FEBRUARY 2020 - APRIL 2020
Branding
Visual Design
Art Direction
HelloSkin and Happy Day Cake were two brands created in my visual design class. My role for this independent project was visual designer and researcher. I followed visual design principles to create two styleguides and two brand lockups, which consist of an icon, logotype, and a tagline.
1. Research two distinct industries
2. Apply visual design principles to brand designs
3. Create two colored lockups
4. Create styleguides for each brand
In order to design two distinct brands, I had to choose two keywords per brand that represented the focus and style of the brands. I began my research by looking for design precedents in the skincare and cake shop industries. This initial research was done to get an understanding of what was already on the market and served as inspiration.
Based on my research, I chose the keywords modern and calm for my skincare brand. Most of the cake shops used fun and inviting colors. Based on these design precedents, I decided to make my cake shop brand look cute and friendly.
I chose cool colors that would represent calmness. The colors I chose are analogous on the color wheel (colors that are next to each other). This brings modernity to my brand.
Two of the colors I selected are
high-key colors. High-key colors have lighter tones. In order to make my icon stand out, I also chose a low-key blue color.
Happy Day Cake is a cute and friendly brand. In order to illustrate this, I used split-complementary colors (a primary color used with two analogous colors to its complement). These four colors are warm high-key (lighter in value) to give a fun and dynamic impression.
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For my HelloSkin's typography, I decided to use modern typeface, Poppins. Poppins is sans-serif (no serifs on the end of each letter). It has a wide, bold look and offers a feeling of reliability to the brand. I bolded the words “Hello” to emphasize reliability. For my tagline, I used Bilo. Bilo is also a sans-serif font, but offers a calm impression due to its flowing thin letters.
Happy Day Cake's typography consists of sans-serif decorative typeface, Agatha, for the brand name. The cute balloon look of this typeface offers friendliness to the brand. I used a
sans-serif handwritten typeface for the tagline. The variety of x-height values in the tagline makes the text look bouncy. This makes the tagline look cute and friendly.
HelloSkin uses organic shapes in the icon. The use of organic shapes emphasizes calmness. The thickness and wideness of the brand name makes the brand feel reliable and modern. The tagline has a curvier appearance that ties to the
Happy Day Cake's lockup is round with soft corners. This adds an element of cuteness and friendliness to the brand. The icon and main typeface display a fun and dynamic impression due to their round and inflated curves.
After creating each lockup, I made two styleguides to display the rules of usage of the brands. I introduced the brands, went over some color, shaping, and sizing restrictions and included color and font information.
This project was fun and challenging. I enjoyed designing in a short amount of time. The goal was to design two distinct brands that gave off different vibes. If I could go back to change anything, I would work on the cake shop brand's logo. I would give the cake a more dynamic look by changing the perfect circular shape of the cake to a more wavier and uneven shape. That would surely add some more movement to the design.
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