*Transcription Disclaimer: the following transcription was automatically generated, and may have errors, or lack context.*
My name is Alex Lazaris, and I am so excited to have you here today with me. Not only today, but the whole rest of this week. We are going to be doing a brand design bootcamp.
So today we are going to be working through brand strategy. Tomorrow it's going to be logos. Day three is going to be tight.
Day four is going to be expanding your collateral system or your brand. And then day five we're going to be bringing into Express so you can package everything up and then start making collateral with it. So I'm super, super excited.
If you don't know who I am, my name is Alex Lazaris, and I run a design firm named Lazaris. You can check out our work wearelazaris.com.
Over the last several years, I've been able to work on campaigns where millions of people see the work and impact billions of people live. So I've really gotten to do some really cool stuff, and I'm going to walk you through my process and what I'm up to. So come on into my screen.
We're going to have some fun. If you are new to Behance Chat, make sure you get all your questions in today. If you are on YouTube and you're writing in there and wondering why nobody's reading it, it's because we're not typing on Behance Chat.
So come on to Adobe Live and you can hang out with us real time and ask any of your questions. All right, so I know that strategy can get pretty daunting for people. I'm going to try to give you as much information as possible in the next 30 minutes.
I know it's a lot to unpack and you're probably have lots of questions, so feel free to ask them in chat, and we're happy to kind of parse through them and give you answers as quickly as I possibly can. All right, so buckle up. I think that this is going to be one of the most important lessons probably out of the whole week that will also differentiate you in the marketplace and get you new work at a higher level than you've ever had before.
So I want to show you what I think is the differentiator for you as a designer. It's how you think, how you use that noggin of yours. So I really want you to kind of like, parse through this.
I've typed this all out, take screenshots, whatever you need to do. I'm going to go full screen on my Illustrator Report right now by just pressing F a couple of times and it'll cycle through viewports. I see friends, Carol, Voodoo, Wade, Steve.
Hello. Hello, everybody. Welcome back.
All right, so we're going to jump into it. I break down branding projects into three different kind of strategies or three sections. This is also a really good way if you're going to invoice clients at certain phases.
I typically try to associate a certain percentage of the project to each of these depends on how you set up your business and your contracts. But this is super helpful. In phase one, we've got brand discovery.
So really understanding what the business is, who the customer is, how do we communicate, how are they currently doing things, what are the pain points that they're experiencing right now. And then phase two of the project is typically the brand strategy, where you start to understand where those pain points are, how things are going, how do you start to do it in the next future as well. So that's super important and that will set the guiding light for your brand design practice.
So once you get into the actual design work, this is the part that I think so often we're so eager to get into. We start sketching immediately in the call with the client. But really you need to do these first two phases before you can really do the third phase.
Super well and super efficient. You can make pretty things all day, but at the end of the day, it needs to be grounded in strategy and you need to solve the business problems for your clients in order for you to kind of get to the next level in your career. So that's why we're kind of coming at it from this perspective.
All right, so discovery. So Discovery is, I think, one of my favorite sections. It's a really honest, open conversation that you have with the client.
It allows you to kind of uncover their strengths, but also their weaknesses. Oftentimes a client or business is coming to you because they want to do something different or they understand that they need XYZ and you can provide XYZ for them. So really uncovering the heart of the brand, learning, listening, asking questions, it's not about you as the design firm anymore as the designer.
It's about the business and the client that you're working with. Really, way we look at it is as a partnership. So one of the things that we love to do is called a brand audit.
So what I like to do in a brand audit, and I'm going to show you in real time how I would do this for my own business so you can start to understand things. So rather than creating a client project or violating NDAs that I have current clients, I'd rather just be very open and honest about my business and show you how I would do it if I was to fix my business's marketing or my agency's marketing. So I'll show you how we do a brand audit in a couple of seconds.
But essentially you go to internal teams. Maybe it's a sales team, maybe it's the social team, maybe it's the marketing team and you're asking questions about what's working for them, what's not. You also go off and do your own research and see how people are reacting in the market.
You look at their social, you look at their performance on marketing assets. You start to ask and uncover questions. The more data you have, the more information you can make from it.
So really going in and asking and just being super curious because these people have been doing it at their job or at the company for a long time, that's a lot of information for you to kind of dissect and understand. Brand research, you can do it both qualitative or quantitative, which means qualitative is harder to measure with actual data and quantitative means with data. So if I said that I was on a landing page and the landing page has XYZ conversion rates, say we get like 1% of the people that come to the website, click and they want to buy the product, that's data and that's quantitative.
Qualitative is more sticky. It's a little bit harder to say with a data point itself. So say like, our brand is very bold and loud.
Could be like a qualitative thing. If you're trying to shift it and be a little bit more passive or kind of secondary, that would be another qualitative thing. So you can start to do that through emotive questions.
You can ask people on the street and you can say, hey, what does this feel like to you? And then they would start to kind of unpack words and emotions that the brand is tying to you. And that's what you're kind of trying to get through the qualitative. So you have lots and lots of things there.
And step one, make sure your stream connection is running properly. Is my stream not running? Hopefully it's running perfectly for you all. So anyways, we're going to go straight to the brand audit really quickly.
So again, I'm coming at this from a Lazaris perspective. If I was to do an audit, if I was to say, hey, I need a new brand design or whatever, I would go and audit my socials. I would audit customers, clients, people who may have emailed the firm but ended up not being a good fit.
I would ask all these questions around why, how, where did you hear about us? All these other things. But really quickly, first thing you can do whenever you take on a new client project is look at their social post. That's super easy.
It's publicly facing and you can go in there and start asking questions. You can look at it. So you look at the social.
My social specifically has thought I was having issues. We're good. All right, so back to the audit.
So I would look at my social and say, you know what, I looked at it. The brand hasn't posted for two years. That's a pretty long time to post on social media.
Maybe there's something that needs to happen there and do better. I would look at the website and understand how it's communicating, what work is out there, what kind of audience is it trying to target who is the intention behind it. I would go through and say, okay, these sections are really good, these sections aren't.
It's a really healthy way of kind of understanding the business and ramping up very quickly and then understanding what's currently happening. Another thing that I like to do is try to find design language that a company might be having. You can do that typically through their social or any of their other campaigns that they might be running.
You can click into it, see if there's a kind of a consistent design language happening with it. And that's super important. Something that you might need to consider later on when you're building design systems.
So going back into that's kind of like the early stages of the auditing phase, you can also check out I would check out my behance and be like, okay, cool. That's how many project views, how many likes, appreciations. All this stuff is kind of showing you what type of engagement your following has kind of done for you.
And that allows you kind of make more strategic decisions down the line if you're trying to continue with them. If I was to audit the industry, so you do internal and external audits. These are agencies that I love.
Anagramma is one of them. I'm highlighting Mexican design firms right now. They're amazing.
But if I was to audit the It industry or like them, I would go to their website, see how they're communicating, how do they break down their projects. I would look at their social, check out their engagement, see how they're structuring their posts as well. I see a lot of carousels instead of one offs.
Those things are good to know. And then you can start seeing like, okay, are they doing a robust social strategy with hashtags and things like that. That's also super important and helpful for us as we're starting to understand the business.
And then look at their behance or whatever other relative things there might be landing pages or other projects. This is by Yi studio. Yi.
Also in Mexico. Fantastic work. Would look at how they're doing, what are they doing? Are they using hashtags? They're not using hashtags as much as Anagram is.
And maybe this is part of why they're not getting as much social traction. Things like this are important to make educated guesses and decisions around what you're seeing in the marketplace and why things are working or why they are not. All right, so, and then the last one on this kind of like, audit board would be by Futura.
By Futura. Again, super fantastic, really talented firm. All these businesses present themselves in kind of different ways and are incredibly wickedly talented.
By Futura also does this really incredible video work right now where it's like, Futura is a fintech as coffee, and then they bring in all this really cool work that they've done in both of those spaces. Video converts really well, it also drives a lot of traffic on social, so they're doing stuff that's really interesting from a social perspective that also is very inspirational. All right, so we're going to go back into the section.
Phase two will be the brand strategy section and I'll start to drive you through how I make those decisions as well for the business. But the brand strategy section is really kind of where the rubber hits the road and it's something that is really important to understand for your client's business and have those conversations with them as you're kind of working through this. This is something that I have a lot of back and forth with the client from in the initial stage where you're kind of going through discovery.
You are putting together kind of your thesis and your hypothesis around why things are working or which things aren't and understanding their pain points. Whereas the strategy starts to say hey, we've got a solidified view or perspective on this project, do you agree? And then there's a lot of conversations that happen from that. So that's super important.
The goal with the strategy is to kind of align all the aspects of your business. Whether it's a product, maybe you're working on a website or a tech company and the product is constantly changing and evolving or maybe it's a coffee shop and your product is really the experience plus the coffee. Those are really important to understand.
How do you start to communicate in it? Is it a cozy space? Is it inviting? Do you use XYZ colors? Like maybe it's a pink or whatever? Does that make the customer feel anything? And so that's really important. We've kind of broken it down into kind of three sections that are really important from a brand strategy perspective. Brand Platform just like in architecture, if you don't have a strong foundation, the rest of your building will crumble.
So having a really strong brand platform is essential to having kind of the legs to be successful for your collateral down the line and your logos and your business cards and your billboards and all these other things. Because at the end of the day, your brand is more than a logo. It's the way it speaks, it acts, it interacts, the culture, your product, everything you do, every touch point that your brand is part of is your brand.
It's not just the logo that is at the top of your website or anything like that. And so that's really important to understand for your clients and communicate and also build a really strong foundation from your core essence. I like to explain is like the ripple.
If you were to drop like a rock in a pond and you saw the ripples kind of flow out, that core essence is like a distilled down version of what makes your business special. It's ownable, it's endearing ideally providing differentiation from your competitors and then from the outside of it. Your brand pillars are kind of the outside ripples where this stone has kind of fallen into the pond.
The brand pillars are I kind of break it down into five different sections. Essentially it's purpose, culture, positioning, customer promise and characteristics. And I'll show you a stripped down version of how this would work for the Lazaris Agency if we were to kind of treat this like a real client project.
But really your purpose comes down to why do you exist, what does your business do? Understanding that and making that one of the centerfold ideas for the business is really helpful for getting stakeholders who are maybe not worked in design or creative or branding in the past to understand what their business does. And it teaches them to communicate in that same way, which is super important. Culture is everybody talks about work culture.
It's not just work culture, it's the culture of how your customer sales, your customer reps work, how does your sales team operate. It defines so much around how do you work internally and externally. Because if you have a solid foundation, it leads to more consistency.
And that's really what is important for a strong brand. It's consistency and evolution over time as the world everything changes around it. Positioning is a really great one.
Positioning can change depending on the product or cycle that you're on. So maybe you're doing a positioning strategy for Q one through three, but Q four, you're going to try something else that's also totally fine, that's acceptable, feel free to do that. But positioning is a really great way to differentiate your business or your product against each other.
So say you are a social media platform and you want it to feel inclusive and inviting and trustworthy because you've got people's data on there. But then maybe you are making a different social media campaign or you want to make a different social media product. You want it to feel different so maybe it feels a little bit quicker digestible and a little bit more edgy or something like that.
Those are ways to differentiate your brand from the others and try to stand out in the marketplace. That's also very important. Your customer promise is one of those things that maybe is not explicitly said out loud, but also super important for making sure that you are consistent in your voice and tone.
Externally, customer promises essentially saying like no matter what, we are going to do XYZ things. So saying, we will never sell your data, your privacy is the utmost concern for us and we'll always take that into high regard. Those are all super important things.
But as soon as you break that customer promise, you've lost all trust and integrity. So making sure that you've kind of set it that bar. And if you're using it as like a campaign or a marketing piece or whatever, it's really important that you uphold those values and keep it consistent over time.
Characteristics. Characteristics is, I think, a really fun one. This is honestly a really easy one for you to start riffing on brand design things very often.
I know if you've been here on Adobe Streams before, you've probably seen a lot of people coming in with like a wordboard or a mood board or things like that. The characteristics are easy to associate with those wordboards word charts and makes it really easy for you to kind of say, okay, this brand is bold, clean, and minimal. Those things are very easy to say, okay, I can associate design words or design features to that and start to build that into your brand design system.
So we'll scroll down and look at what a brand wordboard could look like. This is a word chart. There's many of them you can find.
You can build your own. This is a little bit more farmy than others. It's got words like crisp, cultured, daring, dazzling, boho, beachy.
It's a little bit more like earthy. You can go very corporate with it as well. You can have things like synergistic and trustworthy, authentic.
All those things are super important as well. It really just depends on finding the right copy and the words to help you express the brand and the business as cohesively as possible to both stakeholders and external audiences and use this as a jumping off point for your design work. All right, so with those first two sections, I kind of took a first stab at showing you what this could look like from my business's perspective.
Zoom in just a tiny bit more. Feel free to screenshot this if you want or whatever and use this as part of your decks. I especially love doing sections like what we Are and What We Aren't.
I think these are super easy ways to put a line in the sand. I think oftentimes clients are so excited about what they are that they forget what we aren't. And so what I say by that is, if you look at this word word, it's very easy to say, oh, we're down to earth, we're dynamic, we're eccentric, we're happy, powerful, playful, whatever, all those things.
And I think oftentimes in these conversations, there's a lot of really great words that you'll have, and our clients will love and gravitate towards tons of them. And sometimes you need to cut that list down. You can't be everything all the time.
And so having the like, okay, that's absolutely what we're not. So maybe we're down to earth, but we're not beachy, we're not doing surf culture or whatever here. It's very different.
So having What We Aren't sectioned is super duper important for helping define the brand a little bit tighter as well. Up here, I've kind of built out our mission and purpose. Oftentimes what we'll do for a client is we'll do like business name, industry focus areas.
We might even include income that their projected income that they're doing, not of employees. And then how many people will need to be building the design team for or the design system for. So sometimes that might be, like, a team of 50, or that might be 100, or that might just be one designer, or there might be no designers.
It might just be a marketing team with an outsourced design department. And we need to know these things so we can build the best design system for them for handoffs. So that might be okay.
If we know it's a 50 person team, how do we make sure that we're empowering all 50 of those creatives without telling them, don't do XYZ. On this far left side, we have brand celebrity. I personally don't do this because I don't know very many celebrities.
I'm not one of the cool people who memorizes this. I have tons of friends who live in La. That can tell you every celebrity and everything about them.
I can't do that. So I typically don't include a brand celebrity, but I know a lot of design firms and designers that do that. It's absolutely up to you.
If you want to, you can go, okay, our brand is Keanu Reeves, and it'll be, like, nice, intelligent, hardworking, passionate, and just like, what associations do you think of when you think of that celebrity? And that's super important. I think for some people, it's a good way of communicating personality traits. Again, going back into that kind of, like, wordboard up here, these are great ways to associate who those people are.
So just more tools in your arsenal for when you need to have those conversations with people. I typically recommend in these, like, what we are and what we aren't sections to typically use. Like, you can do two.
I would say two to four is probably a good amount of numbers there for you. I typically will do, like, a word, and then I'll define it more. So for us, I'll say, like, oh, we're courageous.
We start off every project from a place of courage. We also present wildly ambitious solutions that solve our clients problems. We believe you can always pare down wild ideas, but it becomes incredibly difficult to make a boring idea exceptional.
So these are, like, kind of things that are emotive and their understanding and their way to clearly present why I believe that the design firm is courageous and things like that. You can say what we aren't. Same way.
Put your keyword there and then define it. And then wordboard that I would put for my agency would be, like, authentic, trustworthy, bold, future facing, clean, friendly, modern, creative, considerate, and expressive. So I know we've got, like, five minutes left.
Headed on over to the brand design section now. Brand design section. So this is where everybody gets really excited.
This is super fun, right? This is where you start to put everything together again, I love to say your brand is more than just a logo, it's everything about it. And so we would want to build brands that are long lasting, have longevity and scalability and can move the needle for our clients. We do that obviously through the brand design, the logo design, the collateral system, everything like that.
But really what we'd love to do is build design systems that are robust. That means maybe it's a social system and we'll work on the social media stuff and using Express on Friday and that's going to be super exciting. And you'll see how the design system could start to happen, how it makes your life as a designer easier, but also makes everybody else's lives, whether it's the social media person or the sales team, a lot easier as well.
So once we go through this and we start to define the strategy, we like to look at like mood boards. And I think mood boards is kind of one of the most important and exciting things for a lot of people. Essentially when I look at the Lazaris brand and I've instinctively chosen to put everything on a black background, the idea behind that is to let the work sing for itself.
Being a design agency or a creative agency, I believe that my brand should be stripped down more whereas the work should be kind of center stage. So if you think about going to like a movie theater, the lights all turned down around you and the work being presented in front of you is this theater experience. You are seeing it in real time.
Also stripping it down to just its core ethos is also what a lot of luxury fashion brands do. Also what I love, I love Obey, so also very strong on that front. I heard a lighting artist once talk about light being in a dark room.
Light is the thing that draws your attention to things. So without light there is nothing. And so it's really important to shape light in your photography, but also when you're thinking about your portfolio experiences.
I like to turn off the lights on our website, keep it dark mode and then just feature the work and let it sing in this dark space and really give it all the attention possible from a logos perspective. I love timeless logos. We've got this Logo Beginnings book that talks through all the ancient logos.
I love monograms, I love bold logos that feel really strong and can stand on their own. But I also love flexible design systems such as this one right here. You can go on to be handsome as well.
I love cars, talk about adding light, I love vibrant colors. You can see that throughout my work. I love artists and their intention behind the work that they're also doing themselves really quickly.
You can build your own mood board on Behance yourself by just going into Discover. You can go really quickly. You can go to graphic design.
And you can go look through somebody's work and say, oh, this work actually really works for me. This is really inspiring. I love it.
And then what I'm going to do is just go, like, save this, and then I'm going to put it into the branding section on my mood board. So you can create as many moods boards as you want. It's free to use.
Do it on your behance, and then you can also appreciate the work. You can also go, oh, this is really interesting. I love the black and white on this.
I would love to search more like this. Maybe it'll give me some more pieces. And Behance will pull up in another tab.
And because it's got this ripple and texture effect, it's going to start to show me work that is very similar to this. So if I say, okay, I like this one with this green, it's going to start pulling these collateral pieces as well. So lots that you can do, lots of incredible things you can do with the mood boards and with the inspiration pieces.
You have every single tool at your fingertips. But make sure you come back tomorrow. Now that we've gotten the big strategy conversation out of the way, tomorrow is the fun day where we get to start bringing this to life.
We're going to make a logo and then the following day is type. Make sure you come back tomorrow. Hang out with us this whole week.
Hopefully we'll get you in a really good spot for your brand design stuff. So see you tomorrow. Thank you, everyone.
Stick around later. Bye.
