The Steps To Design A Brand Identity, With Alina Wheeler

Ian Paget: This week I'm excited to be chatting with Alina Wheeler, the author of one of my favourite books, Designing Brand Identity. This was one of the first design books I purchased probably around five to six years ago. And it gave me a real insight into how design agencies and companies carry out a branding process from start to finish. And the information and the understanding it has given me of branding has also heavily influenced how I go about designing logos too.

Since reading this book, I purchased and read quite a significant volume of design books, but this is one that I frequently pull out and reference, as it breaks down the branding process into easy to follow steps, with really useful diagrams too, that can even be shown to clients. It's one book I'm always recommending. So when I plan to do an episode of branding, Alina was the first name that came to mind. So I was really excited when she kindly agreed. So to talk about designing brand identities, I introduce you to Alina Wheeler.

Alina Wheeler: Everyone is branding now, cities, countries, communities, even your kid's soccer team. So it's not just companies anymore. It's companies, it's everyone big and small, profit and nonprofit. So then what is branding? It's a disciplined process. The purpose of the process is to fuel recognition, attract new customers, build employee engagements, build customer loyalty, and build and grow the business. Another thing that branding is, is its sense of brand represents the organisation's biggest and most valuable asset. Branding is also about protecting that asset. I love what Debbie Millman said about branding. She said branding is deliberate differentiation. So from the perspective of being a designer, of being on that branding team, how do you help your client rise above the clutter and how do you help to grow and increase the value of their brand?

I initially wrote this book because I realised there just was no agreement on what a brand was. There are hundreds of definitions, and I've met a lot of really smart people, leaders of big organisations who wanted to know what branding was. And I'd often say, "Look, it's like accounting, you have to do it every single day." And yes, it's a complex discipline. It has a lot of little parts, but just please remember these four questions, because this to me is kind of the essence. And the companies, the organisations, or even the communities that can answer these questions, have a better chance to be successful. So who are you? Who needs to know? How will they find out? And, why should they care?

Ian Paget: That's a fantastic explanation. As I know this information may be new to some of the younger listeners in the audience. He may be designing logos without the understanding of branding. Can you talk through what role a logo plays in branding?

Alina Wheeler: Here's what's so amazing. Logos are actually the fastest form of communication known to man. They fuel recognition. The best ones are vessels for meeting. And think of it, they are an essential, essential part of the entire kind of branding matrix. Whether they're used on an app icon, an email signature, a social post, a business card, a package, a tattoo, they're omnipresent. And what really astonishes me is even the smallest organisations have little goals that if you were to count up how many times their logos appear across these touch points in any given year, it would be millions, millions, and millions. So the best logos for me unlock the associations of the brand. And again, I love what Milton Glazer said. He said, "The logo is the gateway to the brand."

Ian Paget: I love that. Can I ask you now to talk through the high level steps that you would take to design a brand identity?

Alina Wheeler: I have developed a process that fits on one page. It has five phases, and I basically developed this process to build confidence in the solution, confidence in the people that are working on the brand, and also to just reduce what I call brand anxiety. So there are five phases. Each phase has a set amount of tasks, and you don't go onto the second phase until you finish the first phase. So in a nutshell, the first phase is conducting research, the second phase is clarifying strategy, the third phase is designing identity, for me, kind of visualising the future. And the fourth phase is creating touch points. So you're creating a system there to achieve the right balance, maybe between flexibility and consistency. And the final phase, I call managing assets. And that's really when the revitalised brand is launched to the world and the guidelines are made available to everyone that needs to know.

Ian Paget: These five steps are brilliant. And what I'd like to do now is deep dive into a few of these steps in the time that we have available. So let's start with the research phase. How do you go about carrying this out?

Alina Wheeler: Well, I like to think of research and the role that you would play in the research phase, and I hope you think of yourself as a sleuth, a shrink and a scientist. So you're looking for insights. You're looking for insights about the problem you're solving, you're looking to learn more about the customer, about your client, the competition, the market place, and what I like to think about too, is you're looking for the gold. It always astonishes me. I've worked on hundreds of brand identity programs and systems, and it always astonishes me. You always find something that becomes an epiphany. There are different parts. As I said, each phase has a series of tasks. One of the tasks is auditing.

Number one, you are collecting whatever information you can about that particular organisation. Make a request of your client, you give them a list. And not only do you look at things from the present, also if you're revitalising, if you're re-doing the logo, revitalising the brand, you also want to request materials from your future. So you will be conducting a marketing audit. A marketing audit is also called an internal audit. And you are looking at all the touch points where the logo and the brand exist. Maybe you're looking at key messages, maybe you're also looking at names. You're looking at all of the logos an organisation has ever had. You're really taking a magnifying glass to how is this company presently communicating about itself? So while you're doing this internal audit, I always like to recommend doing a touch point diagram.

A touch point diagram is a diagram where the brand is in the centre, and then it has a number of spokes. And when you look at an organisation, you say, "Wow, look at all the different ways that this organisation is communicating about themselves across touch points." Throughout this research process, you are collecting information that you're going to be using throughout the entire process. You're also going to do a competitive audit in which you're going to ask your client, "Could you identify three to five leading competitors?" And again, you're going to go do a deep dive on how do those competitors leverage their branding to become more successful? How did those different touch points that the competitors use, how are they different? What do they do really well? What can we learn from them? And where can we really dramatically differentiate ourselves from them?

You're going to be conducting a series of interviews. So if it's a very small engagement, maybe you're only interviewing four or five people. You're interviewing the founder, maybe a CFO or the customer service person or the sales person. And you are going to be asking them a series of questions. Number one, you're going to start to build confidence because you're going to ask some really good questions. And the other thing that you're going to do, and it kind of sounds like blinding flash of the obvious, is you're really going to sit back and listen. So if you ask some questions and people hesitate, just sit back, give it some space and they'll come back to you with a really thoughtful answer.

So what kinds of questions do you want to ask? It's kind of like what you want to be when you grow up. Why should your customers choose your brand over others? What do you do better than your competition? What keeps you up at night? Tell me about your customer. Tell me about the needs that you are fulfilling. And during these interviews, you also have an opportunity to reinforce why this organisation has chosen to rebrand themselves. You always want to make sure that everyone is working towards the same three goals. Number one, you're listening, you're building confidence, you're taking notes.

I love to just record a conversation and have it transcribed. And you're going to, at some point, pull out some really amazing things that come out of these interviews. When you learn more about who the customers are and how this particular organisation is structured, you're going to be able to create a stakeholder diagram. So again, it's a great diagram, you're going to use it throughout the process, and it's basically the brand is in the centre and a series of circles surrounding that brand. And it's the customer, the prospect, maybe it's the board. Maybe it's a government agency, the media.

So companies are always, companies of two people, companies of 10,000 people, they love these diagrams because decision-makers very rarely kind of see at a glance who the stakeholders are, what the touch points are. So these audits, you're really evaluating the present state of the brand. You're also doing whatever you can to gain insight into the customer. Some companies, even if they're really tiny, are going to have some research about their customer that they can share with you. Sometimes I like to do something called mystery shopping, where I put myself into the body of the customer. So I order a product and then I see how easy it is.

I see what the customer services like, I see what opening the package is like, I see what the follow through is like. So I get a lot of insights in being a mystery shopper. There are levels of research as projects get more complex. And I don't think we have time to review them, but things like usability research is one of them. The other thing that I didn't mention is before you do the interviews, educate yourself about this organisation. Read whatever you can from customer reviews to your website, to again, give your clients the confidence that you've done your homework, and you're listening deeply to what they're trying to achieve. At the end of this research phase, you're going to do something called an audit readout. And maybe if you're really lucky you can create a wall room.

Sometimes even small companies have a room where you could put the entire audit up on the walls. It's kind of fun to walk management through. What I usually do is I usually create an 11 by 17 booklet, and I also project everything on the wall. So you say, "Alina, booklet paper, really?" But I found that during the presentation, everyone gets ideas, they want to write all over the audit. So I want you to do that. So basically you are synthesising your learnings. You are sharing your epiphanies. You are quoting some of the people that you've interviewed with things that they've said, big pullout quotes. And I've been doing this for a long time, and I'm always amazed and surprised at what I can get from an interview.

Face to face is a luxury, as Susan Bird says, that few of us can afford, but if you can do it face to face with the founder or your client, I strongly recommend it. So that's in a nutshell what the research phase is. So you're capturing your client's vision. You're looking at the present state of the brand and all the touch points. Your job as a designer is you're part of that team that's going to help run the future. And by doing all this homework, you can anticipate the future in a much better way.

Ian Paget: Okay. So let's move on to the next step clarifying brand strategy. What happens within this step?

Alina Wheeler: Basically what happens in that step is you get everyone, the decision makers to agree on what the brand is, what it stands for and how it's different. So this phase is very hard, hard in something that if you do this phase, you will start your whole process. You're starting from a position of strength. So let me go backwards. Organisations that know who they are and why they're different begin any branding from a position of strength. In my earlier career and early on, I had a very, very... I had a design office, and I didn't use a discipline process. And I didn't sit down with this process map and say, "Well, here we are in the process." As a designer, as soon as you shake the hand of a prospective client, you're already designing in your mind. Because designers are amazingly intuitive. But you have to hold on to it and do not begin to design or share the design until after you're absolutely certain that your client has been clear about their brand fundamentals.

So I've had clients that have given me like a 300 page deck and said, "Well, if you want to understand our brand, this is what it is." Well, that's... I'll just use the word baloney. So I developed this tool called the brand brief, and the brand brief is not a creative brief. It's the brand grief. It's a simple one-page diagram. Again, I put it on an 11 by 17 piece of paper, this is not a word doc, this is not an email. I'm going to project it on the screen, and I'm going to through the first version of it, record what I heard from the interviews and the research that I've done. And I'm going to make it visual. I am going to make it visual because I'm beginning as a designer to get a feel for what the customer looks like or what the brand could feel like.

So this simple one-page diagram has the following components. Again, it's just one sentence or two. Core purpose, why do they exist right beyond just making money? Why do they exist? Audience, who are their customers and what do they need? Describe very, very briefly the way they define their customers. Personality attributes. You want to agree ahead of time, whether they want to be shallow and edgy or buttoned up. You want to really start to talk about their personality. Key products or services. So any company, they're going to have three or four top three products or services. Proof points. Proof point to me is why they will be successful, and it's everything from, "Our product went viral." Or, "Just read our customer reviews." Or, "We've gotten additional funding, we're kicking it up to this next level." It's also really important in terms of, to kind of record the values.

I didn't talk at all in the interviews on we want to kind of get a sense of what the culture is of the organisation. So you want to put down what are the values that hold this organisation together? And there are organisations like [inaudible 00:24:28] that do a terrific job of communicating about their values to their employees and their customers. And then value proposition. What are the benefits? Are they functional, or are they social or are they emotional? And so all of these things are described with just one or two lines, and then there are some visual elements, and then maybe there is a central positioning or kind of larger, big idea. And you can begin to communicate here. So you present this and you think, "Wow 500 words, how hard could it be? Slam-bam, thank you ma'am." But actually this document engenders the best conversation, because it's one page and again, depending on the size of your client, maybe you'll go through two or three versions.

But you'll really engage them into being completely clear about who they are. Earlier on, before I developed this process, I had a fairly large design studio, wonderful, wonderful studio. And we're going to go into these meetings and we would show what we thought were solutions based on a lot of intelligence gathering. And then you'd always have someone at the meeting go, "That's not who we are. That's not who we are." So I think the brand brief is a great tool. I like to think of this as the campfire. "Let's all get around the same campfire and be really clear at the highest simplest level, what this brand is about." As a designer, you're like chomping at the bit, and then again, this is not the creative brief. The creative brief has to do with the project itself, the constraints of that project. The creative brief is going to say, "We're going to look at three applications." So again, I just don't know Ian, when you design a logo, do you show that logo applied to a company's three main touch points?

Ian Paget: Yeah. What I tend to do is I typically mock up the logo on a number of different things. It's not specific touch points as such, but what I try to do is like mark up and say like a business card on a T-shirt, on a billboard or on a building or something like that. Because I've always found that it's easier for the client to actually visualise how that's going to look at the end because if you can imagine no one ever looks at a logo on a white piece of paper, do they?

Alina Wheeler: No, no, no. And that's smart. You want to present the logo as if it already exists. So I'm so happy that you do that, but I would love if you could also use the touch point diagrams. And when you're meeting with your decision makers say, "Okay, here are all your touch points." And everyone goes, "Wow! Wow-wow." But then what are the top three? Which ones are the most important ones to grow your business? And again, that's a tool that you keep on using. So in summary, clarifying strategy. Sometimes in the strategy phase something is renamed, or sometimes in the research, you'll find an old tagline that was used like 30 years ago and you say, "Let's bring this back." So when you're doing that internal audit, you want to look at the earliest stuff from the brand communications, because there might've been something really brilliant that everybody completely forgot about. And you have an opportunity to put a spotlight on it and say, "Wow, we might want to resuscitate this."

Ian Paget: I think that step is definitely useful, and I think it's probably a part that a lot of people miss. Because like you said, you're essentially taking the research and communicating it back in some way to the client to actually all agree what the direction is forward. And I think it saves a lot of time. Now. I know we could keep talking through these different steps, but we're conscious of time. So I want to talk about your book. I understand the fifth edition is due out in November. Could you talk through what's new in this edition?

Alina Wheeler: Yes, I would be happy to. Yes, it is coming out in November in Europe. It's coming out in mid October in the US. This edition is the best ever. Over 50% of the content is revised and new. There are 33 new case studies, everything from Mozilla to the city of Melbourne, hundreds of new best practices that demonstrate the intersection of really smart strategy and brilliant design. I've reached out around the world to the best designers, to in-house teams, to companies, to really find those places where the brands marry intelligence and insight with imagination and craft. And again, Connie Birdsal really said that the best brands marry intelligence and insight with imagination and craft. But that's kind of a compass for me. So the new content is organised exactly the same way as it were additions, one spread per subject, and a lot of new subjects; intellectual property, content strategy, brand governance, just a lot. And I'm so excited because this is the best ever.

Ian Paget: I can't wait to read it. I'm quite excited about it because I've currently got the third version. I'm going to talk briefly about when I first picked up a copy. I got mine about five years ago. When I first read it, I was thinking if I wanted to do everything in this book, it's going to take quite a substantial amount of investment from the client, and it would need quite a lot of people as well. So I'd like to ask you, as a freelancer, in my case at the moment I'm working on logos, but I would like to start branching out into branding projects. And I've taken inspiration from your book so far. What advice can you give to people like myself for using the principles in your book? How would they go about starting that without having access to a bigger team?

Alina Wheeler: Number one, in my book, I'm showing some work from single practitioners. So I know a lot of single practitioners that use the book. And the book is very helpful because you can say, "Wow, I'm going to interview the CEO tomorrow." So you go to the page and there are list of possible questions. "Oh, I'm going to do a touch point diagram." So you go to the page where the touch point diagram is. So you can do it yourself, it's just not going to be as deep and broad, but everything really depends on the size of the organisation that you're working with. It depends on what kind of internal team they have. There were times when I was a single practitioner and I worked very closely with the internal team. So the internal team helped create the audit. So I believe in order to do really responsible work that's going to be sustainable, that you should trust the process.

What I'm so thrilled about is who uses this book, and it's everyone from the single designer to the big design and brand consultancy with a lot of clients, to remind them of all these fundamentals. I wrote this book initially so that designers could have a seat at the table, right? Eye-to-eye across from the marketers, and they would be respected because they understood the bigger purpose of the work, what impact the work would have, and the fact that it's really for me making the work the hero, making the client the hero. So how do you do that? Again, I created this book because I was so frustrated by what existed. And there were a lot of really brilliant design books done by a lot of my great friends. There were a lot of huge strategy books, but there were no books that basically said, "Here's a step by step process." And this is the process, whether you are a startup, whether you're a non profit, whether you're a museum, whether you're an investment banking firm.

So throughout this book project, I've interviewed thousands of people, and at the end of the day, this is the process that everyone uses. Sometimes they call the phases differently. They might call clarifying or conducting research, discovery. But personalise it and post a note or tag the spreads that work for you. I also believe that a lot of clients don't understand the complexity of anything, designing a package, designing the collateral program. And so I have a process section in which I deconstruct every single little thing you have to do. So what is my hope? My hope is that designers, design forms, brand consultancies use this information to write a better contract. And my other hope is that clients use this resource to educate their staff, and maybe gain some insights into the intersection of brand strategy and design excellence.

Ian Paget: I think why I love this book is that the first time I read it, even though I did say I did feel that it's for larger teams, I did get a lot out of it myself, especially when I first started. And it is definitely suitable for everyone from people like myself working on my own, way up to people with a staff of a hundred people. So you've done a fantastic job of that.

Alina Wheeler: And also, I'll just tell you something really funny. People think, "Oh, book, I have to read it front to back." Absolutely not with this book. Look at the table of contents in the front, jump into the case study you want to read, or jump into the one-page description of what you need to know about intellectual property. It's a resource. It's not like reading it from front to back. So I think that's important.

Ian Paget: Yeah. I totally agree with that. I read it when I first bought it about five years ago and I picked it out off the shelf and you flick to certain pages just to see some of the diagrams in there because they're incredibly useful. All of the questions are really useful, but it is a very good reference book. Now, can I ask you, what one piece of advice would you give to designers just starting out with branding?

Alina Wheeler: Breathe, just breathe. My one piece of advice is to talk about ideas and concepts, and don't talk about the design. Find ways that you can build trust with your clients, by being a good listener, by showing them a roadmap for the process that you're going to use. I think that's more than one, but maybe it really is just breathe. And designers love what they do. I've never met a designer that wasn't passionate about what they do. So keep on following your passion, keep on following it. The best thing that you could do in the world.

Ian Paget: Fantastic final words of wisdom. Alina, thank you so much for being on the podcast. It's been great chatting and I appreciate you for sharing so much value here.

Alina Wheeler: You're welcome. Talk to you soon. Bye-bye.

Ian Paget: This episode wraps up the 10 part season one of the Logo Geek podcast. It's been quite the journey, and I'm so thankful to the incredible guests, and more importantly to you, who has taken the time to listen to this now. I really appreciate you and I'm so thankful for your time. It's been such a great experience personally, so I'm pleased to tell you that I've already started planning a second season which I hope will be even better than this one. So for now, I'll see you in the Logo Geek community, but if not, you'll hear from me again in a few months. So I'll see you soon.