A Designer’s Take: Rebranding, from Sketchbook to Shop Front

There is a wealth of information available on the topic of ‘rebranding’: from how-to guides on creating a successful brand identity; to lists of questions a business must consider in order to determine their brand values. As a designer, my interests and responsibilities lie in bringing these brand values to life visually through the creative process.

A rebrand for a business can be a complicated operation. The business will need to have established a firm understanding of their current brand identity, have questioned the reasoning behind the rebrand and carefully analysed their current and target audiences.

It’s a designer’s job to ask the right questions and absorb all the information given to us in the briefing. Then we must distill this into a strong and effective idea that ticks all the boxes, successfully portraying the brand identity and therefore fulfilling the brief… Sounds easy right!?

Due to its nature, creativity can be hard to funnel into a predictable and linear set of stages, so I’m going to share the steps I took to rebrand a local hairdressing salon, as part of a concept project.

Words Before Whitespace

In the case of this project, the rebrand included generating a new company name. Therefore the first creative step was to explore the new potential salon name; for me, the best way to explore multiple options is via a mind map. The goal was to find a name that met the brief of a classic, long established yet forward-thinking salon; one that brought the company up-to-date without alienating existing clientele. Mind mapping allows all the information to appear in one place, exposing gaps or differences in thinking; it ultimately allows you to find a path to the ‘solution’.

Gather, Analyse, Visualise, Repeat

The next four stages all flow into one seemingly repetitive process, however in practice I have noticed that as the information is gathered, assessed, and visualised, the space in which the solution can be found, narrows.

Every project I take on moves through the creative process in its own way, but generally I try to follow these steps:

Gather: Creative briefing and research
Analyse: Mind mapping and validation of information
Visualise: Initial sketches and preliminary concepts
Gather: Conversation and feedback on preliminary concepts
Analyse: Validation of feedback/information
Visualise: Refined concept
Gather: Conversation and feedback on refined concept
Analyse: Validation of feedback/information
Visualise: Refined concept
Gather: Conversation and feedback on refined concept

Repeat last 3 steps until solution is reached!

Delivery: Approval and roll-out

From sketchbook to shop front, here are a few examples of the creative process taken from a concept hair salon rebrand, Strand Studio.

Visualise: Initial sketches

Visualise: Preliminary concepts

Visualise: Refined concepts

Visualise: Finalised concept – Mood board

Visualise: Concept shop front mock-up

As part of their branding package, I decided to produce a short animation of the final logo design. I envisaged this looped on TV screens around the salon or used as part of the window display.