Check out v1.0 of my New Brand 💜 - Issue #17

Hey y'all 👋

Learning this week: My spirit animal is a 28-year old Swiss dude 😭🥵

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This week's issue:

🎨 Designing a Winning Brand (Part 2)

📖 Story Telling: Our Highest-leverage Skill

Designing a Winning Brand (Part 2)

Last week I wrote about the process of building a winning brand.

To brand my e-learning business I followed Nate's "Inside-Out" Design Process.

1. Brand Core: Identify your values and associations
2. Visual Taste: Create a mood board to capture your visual taste preferences (see mine below)
3. Visual Identity: Distill a visual identity as a result of steps #1 and #2

This is what my mood board looks like 👇

General Language: Finding a Terminology

Nate reviewed the board and referred to it in the following terms:

• High contrast - ✅ totally aligned w/ my own language
• Moody - ✅ it's dark, it's moody.
• Existentialist - 🤷‍♂️ referring to the stars; directionally correct but not the word I would use

I phrased it in my own words as follows:

• 🤖 Futuristic - I love Sci-Fi and rockets
• ⚗️ Scientific - Scientific method FTW!
• 🌃 Urban - Sky scrapers and clubs

Colors & Fonts: Result of Brand Core

Understand the principles, then the application is easy.Pavel Tsatsouline

With the brand core identified it's rather easy to derive colors and fonts.

A couple of considerations when picking my colors:

• No Blue: I am tired of "professional" colors.
• Energetic: I wanted an accent color that feels electric.

That's how we ended up with extra violet 💜 + glow pink ⚡️

For my fonts I browsed Google Fonts until I found the right combo. Here my rationale:

• Roboto Mono (mono spaced font) for paragraphs because [a] it looks like coding font and [b] because the 'serif-like' design makes it easier to read in longer texts.
• VT323 (special font) as a cover and logo font. It looks like cassette futurism (a la 'Maniac' on Netflix). I LOVE that stuff. And most importantly, it's different.

If you want to dig deeper into the entire process and see the results (applications online + in my slides) then read more in this twitter thread 👇

Story Telling: Our Highest-Leverage Skill

I've been thinking more and more about story telling.

Personally and professionally.

Benefits are many:

• Delight friends
• Entertain strangers
• Rally teams
• Convince customers

The smallest common denominator is an idea being transferred from one head to many others.

Good stories create lasting memories.

Good stories build lasting brands.

Good stories decide wars.

Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.Victor Hugo

In the coming weeks I'll write more about story telling in the context of company building.

A couple of my friends are doing exceptional work in the realm of stories, hence wanted to give them a shoutout 🙌

Cam, Dom & Ryan, and Roberto.

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It's been a long week, but I'm happy.

I'd love to hear how you are doing. Please drop me a quick line as a reply ☺️

As always, stay healthy, stay happy 🙌

Art