[gb] Studio

Last week I launched a splash page announcing the Lilly’s Table project. I’ve been working on it for some time, and part of the plan is to give you all (my 2 or 3 faithful readers) some insight into the process of designing and building a web application from the ground up.

This is one of my favorite types of projects: I’ve been involved with Lilly in everything…

This is one of my favorite types of projects: I’ve been involved with Lilly in everything from the business development side, to the product design, and of course, the actual site design & development. One of the initial design pieces I worked on was the visual brand for the project. In this first post discussing the branding process, I’ll show a bit of the work we went through to arrive at the final logo for Lilly’s Table.

Goals

Chef Lilly is a joy to work with. A few of the overall goals she and I discussed at the outset of the branding process were: the inclusion of whitespace, a competence, but reserved friendliness to the tone, a modernity, but without being “stuffy”, use of vibrant color, use of photography (when applicable), and finally, a system for representing the season—a sort of visual reminder for food’s natural ties to spring, summer, fall, and winter.

Brand Exploration

I put away my gradients and drop shadows for this one.

Because of the creative nature of cooking and recipe writing, Chef Lilly had a pretty good idea from the outset regarding some of the look & feel she wanted for the sites brand. My job was to help her narrow some of that down.

I put together something I call a Brand Exploration Board. There isn’t any magic to it—it’s simply a chunk of existing design work that I think either feels “right” for the new brand, has aspects I like, or helps me answer a question regarding what the client is thinking. For example, if a client says they don’t like red, but I think it might work well for the project in the right context, I try to find a fitting example and get their reaction to it. You’d be surprised how often their answer is different from their initial statement.

For this project I wanted to take a lot of our design cues from food packaging design. While Lilly’s Table will-most likely-never sell actual food, I wanted its brand to embody and evoke the feeling of high-end, niche food or retail products.

One of my other goals… was to create a brand that would look amazing online, but wouldn’t “feel” like a typical web application.

One of my other goals going into the design process was to create a brand that would look amazing online, but wouldn’t “feel” like a typical web application. I put away my gradients and drop shadows for this one. About the logo, specifically, it needed to be simple, bold, and look like something that was pulled out of gorgeous print design before hitting the computer screen.

Pen & Ink

I used to always start with the computer. I know, crazy. At one point I worked for an agency where we worked so fast and relentlessly that we’d be showing clients what were essentially initial ideas, straight from my brain and into Illustrator. This wasn’t necessarily bad, but I knew, even at the time, that I wasn’t doing my best work this way and it bugged me.

I’ve learned… there isn’t magic in a particular process so much as it is important to do creative thinking in different ways.

When I started [gb] Studio, I began revamping my own personal creative process. One of the most important things I’ve learned along the way is that there isn’t magic in a particular process so much as it is important to do creative thinking in different ways. Mixing it up forces different thought processes to happen. I find now that I come up with better ideas starting with rough sketches long before touching a computer. Even then, I sometimes go back-and-forth just to force myself to look at potential concepts with from different perspectives.

I’d learned a few things from Lilly’s feedback to the Brand Exploration Board. Particular to the logo, I knew for certain that she would be drawn to strong, simple marks. We both felt like such marks would be perfect for the audience of our project.

An aside on designing for your target audience: A huge part of what good designers do is hard to explain. We kind of have to “get inside” the mind of the target or audience for a project and ask what would appeal to them. If we’re the right designer for the project, what appeals to them will often appeal to us as well, on some level, but these things don’t necessarily go hand-in-hand.

For this project in particular, we’re trying to attract some people that, frankly, are probably turned off by other food sites. Most cooking sites seem geared to a) woman, in general, and b) specifically moms. Here is the interesting thing about those demographics: if they find our site useful, they’re not going to be turned off by it if they aren’t specifically targeted in the design. By creating some cleaner, higher-end design that is a little more gender-neutral, we are hoping to attract more men who enjoy cooking (or want to try) and single women, who may not be cooking for family as much as for friends.

I set out with some sketches. Mine are usually quick, crude, and only make sense to me. Most of the time, I don’t even show sketches to clients. I can draw a large number of concepts quickly, in one or two sittings. They simply act as cues for what I really see in my head and how it needs to be executed on the computer.

Ideas

The logo design process is like a funnel. Even on a project like this, where I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted out of the logo, you start with an overwhelming amount of possible ideas, nixing some, refining others, slowly whittling the pile down. I’ve made the mistake of presenting too many ideas to a client before and try hard to avoid it now. Many clients think this is counterintuitive—that they would be better off seeing all of my ideas—but part of my job is to help them pick the best concept for the project. Without guidance, they can become overwhelmed with possibilities.

I start asking myself how each idea would influence other design elements: What colors would we use? What complementary typefaces?

A lot of the final ideas had similarities—they were variations on the same concept—trying to figure out the best option. Something happens at this stage in the process: I begin visualizing what these logos would look like in actual design. I start asking myself how each idea would influence other design elements: What colors would we use? What complementary typefaces? I’ll even create some other design elements to see how everything interacts in some context.

Narrowing it Down

Looking at the options above, in relation to some other design ideas I had for the brand and site itself, the logo on the bottom-right was working the best. It was strong, flexible, clear at different sizes, but I wasn’t yet happy with the typeface.

It was close, but didn’t have the right personality. I played around with a few others and finally settled on Museo Sans 900:

The end result

Some kerning, spacing, a few other minor adjustments to the letters, some squinting, staring, and going crazy, and I finally felt like it was where I wanted it. It can be hard to decide when to stop with a mark—when enough tweaking is enough.

Choosing a logo should not be a tortuous process.

Chef Lilly was really happy with the result. It works for where we’re taking the project and it’s flexible for applications in the future that we haven’t committed to yet or even thought of.

An aside on choosing a logo: A logo is important, but it’s ultimately only one piece of the whole brand. Choosing a logo should not be a tortuous process. In my experience, the clients who over-think, overanalyze, and remain indecisive throughout the whole process are basically not allowing themselves a chance to be happy with their mark. They rarely have concrete reasons for why existing mark ideas won’t work, and start saying things like, “None of these feel right”.

As a designer, you can’t plan for every contingency up front. As a client you can’t keep putting off a decision in hopes that something “more perfect” will come out of the designer’s brain further through the process.

In a future post I’ll talk about how I addressed some of the other overall branding goals, and also talk about the color palette and seasonal color system we’ll be using on the project.

• Follow @LillysTable on Twitter
• Watch the lilly’s table tag for other articles on the project.

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