At a glance, investing in branding design for your small business might feel like a steep investment, but did you know that a lot more goes into your branding than you may even realize?

The most important part of your branding is actually the step that comes before we create anything tangible. The first step always should be to craft the creative direction for your business.

But what even is a creative direction?

A creative direction is a set of visuals and design inspiration custom to your brand. It’s based on a strategic deep dive into what makes you and your business unique and guides us through the rest of the branding design process.

We start by discovering your goals, your target audience, and your brand personality, which all combined will help us discover the visuals that best represent your business.

All of this information is what shapes the Creative Direction and becomes a detailed guide that we will reference throughout the rest of the design process.

How it helps your business

Think of the creative direction as the soul of your business. It’s what makes your brand special. We want to make sure that your individuality shines through.

Having a creative direction also allows us to make informed design decisions which will attract the right audience, help you stand out from the crowd, and give you an overall professional and cohesive look and feel.

What comes with your creative direction

The first step is coming up with a comprehensive strategy. This includes pulling together your target audience, your brand vision, and your brand adjectives. We gather this info from our initial conversations and a brand questionnaire.

From there we can create a visual moodboard which will portray the overall vibe we want to go with for your brand. Usually the moodboard features photos, textures, typography, and more all based on the strategy we created earlier.

Once we’ve gathered inspiration, we can find patterns within the visuals we’ve pulled together to determine colors and fonts.

All of these components will help us move forward to the part of the design process that you may be most familiar with, aka a logo, packaging design, digital graphics, and more.

As you can see, there’s a lot more that goes into creating the best branding design than meets the eye. There’s a lot of thought and strategy that needs to be established before we start coming up with a logo or business cards or anything else. If you want to level up your brand game in 2021, you need to figure out a creative direction first so that you have a strong foundation and understanding of what we’re designing and why.

___

Are you ready to take your business to the next level with your own creative direction? Fill out our inquiry form to schedule a free intro call and learn more about how we can help you!

Or check us out on Instagram to see more behind the scenes of what’s happening at the studio.