Workflow

Review Job Overview

Before beginning, fully review the job overview of the position. It will have all the information you need about what is expected and what tools you will need.

Visual Identity Designer

Projects follow a set (but flexible) process to manage expectations and produce high-quality results for the client team. Please familiarize yourself with our principles and general prototyping guidelines:

Prototyping Principles

Check out this medium article by Andrej Berlin on how to prototype anything in one day for ease of reference.

Contribute to Workshops

Show up to workshops with valuable insights that are relevant to the client's values. Provide feedback and assistance. Workshops will usually have a Workshop Facilitator to help guide the conversation. However, they often lack the Design experience necessary to provide specific insight.

This will include:

During the workshops, you will be supporting the facilitator in making strategic product design decisions and guiding the client towards designing a product that their users should fall in love with. Some clients tend to be insecure and may need more or less handholding, in which case you can always give them advice and help steer the product in a direction, which will benefit the users.

Branding Sprint

There are two Branding Sprints to be attended. The first is simply to get clarity on the venture. The second is to align on a visual direction. The most important part of these workshops, for the Visual Identity Designer, is the Styleboarding Session. Learn more about the rest of the workshop here:

Branding Sprints

Styleboarding Session

During the storyboarding session, your task is to understand what the team's intentions are for the product and visualize it in simple ways. The goal is to create a basic concept with all necessary details so you can design the prototype with high visual fidelity, without external support.

As the designer on the collaboration, you need to enforce that all the content and decisions are made by the team during the storyboard. It is essential that you don't have to make these or fill in the gaps during the prototyping as there is no time.

During the storyboard, at each break, you need to estimate what you are capable of designing during the two or three days of prototyping. E.g.: We've designed three screens at this first break and I estimate that due to the complexity, these are going to take 50% of my available time during the prototyping process. Please bear this in mind as we go into details on the next six screens.

Styleboarding Homework

After the 2nd session of the Branding Sprint has ended, condense the findings of a brand sprint into 3 styleboards. Research and provide high quality recommendations for font, colour, layout, and key visuals. Define the visual concepts in each storyboard to discuss with the client.

Steps

  1. Styleboarding 1 - Cluster Visual research into style groups.

  2. Styleboarding 2 - Get more examples for each style group to clarify style, especially for type, color, and layout variations.

  3. Styleboarding 3 - Break down style groups into 2-3 main directions with 4 sub-categories each – Color, Typo, Layout, Key Visual.

  4. Styleboarding 4 - Get feedback from internal team (facilitator, brand designer, etc).

  5. Styleboarding 5 - Refine Boards and research additional material if needed.

The styleboards created will receive feedback at the first Website Design Sprint workshop.

Receive styleboard feedback

The client will spend the first 5-10 minutes voting on and discussing the styleboards you created. Take notes on this feedback and use it to inform the rest of the workshop.

Communicate visual direction to all relevant parties

Based on this feedback, articulate the visual direction including foundational styles (colors, fonts, grid) and components (buttons, nav, fields etc.) to speed up ongoing work and send it to the Website Designer so they can begin drafting the Key pages. Make sure to also send any relevant information about visual direction to Illustration Designers and Logo Designers.

Create Brand Guidelines

With this information, create brand guidelines for the client. Make sure it includes an intro / overview, Logo (optional), colour, typography, imagery, resources.

Attend Final Presentation

At the Final Presentation Workshop, you will have the opportunity to spend 5 minutes presenting the Branding Guidelines. After the workshop, send the branding guidelines to the Creative Director who will ensure it is included in the Project Completion stage.

See the Final Presentation page for more information:

Final Presentation

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