The first thing many small businesses do when starting out is create a logo. A strong logo is one of the most important design elements you can have for your business. It’s what your prospects see first. It shows your identity, distinguishes your business from your competition, and you can put it anywhere from water bottles to letterhead.

But as your business grows, you need to regularly reflect on your brand and ensure that it continues to reflect who you are and what your mission is. Have your services changed? Has your mission grown from a local focus to a more regional or national footprint? Is a major anniversary milestone on the horizon or does it just no longer represent the essence of who you are anymore?

After answering these questions, you may have decided that you are in need of a rebrand but are curious about next steps. Here’s the process our talented artists use for designing brands.

Do Your Research: First and foremost, you must know your brand. What is your brand about? What do you want your brand to say about your business? Define words that resonate with you about your brand.
Knowing your brand clearly and concisely is essential in creating a brand that works for your business.

Know Your Ideal Customer: Do they like sleek and modern designs or fun and playful? Do they resonate with a formal tone or are they more relational in nature? Knowing your customer helps create designs that will appeal to them.

Curate Inspiration: Once we’ve gotten to know your business, we can start preparing for the design process. The best way to get started is by creating an inspiration board guided by the information from our research. We gather images, typography, colors, and more, that we feel embody your brand. Providing visual references for words like “modern” or “elegant” helps ensure we’re all on the same page moving forward.

Explore the Possibilities: This is when we take the ideas in our brains and turn them into tangible concepts by ideating based on the information and inspiration that has been gathered. We build out different lockups, try out some more off-the-wall concepts, and really play around with all the possibilities to bring your brand to life.

Narrow in on Concepts: Once we have explored the full breadth of possibilities, it’s time to narrow down our designs to the strongest options and build them out into initial concepts to present!

Show Off the Hard Work: It’s time to present our work and the rationale behind our choices. Why did we chose to go with that specific typeface? What are the possibilities of one concept compared to another? What limitations or quirks did the designer work through when building out the concepts? This allows us to discuss and receive feedback.

Refine the Design: After the presentation is complete, we refine your chosen concept based on any suggestions or requests that were made.

Build the Brand: Once a final logo concept is decided upon, we build out your visual identity through type pairings, a color palette, and mockups. Mockups help you understand the context in which your brand will appear in the real world — such as on the aforementioned water bottles and letterhead.

Create a Style Guide: It all comes together here! Your style guide will lay out usage instructions for your logo and color palette, define any additional brand assets, and give you guidelines on how to keep your brand identity consistent across all platforms.

A strong brand says a lot about a business. Do you need help refining or refreshing your brand identity? Contact us and we’ll help you build a brand that lasts for you and your business.

Erica Pefferman is the owner and president of COMO Companies, which owns and operates COMO Magazine, COMO Business Times, COMO Marketing, and COMO Tickets. Erica shares her love of Columbia with the people she serves with on a multitude of boards including the Chamber of Commerce. In 2017, Erica was named Outstanding Business Woman of the year and her team was named the Columbia Chamber Of Commerce’s Small Business of the Year.

573.499.1830 | comomarketing.co