*Transcription Disclaimer: the following transcription was automatically generated, and may have errors, or lack context.*
Hello. Hello, everyone. Welcome to day four of the branding boot camp.
I am so excited. My name is Lazaris, and I run a brand design studio called Lazaris. You can check out our work at wearelazaris.com.
But today is day four, which means we've had three whole days before this of brand strategy, logo design, type design. Today is our brand extension day. Sorry, words are so difficult sometimes.
We are going to be focusing on color, color palette, additional elements such as patterning, iconography, things like that, imagery, anything that you might need to bring your brand to life. And tomorrow our last day. We're going to be focusing on bringing it all together in Adobe Express.
You'll definitely want to make sure you turn in for that. I'm very, very excited about it. Today is kind of the last big talk driven thing.
Tomorrow we're going to be doing a lot. So jump on into my screens. You're going to catch up with a real little quick recap of what we've done over the last couple of days.
Essentially, we started off with our brand strategy document. Make sure you check out the first day, the brand strategy, one on one video. It's super detailed, super, I think oriented towards your first time building a brand strategy deck, maybe for yourself or for a client.
I think it's a really robust starter template for you to leverage, to start having really productive and sound conversations both with yourself and with your clients. In that we talked about the three phases of your projects, where you'll be working with your clients. We even went through a quick mood board.
We talked about our logo design in day two and what types of logos there are and how to build them with basic shape language, all really quickly within Illustrator, and why you'd use certain shapes as kind of starting points. And then yesterday we worked on type. So we talked about kind of the differences between Serifs and San Serifs and showed kind of how we start projects and how to pair type just ever so gently.
But today, oh, I see so many friends in. Hello. Hello, Carol, Annika, Mark, tim.
Hello, Barbara. Everybody. Welcome, welcome.
If you're typing in chat and you're wondering why I can't see it, you might be on YouTube. So make sure you come over to Adobe Live and I'll be taking your questions real time through the Behance chat. So come on over to Behance chat.
Hang out with us. We're going to be diving into color to start. Color, I think, is one of the most integral and important pieces in your brand design toolkit.
So I think it's also one of the most subjective. So I'm going to caveat that color is not easy. It varies by person to person, culture to culture, client to client.
Right? So the best thing I can say is, if you look back to the first video, we talked about brand personality traits. What does it mean for you as a business? Are you a mature company? A young scrappy startup? Are you trustworthy? Are you bold? Are you visionary? Are you humble and modest? Are you reserved? All these things will play into your color palette and will help you also get alignment with your stakeholders, with your clients, around which color should your brand actually be. So without further ado, we're going to just do a very quick intro to color theory or just colors in general.
So I believe that color is one of the most inherent human experiences. Without being colorblind or not being able to perceive certain color ranges. It's like the most universal thing.
It's literally what we've been developing for hundreds of thousands of years as a human species. So color has an instinctive gut reaction that your body is telling you, right, red is fire or danger or blood. Things that are very in your face and cautionary, you kind of immediately say, okay, that's dangerous.
And that's why our reject buttons or even any danger button you might see on a website is typically red. So it says, okay, maybe don't click this thing. So it's ingrained.
Green is grass, trees, foliage, things around you in nature. So it feels very calming and soothing and relaxing. So think about that whenever you start to apply your brand lens or trying to wrap your head around a color palette.
Why do you feel this way? It's probably because it's instinctual for you. So just always kind of gut check with yourself, try to understand it and understand that also your own cultural biases. If you're growing up in North America versus South America or Europe, or like, you'll have different cultural biases also associated with those colors.
So those are also important to come into play, especially when you start looking at global markets and internationalization. Having kind of a clear perspective on that is super helpful. So without further ado, somebody says Peter asked question, is this true with tints also? Yes, tints are just another modification of a color.
So yes, tents have an impact. So if I wanted to say if I wanted this gray here, if I wanted to change gray, let me bring back my tools here, I can make three different feeling grays really, really quickly will have different moods. So if I click so if I wanted to maybe warm up this gray just a tiny bit, I could put a tiny bit of red in there, and it starts to become a warm gray.
If I want to make this a little bit cooler, I'll start to put some more blues in there and just ever so slightly change it. And that will also change and impact the subtleness of the gray itself. So these are all grays.
They just have a slight hint of warmth or coolness to it. So it's definitely something to think about. And great question.
Tim says color is so important on an unconscious level and that is absolutely true. Cool. So we'll scroll into this.
All right, let's talk into just generic high level of each color. What do they kind of do? Red stands for passion, excitement, anger. It's importance, it's also attention grabbing.
Red and yellow and orange lighting in restaurants typically helps bring out the natural skin tone color on you and brings a little bit more of the blood vessel feel to your face. Whereas if you go into the office, an office space has very bright white blue lights and makes everything look kind of less beautiful. Restaurants want you to enjoy your food.
It brings out kind of like a hunger appetite as well. And by having the lighting in the restaurant at kind of that warmer color palette, it's going to make people more attractive to you as well. It's a very weird thing to say, but it does make you look less dead.
If you go to the corporate offices and you have those crazy floodlights that blue light on you, that harsh light makes everybody look a little bit more like pale and unsightly orange. Orange is thought for being kind of playful, vitality, friendliness, invigorating and evoking energy. It makes sense.
It's right there next to red. So you can have a lot of those same kind of affiliations. Yellow is going to evoke happiness, youth, optimism is also very attention grabbing.
Some people say it's affordable. I think that's a cultural bias depending on which brands you work with. If you think about like Ikea being blue and yellow, you can see that Walmart has it as well.
Amazon has some I think it's orange and yellow and their blues as well. So you can see how these brands are starting to use these and their logos kind of differentiate or suggest what they are there for. Green evokes stability, prosperity, growth.
We obviously associate it with dollars in the US. But also foliage and just like ecologically sound. It's also fun fact, not a very eco friendly printing technique.
So you've seen companies like Sprite starting to pull away from using a green dye. And I think there was a couple brand design firms that were working with partners. They ended up changing their color palette just so that they didn't waste as much ink and weren't harming the environment as much.
Blue. This is my favorite. I can't tell you how many startups have come to me for blue in their brand or the logo because they want this tranquility, they want this trust and openness.
As you can tell, there's big behemoth of social media companies that want to act like they are very trustworthy and that they'll use your privacy and your data for the best intentions and so they keep it blue. It's very intentional the way that they've done that. Purple is one of those things that can signify royalty and creativity and luxury.
The reason why this royalty trend exists is because purple dye was very hard to come by. And so it was really important for them to kind of differentiate and be special. And so they had to use the purple, which I think is a combination of indigo dyes and something else.
If I'm wrong, I'm sorry. Post it in Chat. I would love to know, and correct me if I'm wrong, white is clean, virtue, health, simplicity, and can be both from affordable to high end.
I think we talked about this when I was going through my mood board earlier. I love the fashion lines like Tom Ford and Chanel, and they've all done their fashion books in black and white, and it's definitely got the high contrast. But then you can also do, like, a generic spam can that is all white and just a spam on it.
It's very utilitarian. It can be as luxury or could be cheap as well. So lots of flexibility with it.
Black evokes, like, power, sophistication edge, luxury, and, like, a modern feeling. Whereas gray could be a neutral. It can look subdued.
It can also look mysterious and mature. I love the new Porsche GT three paint job. If you're a car fan, they've got this really nice, warm gray happening.
It's just beautiful. I think it's really kind of a very slick color palette to wrap the car in now these days. I see Colby here.
RB, what's up? Hello, everybody. Hello. Annika says, do you think it can be difficult for a brand to stand out if they all use the same color? Absolutely.
That is absolutely a big problem, and that's what most companies will come to. A brand designer or a brand design firm to talk about, is, like, how do we differentiate in the marketplace? Differentiating in the marketplace is key and crucial and can be very powerful. I think established brands, you don't see that many competing with the same color palette.
Right? When Instagram started, they've kept a gradient in that color palette. When Facebook was happening, they were keeping it blue. Twitter has a different shade.
I think Twitter chose theirs. If I remember the design lore correctly. I believe again, correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that the lore says that they chose a color palette that was specifically to keep loading times down, especially across, like, cell phones and regions with low data resilience.
But if I'm wrong, that might be just folklore. So if we were to choose our own color palette, how would I go about it? Well, personally, I like dark colors as my base or a color that I would wrap, maybe a whole entire website, maybe the entirety of a landing page or something like that. I don't want it to feel too overwhelming, but I want it to kind of imbue the brand in every touch point.
So maybe I'll use, like I don't know, maybe we could do just, like, a dark purple blue, something like this, like, kind of mysterious. Maybe go a little bit further, push it down a little bit more. Boom.
And then we would do like a let's say based off of the texturing we did the other day, I was really loving like a neon and yellow. I would pair that all together and then I'll strokes real quick around the outsides and then a neutral. You could always find something that's a little bit more neutral.
For this one, I would probably suggest doing gray that's a little bit cool. So it kind of brings in some of the elements of that dark purple blue that we have. And then you'll see kind of like if I was to pair these three together, you can just see how they would interplay over each other, which is pretty solid.
I feel like from an accent piece, kind of looking at that, it's like, okay, cool. I can see some moments of intrigue I can have a lot of fun with. That the way I typically like to look at it, like brand palettes or especially from a starting point, I say if you're new to color and color can be absolutely overwhelming.
Totally understand. Try to think of like, your base color will probably be used like 80% of the time. Your accent color may be like less than 20%, and your neutrals will fill in kind of just like always happening.
So I guess that math. I'm a designer. That math was wrong.
Whatever, it's fine. Your neutrals are used in combination with your base for that 80%. I would also pair like a lighter color in.
Probably get like a white or like an off white maybe. It's very subtle, something like that. And now you've got like a pretty solid color palette.
I try to keep the colors within the same range. So again, new to colors, just start with three. Start with your base accent neutral, and that will simplify it for you.
If you feel like it's too rigid and you're not getting enough flexibility from it, then add in a couple more neutral variants and you're going to have a pretty robust system. Allows differentiation and scalability for your projects and your work. That's color.
Oh, no, it's not color. I have so much color for you. All right, come on over with me.
You can go to Adobe or color Adobe.com and you can create from there. What you can essentially do is just go there and you say, okay, I took this great photos from the beach the other day, Alex.
I've got awesome color palette. I got a good sunset, sunrise, whatever. You can pull it in directly from your computer.
If you don't have one and you're seeing all your friends on their Instagram steal their photo and use it as a color picker. Or you can just go on to unsplash and you can actually just pull up a sunset and say, okay, cool, here's a great sunset photo. I'm going to download it and then I'm going to just go here and I'm going to just drag it up inside of it and boom, boom.
It just automatically has pulled the color pieces for you. Or you can drag around, say, maybe I need that dark piece. Maybe I really need a white, but I want it maybe on the outside of the sunset like that.
Maybe I need something else from like a blue here, but I'm not having strong enough oranges. That's a good one. Maybe that's fine.
These are all very doable, very workable. You can drag and drop. Maybe you don't like this image.
Maybe you go to Extracted Gradient. Maybe you want to start adjusting some of the actual visual language through it, change that, something like that, maybe so it starts to scale, have a different gradient. You have the ability to upload new images if you want.
Or you can even just go to the section on the side says Extract Color Move. So you can literally just be like, all right, the colorful one. No, I want the bright one.
Muted deep tones, darker tones, or no. So it's all up to you. You have complete control over this.
What you have the ability to do as well is you can save it to your creative cloud libraries. So I can click Brand Bootcamp and click Save, and what that will do is immediately pull it into my creative cloud libraries and then I can start playing with it and adjusting it. But if I didn't want to do that immediately, there's another option for me.
If I wanted to take this piece, I can also just grab these images or sorry, these color swatches that I built. And I can go up to the very top of my Illustrator board and click Recolor Artwork. Boom.
So I can recolor these pieces. I can go to a color theme picker if I want, or I can go to Advanced Options. I like playing off the advanced options and pressing edit.
What you have the ability to do from here, let me just zoom out just ever so slightly so I can show you better. 2 seconds. Boop boop.
Got those there. Now I'm going to select them again. And then I'm going to go up to the color picker advance.
And then now you can see all of it happen in real time. Click Identify and what you'll see is, as I'm moving this around, I can change the colors. I can keep them pinned together so they're moving together in a group.
So maybe I liked some of the pieces. I can also adjust the hue and saturation of them. I can also go through here and change to Complementary or Triadic or any other types of shapes.
I can click here and go to web color groups. I can completely adjust them if I want to. I can also use the different segmentations of the color wheel so you have a smooth one and then you have color segmented groups as well, and display color bars.
So you have lots of different options. Maybe I want to just adjust the HSB. I want to adjust the brilliance of it.
It gives you that option as well. So you have a lot of things you can work with within this space. So this is a really easy way to just move things around on your screen.
Start exploring color palettes. It helps you keep things easy. Peasy lemon squeezy.
All right, so that's color spent about half the lesson on color. Let's start talking into the other things you can do as an extension of your brand. So, patterns.
If you watched any of my streams before, you know how much I love designing in patterns. We'll show you a little bit in just a couple of minutes about patterns and pattern language and how to build them really quickly within Illustrator, super fast imagery is huge in terms of how your brand communicates, right? You want to be able to bring in images that speak to your audience or reflect your brand. Again, we go back to that wordboard that we looked at at the very beginning on the first day, as you remember.
Let me scroll through up here. Any of these words can be super helpful. This will give you a great starting point.
Maybe I want something that feels a little bit more bold and dramatic. Maybe that means, because I've got those two words in my wordboard, I'm going to be looking for something with harder light, maybe some harder shadows, a little bit more bounce around with just colors, maybe even there's a lot of things that you can do with this. So remember, your mood board, your strategy, all these things help you be a better designer, but also get stakeholders aligned around the vision and the imagery.
Everything you're doing should be tied back to the strategy. The better you get at the strategy, the better you're going to be as a designer, as a creative, and all your work will be approved a lot easier. So highly recommended.
So we're spending so much time on it this week. Your images can be literally of anything. It doesn't have to be a person.
It can be a 3D thing. It can be a 3D object. It could be a landscape, it could be a product.
It can be anything you need to convey it. The other thing to say is, illustrations are a great counterbalance. Not everything can be shown in a literal image, or if it is feasible in an image, it might be too much work or require too much budget to set it up right.
So if I could say I need a cell phone app mockup that expresses a payment transfer, sure, I can go to a studio and I can get a model and art direct it, and have a photographer and a lighting assistant, makeup artist and a set stylist and get the hand photo shot that I want. Absolutely easy. Could also just be quicker to go into Illustrator or go to Adobe stock and start downloading illustrations and start bringing them in.
Either make them yourself or buy a stock vector pack. All these things are at your fingertips. Let me actually just pull up really quickly if you wanted to stock Adobe.com.
So if I want to, I could go straight into here and go down to the images section and just type in like vector illustration person. What I'll do is immediately grab. You can see these, like, great pieces or starting blocks.
Let's see here. I think this might be an Illustrator file. I can also change the filter button typically.
Yeah, illustrations. So I can go from subcategory away from Photos and go to Illustrations. And now all I've got is vector images.
Right. So this is huge. This is such an easy way to start building maybe a web page that you're doing.
Maybe you're helping somebody with like a library or a bookstore or something like that. You now have six assets here that you can start using and pieces of them to bring the brand together so you can license it really quickly. This file is a JPEG, though, and what I would want is an Illustrator file so we can see if we can find one really quickly.
JPEGs, come on. Clear filters. Let's see.
Filter. Filter clear. Why is my filter not working? Well, you can search for Illustrator files.
There you go. This one's an Ae, EPS and JPEG. You can see this here.
What you're going to want to start with is the Illustrator file. So you can bring them in, you can edit them. One of my favorite things to do, if I didn't need to do this style for people, I've had to do it many times for clients.
If I start with one of these vector packs, or if they already have a vector pack to begin with, you can start editing them with the Puppet Warp tool and grab this person's elbow and move the hand down and start to pose them the way that your business or your product needs. So it is a very easy peasy approach for you. Go back into icons.
I look at icons as a secondary element as well to your brand. It is like another version of Illustration, but at a very small level. How you do the strokes, how you do the end caps.
If you're doing filled icons, all these things translate your brand down into very, very simple shapes, languages, and like a nomenclature that can be another touch point for your brand. So it's super important that you also do your iconography well. Icons could be free.
There's tons of great free resources. Material Design has one from Google. Tableau, I believe, is one as well.
Remix is another icon set. Lots of already super robust ones. You can also build your own we've got three minutes left, though, so I'm going to show you patterns super duper quick.
All right, so if we were to start with, like, the I made a new logo this last night. It's called halves. It's essentially just untitled sands with this kind of geometric shape here.
But if I wanted to play off of this circle or this half circle shape, I would probably just say, you know what? I want a circle. I can bring this circle in. I can make it as complicated as I want.
But what I can do really quickly is just say, okay, I'm going to object. Pattern make I'm going to do is actually stroke it. So shift X and then increase the thickness.
And then I can go down to these columns. I can sort it by grids, rows, bricks, anything you want to do. I typically like to do it by column.
I'm going to decrease the artboard width so it has more overlap, and then you can start playing with it. You can also, if this is too confusing, you're like, which one's? The one that I'm editing. You can dim your copies to, like, 30% or 70%, and that will change the opacity of the ones you're not directly working on.
But by just doing that really quickly, you can see how this is starting to shape. It's a square. So I do want everything to be the same width and height.
I'll do 420 as well. And then that creates a pattern. And then you can just do that ever so quickly.
Just go up here. It's already added it to the palette, and you can start messing with it. So this is, like, so easy, so simple.
Just quick way to rip out a pattern. I could see this if this was like a coffee shop, this could wrap the mug, or this could go on a billboard or a poster or anything that you need as, like, a background textual element. You have to be careful with patterns, though.
Sometimes they can start to feel a little bit too heavy. They almost start to feel like a chain link fence or jail bars or just like a very heavy, heavy blanket on your project. So use patterns with caution.
Use them with care, but they can be an extremely helpful tool for you as you are starting to build out your design library. So, really quick recap. We have talked about today colors, how important it is getting your lighting and your shades and your tents and your hues correct for your brand.
Your project is crucial, but I also like to let stakeholders get a lot more control over the color palette because they're going to be working with it on a daily basis. It's also a really great way to involve your stakeholders and let them feel ownership of the project instead of you always being the one who has to know everything. It is one of the most objective things so typically works to involve them in that process.
All right, we are at time, but stick around. Tomorrow we are going to be working in Adobe Express. We're going to be tying everything I've taught you all into a 30 minutes segment on Express, bringing your color libraries into creative cloud stock.
Images, patterns, tools, tight, all all these things. That's what we're going to be doing tomorrow. So make sure you come back.
We are looking forward to it. See you tomorrow. Bye bye, everyone.
