The foundation of any great design lies in truly understanding the customer and their needs. Our consulting process always starts with getting to know your business inside out – your history, ethos, objectives, target audience and any specific aims you may have for a design project.

We take the time to understand the following key aspects:

• What products and services you offer
• Who your target customer base is
• What is your brand persona and what you aim to convey visually
• Any particular styles or themes you wish to incorporate
• What the main aims and call-to-actions are for the design

Understanding requirements from your perspective as the business owner enables us to translate those into an effective visual design strategy. Our design consultants will work closely with you in a highly collaborative process to develop a design brief that captures exactly what you need.

In addition to understanding your business, we also conduct thorough market research and analysis around your industry, competitors and existing visual branding approaches. This enables us to take an informed strategic approach on what styles, themes and design tactics are most likely to achieve your objectives.

Some of the key areas our research focuses on:

Industry Benchmarks – We closely analyse designs and styles commonly employed in your industry to determine what tends to resonate best with your target customers. This establishes a benchmark to either align with or consciously differentiate from.

Competitor Analysis – An in-depth competitor analysis helps us determine what visual approaches your direct competitors are utilizing, so we can ensure your design stands out whilst also leveraging approaches that work.

Brand Persona Research – We assess brand personas, themes and visual elements that your target audience finds appealing so we can incorporate appropriate strategic elements into your brand’s design.

Design Tactic Research – From strategic use of colors, shapes, layouts and fonts to the latest trends in graphics, templates and UX, we research all existing knowledge to inform a tactical design approach for you.

Combining our understanding of your business and strategic findings from market research enables us to put together the optimal design strategy tailored for your needs.

With a solid understanding of your requirements and research into your target market as well as industry benchmarks, our design consultants move to the next phase of developing an overarching design strategy.

This provides a planned conceptual roadmap and guidelines for the design process based on core focus areas:

Brand Messaging – We determine the key brand messages that need to be conveyed visually in alignment with your business ethos and objectives.

Style Guidelines – We establish guidelines around styles, themes, fonts, color palettes, graphics choices and layouts to effectively communicate your brand.

UX Strategy – For digital products, we develop an accompanying UX strategy focused on user journeys, interactions and interfaces for optimal engagement.

Adaptability – We ensure the overarching design allows easy adaptation for use across various mediums like print, digital, merchandise and more.

Format/Layout Guidelines – Although each design piece may be unique, maintaining consistent formats, layout principles, typographical hierarchies etc. helps strengthen your brand identity.

Cohesive Visual Language – A planned visual language is developed to ensure all elements like colors, fonts, graphic devices and style themes speak in a consistent voice that uniquely represents your brand.

Call-to-Action Strategy – We determine how to strategically lead the viewer’s eye towards key calls-to-action aligned with your objectives.

The design strategy provides the blueprint to now execute individual design pieces, enabling efficient creative direction of each piece while retaining cohesion from a big picture perspective.

With the project fully scoped and strategy mapped out according to your unique needs, we now focus on effectively bringing your design to life.

Our designers get to work conceptualizing and creating stylescape mood boards, UI wireframes and initial design comps to capture the visual direction as outlined in our previous strategic planning stages.

We take an iterative approach, welcoming your feedback to hone in on what resonates best with your vision. This enables aligning the strategic frameworks with how you envisaged the end result.

Some of the key areas we focus on executing:

Stylescapes – We develop a library of styles, graphics, fonts, layouts and patterns that align with the planned visual language for your brand. This forms a stylescape that conveys the look and feel you want to achieve.

Fonts & Typography – We select and test fonts that perfectly communicate your brand’s persona, ensuring great visibility and UX where applicable. Typographic hierarchies are defined to orchestrate optimal flow.

Color Palettes – Impactful color palettes are chosen not just for visual appeal but also strategic messaging, conveying deeper brand meanings and driving specific emotions and actions.

Graphic Assets – Unique graphic assets like logos, icons and illustration styles are created to further build your distinctive brand identity system.

Imagery – For print and digital, we advise and source impactful, relevant imagery that aligns both aesthetically and thematically with your brand story and objectives.

Layouts/Compositions – Balanced, intentional compositions and layout principles are applied to scenes, pages, slides and screens to effectively direct focus and support UX where relevant.

UI/UX – For digital products, UX prototyping and iterative user testing ensures seamless front-end and back-end integration where every screen and journey enhances user engagement.

Through collaborative fine-tuning, we arrive at finalized design pieces that bring your brand to life just as envisaged.

Upon completing the design process, we deliver all finalized graphic assets and files formatted, optimized and compatible for use across the required mediums and applications.

For print design this includes:

• High and low resolution JPG/PNG files
• Packaged InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop files
• PDF, EPS files

Guidelines for printing specifications like size, binding, paper stock etc

For digital design this includes:

• Web-ready graphic files like JPGs, GIFs, PNGs
• SVG, Vector files
• HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript files
• User interaction guidelines
• UI/UX guidelines and resources
• Access to design source files

Additionally you also receive complete Brand Guidelines capturing brand messaging, visual language, stylescapes, usage guidelines and more to enable easy adaptation of your new brand identity across various applications in future.

We are also happy to work directly with your printing vendors and web developers to ensure perfect execution from our design files through to final production as well as provide any guidance or support needed in future to help you get the most mileage from your new design assets.

Contact us today to schedule a consultation with our design experts or learn more about our branding and printing services.