought of it in terms of how it relates to animation/motion design. This month was extremely beneficial in recognizing the larger role typography plays in the psychology of branding (Amos, 2017). Proper type hierarchy and grasping what different typefaces represent needed to be employed while finalizing logo development as well as throughout the design of the vision boards.
This month was fast-paced and difficult. Taking last month’s sketches and vectorizing, colorizing, and applying them to an overall larger representation of the brand seemed like a daunting task. Doing this alongside a research paper and vision boards added to the chaos. I can only imagine this same type of work rate is expected in professional practices, so it was a great experience having to budget time wisely and allocate appropriate resources to each task.
References
Adams, S. (2015, March 27). Branding for designers. LinkedIn Learning. Retrieved January 5, 2021, from https://www.linkedin.com/learning/branding-for-designers/
Amos, J. (2017, September 11). The psychology of typography. Layout. Retrieved January 19, 2021, from https://getflywheel.com/layout/psychology-of-typography/
Donnelly, S. (2015, August 19). RGB, CMYK, PMS – what’s the difference? Precise Continental. Retrieved January 7, 2021, from https://www.precisecontinental.com/rgb-cmyk-pms-whats-the-difference/
Neumeier, M. (2006). The brand gap. New Riders. https://learning.oreilly.com/library/view/the-brand-gap/0321348109/