than your how, it’s your brand’s north star.
The Process.
Our objective is to help give your brand a clear visual face that has a timeless feel, identifiable personality and speaks your brand’s message with clarity and simplicity.
Whether you’re just starting out, or have been sharing your brand with the world for some time; a solid plan of action that is tailored around your WHY is always the first step towards your long term success. What is unique about Smith & Sylvan is our invested passion and dedication towards providing as much value to you and your brand as possible. We consider this to be the foundation of all things.
You are not just hiring us to sketch ideas and make them pretty, you are hiring us to problem-solve and develop a creative solution that conveys your brand’s message and experience accurately to your audience.
Before we jump into creating anything, our focus is invested in defining your goal(s) through the strategy process, in order to build a clearer vision of what your brand truly needs.
This allows us to explore the best possibilities for solving your brand’s problem and means far less time trying to piece together multiple directions and ideas a client may have, and more time invested in developing the best design solution for the brand and it’s intended audience.
The Approach.
*Please be advised since we take a very detailed, problem-solving approach to our work the Discovery and Strategy Sessions see an invested minimum time-frame of 3hrs per each day scheduled. (Time length will vary based on each individual project and it’s scope).
This means you must be capable of meeting via, phone, virtual, or in-person (if permitted) to engage and get the most out of these sessions.
Discovery
In Discovery, we take the time to discuss and define your goals and the challenges that you may be facing in establishing your business and brand. We define your potential customer, position, and uncover the pain-point(s) that exist surrounding your goals.
Through this process, we aim to help you uncover the most important elements of your brand so that we can begin moving towards developing your unique road map in our Strategy SessionDiscovery is all about putting a name and face to your biggest problem so that we can both get clear on what the best potential solution will be for your brand and business.
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Strategy
The Strategy Session follows up on the Discovery phases objective of establishing a clear path to identifying the problem we are attempting to solve.
In this phase, we will begin building a customized roadmap towards a credible solution to your pain-point by revisiting all that was shared and uncovered in our Discovery Session.
The goal through this process is to discover the important questions that need to be asked and listen for the most suitable solutions that will meet your brand’s needs.
By walking these steps, it will allow us the opportunity to make concrete choices on your brand’s best position for being better identified in its space.
This is the most valuable asset to your brand and business.
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Research
This step is a very important aspect of the design process as it sets the tone for all the other steps that follow.
The process of researching assists us in better understanding where you currently fit and how we can better establish your brands’ visual personality in an already competitive space without wasting valuable time in the process.
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Ideation
Ideation is where the measurable goals are truly defined by exploring concepts via brainstorming, sketches, and visual metaphors. This process also sees the construction of various assets s which help to drive the feel, tone and direction of the intended project’s goal.
Once we’ve gained our direction from the above phase we begin exploring your custom solution and as we get closer to the desired direction based on our Discovery, Strategy, and Research Sessions, we begin developing a more refined version of the concept. This is why we invest a greater portion of our time on the first 3 phases which precede this one. It allows us to have a clear blueprint that makes it easier to identify the most appropriate and “only” solution for your brand.
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Creation
The next step is to recreate the final direction digitally; this is called the vectorization process.
Through this process, we produce a beautiful and functional replication of the custom hand-drawn design/concept for your projected business needs.
Everything from the finalized primary identity mark(s), to the color palette, lockups (a lockup, sometimes called a combination logo is the final form of a logo, with all its elements), brand patterns, font system, brand guide, brand collateral are also created during this process.
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Deliverables
This is the final phase of our process and where all of your files will be packaged for your web and print needs.
You can expect to receive: Web Files (RBG ), PNG ( Transparent Image File), JPGPrint Files (CMYK) PDF, EPS, PSD ( If Photoshop is used for a raster/pixel-based designs), AI (If Illustrator is used for vector-based designs). Identity System/Brand Guide.
*All appropriate files for web and print will be created and electronically delivered upon receipt of the project balance.