Behind The Scenes: Building a Brand & Identity

One of my very favorite things about starting a new project is building its brand and identity. There's something about bringing together the perfect colors, design elements, shape & type that's so very fascinating and satisfying to me. We've developed quite a few brands over the past couple of years, and each time I get so excited about the prospect of creating a new identity for our new venture.

When we set out to create the brand for Urban Craft, we started in a very familiar place: we tend toward clean, modern logos and often find ourselves drawn to color palettes that include light blues, greens, teals and grey. Case in point:

While all the brands are definitely distinct, you can see a lot of similarities in colors, styles and shapes. So when we began building the brand for Urban Craft, we set out to do something unique and distinctly different than what we've done before.

When I first sent logo ideas to our graphic designer, I had a brand in mind that was heavily inspired by the cover of Steve Martin's book, 'An Object of Beauty'.

I wanted to do a spin on this idea potentially using images from our city -or- maps of our city. We did a few iterations of the logo and it just didn't have the je ne sais quoi that we were looking for. So we decided to take it in a different, more vintage direction.

We began with a color palette that we discovered on Design Seeds, a great resource if you're looking colors that work well together:

As you can see, we didn't do a very good job of getting very far away from the teal/grey combo. But we all fell in love with the color scheme and how it worked together, and loved the fact that shades were a bit deeper and more rich and luxurious for fall, which is when Urban Craft would launch. I was also particularly proud that we incorporated that lovely yellow as I'm not typically one who tends toward the color. It just worked so well in this and we had to use it.

We then sent some basic ideas to our designer, giving her an idea of what we were looking for. She redeveloped our logo for us, which ended up coming out like this:

We were completely smitten with the final product and quickly moved on to develop the poster using our color palette. We knew we wanted the poster to have a vintage-yet-modern feel to it. We also wanted it to be striking and to stand out amongst other posters in store windows so it would draw people in as they walked down the street. We decided to literally frame all of the information inside what looked like a vintage frame and voila! A poster was born:

We're so completely tickled with the end result and have received such a rousing response from all the business owners who have put it up in their lovely shop windows. We couldn't have been happier with the way it turned out and the way it conveys the exact things that we wanted it to. We hope you love it too!