Expanding Lesk’s brand

Expanding Lesk’s brand – To have something good enough

Today is the day when I decide to expand the Lesk brand (and also to write something about the process). 

To explain a bit, I saw that a big part of the market of sound/light equipment had poor branding. Not beautiful logos, a bit outdated. Maybe a lot of customers don’t care because what’s the matter? But I do. I believe a good brand can inspire people. Can be likable even if you wouldn’t use the product. 

Of course, here I am not speaking about internationally known brands such as Pioneer for instance. But all the other small ones. 

I also understand that branding can be an expensive and time-consuming process. Why bother with branding when you know that your product sells? I remember working at a place with poor branding but a high capacity for sales. Branding doesn’t do everything, for sure.

But branding structures.

While I am struggling to find the right words for Lesk, I decided to call it a Lesk. While the logo is not professionally made, it can be applied to support (such as the 3D-printed one we produce).

It also helps to understand what we are fighting for. Why we’re working on something that can be great but is mostly the fruit of our imagination right now. 

This is why well-structured branding can help.

From now on, I know that the job that has been done on our branding has not been the most researched one. But here is the thing we already have:

• A logo we made on Adobe Illustrator, taking the L of “Lesk” and the round of the light bulb we’re using. Good to get adapted to all difference
• A single font, the “Poppin” one
• A set of colors that we have gathered on the website Milanote

I also listed a series of values that were important for the culture of the company. Some of them could be relevant but others should stay in the private circle.

So here we are with our brand’s assets. Enough but not enough. 

I say that because I wanted to rebrand our landing page and I figured out there was lacking some important information that would convince our potential audience. Like our values and maybe more. And before starting to improve the SEO of the website, I wanted to have the branding on point.

It is then time to go back to work. To do so, the first step I will take is to look at the series of videos from the Youtube channel The Futur trying to watch this playlist.

Note to myself: 

Clear branding will also deepen the needs in terms of videos, writing styles, and such.

Here are the notes I have taken:

Part 1

“once you’re hitting the shelf, you’re against everyone”

“It affects the overall experience”

Get a good story

More than making a product, it’s for connecting with people

A logo should 1) be appropriate for the context, 2)memorable 3)simple and works at any scale (tiny like really big)

Production of a guide

Part 2 – Discovery

Discovery session meeting define goals, challenges in the way, we look at the customers and pain point, define brands attributes

Define the goal: What do you want out of your brand? 

Understand what kind of behavior that drives sales

Describe the different customers and give them names, age, married or not

They are filters and references for the whole process.

Personas having sections: demographics & psychographics (age, sex, education, marital status, hobbies, brand affinity), story (what’s their background), expectations and desires (what do they expect? what are they seeking?), obstacles and objections (where are the bumps in the road? What’s stopping them?), loves (Why would they love your brand?), compelling events(What makes them look for a solution?), awareness (How do they find you? What do they seek?), engage & delight (Why do they choose you?), Share and return(how do they share? why do they return)

Look and feel: How do you want the brand to look and feel? 

Look at some brand stylescape to get inspiration. 

Part 3

Creative brief – meeting with the team, high-level overview of the project where clients goals, the design challenges, user profiles, brand attributes, creative parameters

Make a long list of attributes and choose the 5 most liked. Explain a bit more what it means and what it doesn’t mean. 

It’s good to speak to potential users.

One needs to define what kind of examples we like to find inspirations. 

Take into consideration how people would interact with the object as if this person would already use the product. Thinking about the things of things. 

Be careful on the language you’re using as it can be appropriated by people in their way and then can change every time.

It needs to lead to a piece of design that has never been created but that designers need to use to make.

Then make a design panorama (styles scapes).

Part 4 

What is a stylescape: Collection of type, pictures, and such that are curated to communicate to the client to get the look and feel. It can be focused on one keyword.

Refine the stylescape until it’s liked. Possibility to explore everything.

It still needs to pop up from the competition.

Part 5

It needs contrast between all the stylescapes to open possibilities.

Name every stylescape.

Part 6

Refine the feedback on the stylescape

Logo design = Make the brand identifiable, job is to refine the concept

don’t be scared to leave your old identity to embrace a new one.

Part 7

If something feels pressure, this is how you make diamonds. 

Refine logo, visuals inside, gradients

Does it fit with the story? Is it symmetrical? 

Think about colors and color combinations.

Part 8

Creation of a site map

Discovery – Understand users and their goals and what the website should do to them?

A site map is the map of the website with pages and stuff

Wireframe – Grossely pushing the content on the page and figuring out the flow “How the user accomplish it in the fewer steps possible”

Visual design – How the site looks, how’s everything is spaced up

Then development.

Think SEO but then once you have every product

Home page – Video, beer on tap, story, book a tour, testimonials

Think call to action and opening on a video

Part 9

Packaging – Connect with their customers

Depending on your product, you’ll have to differentiate from other products and understand what packaging can do for you

After watching all those episodes, I then decided to read the book Zag, the #1 strategy of high-performance brands which is a good reference for branding.

I wanted to share some notes I would have taken but, the book is well done and the authors already wrote notes at the end of the book.

However, here is the list of what I thought was good remembering:

• It’s worth being unique because being unique will differentiate you from all the other actors in the marketplace. When we think about it, it’s true. What can make you stand out from an amazon product’s page? Being unique. What can make you stand out from a Facebook advertisement? Being unique.
• Find a differentiation point. Like: Can I name more than 2 people doing the same thing as me? If yes, you’re not differentiated enough.
• Branding is about what other people say about you
• The competition is not being unique, but being like anyone else
• When too much competition, the human mind select only one option and blocks the others
• People want trustworthy brands
• “Look for a job people are trying to do, and help them”
• Don’t define by what makes you admirable, be defined by what makes you unique
• Complete this sentence: Our brand is the only …… that …..
• If you develop your brand to compete with bigger competitors, think twice
• Get a good name
• Being original can help you save money in a marketing way.
• Customers experience your brand at different touchpoints. You need to select those touchpoints carefully and exploit them correctly.
• Be loyal to your customers

Starting from that, I decided to create some mood boards around several themes:

• Neon’s type graphism
• 80’s house music and 80’s graphism
• Product design graphism

Here they are:

From that, the mission was then to create several stylescape to copy the process I saw on The Futur video. As we wanted to keep the logo, our mission was quite complicated. How to extend our brand by keeping the central piece: The logo.

But let’s dig into it.

First, watch a video on how to make a stylescape here.

This led me to follow a series of the tutorial where I could investigate the styles I wanted and the elements I wanted to present on the style scape. After 2 or three tutorials on some styles I liked from the mood board, I came up with this first style scape.

Feedback: Round pattern not aligned

Gradients are not random enough

More fluorescent

Lights point the same color as the style scape and points in a square

Font is good

Unfortunately, I hated it. The word “hate” is a bit too much right now but I didn’t like the fact that it was too cheesy, too NRJ music awards. I wanted something with more meaning, more research. 

From now on, I knew I needed to practice some more tutorials to get to understand the art and what was possible to dig. 

So let’s go again.

Ps: By the time, some new meaning came to me. I thought about the fact that the mix of colors I was wishing of reminded me of a galaxy kind of. Stars in the sky remind me also our lights. And dancing can be the essence of life, something that can transport us as the big bang would have done that. From now on, I decided to go in that direction, to see how I could mix both the spatial theme and Lesk. 

So let’s go again.

Liquify on photoshop

Holographic colors

Tutorial holographic on photoshop

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYbfqRsBjmw

Tutorial chrome 80’s fonts 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYcO7cgCJoc

Another thing worth doing was to dress the list of brand assets we’ll have to plan a correct style scape that would represent Lesk in itself. So here is the list:

• The logo/
• The name/
• The colors and their association/
• The font/
• The jingle/
• The website/
• The packaging
• The persona/
• The patterns (both the round and the fabric)/
• The music (we need one house)
• The filming style
• The round of the design
• Where the Lesk should be hanged (warehouse)
• The textures
• The product in 3D
• List of attributes that make us unique

So, after a lot of iterations and tutorials, I managed to come up with something that I would consider quite original but not good enough. I sent this to some of my friends and my co-founder. 

Some critics came back which opened the door to refine the style but at least, people felt that we had something. So here is the second stylescape we come up with:

Most of the critics were from the fact that the fonts were kind of used without a reason and that it was too polished. Also, we got an interrogation on the logo, as I already got some comments on it, we wanted to know if it was a good choice to keep it or not and then why. On this stylescape, there was a warehouse that eventually represents a party environment but not necessarily where Lesk will be. 

So we needed to go back to work!

The first thing I thought was interesting to do was: find the Instagram-like texture. Why? Because it would traduce the mood we’re in.

So taking the experience I got making the several tutorials AND sending my results to my friends and my co-founder, here is what we finally obtained.

From now on, the font used (which was also free of use by the way) plus the chosen style registered us to the style we wanted to develop no matter what.

Then we continued with the stylescape by letting the logo on the side. Taking all the feedback in consideration + using the style we created, here is our final stylescape without the logo :

Now, we had just one thing to finish with: The logo.

The logo is tricky, spending too much time on it, at the beginning of the creation of a venture, can be a bit useless. But it’s not a reason to not try to have something worth it. 

We already got some critics saying that the branding, and the logo, weren’t well-made. It was right, but not completely. The logo was ok enough and I believe that for reaching a great result, one needs to pay a branding agency. This is not that necessary when you’re starting or can’t sell a product. However, after reading Zag, we figured out that we wanted to put a bit more originality, more sincerity in our branding. This is why we wanted to make things right.

So we decided to iterate on the logo

To finally decide this:

Our reasons were that we could explain any part of the logo clearly. The round represents the lights, the L, the bars of the L which get bigger like lights rays. The L that goes just a little bit out represents our tendency to be a bit different but not too much. I could go for hours.

But here is our rebranding, and I am proud of it. I might insert everything into a guide if I have enough time. Let’s see!