Speaker 1: What's up? Welcome or welcome back. If you're new, my name is Corey. Check me out, stick around. If not, then you've probably seen my last video where I did a design walk through of a branding project for a local business here in Atlanta called No Skips Smokehouse. Today, I am ready to share with you the presentation that will be sent to the client. For context, this is more of a brainstorm presentation or a pitch for lack of a better term, rather than it being a brand guide. This client is a little bit different because this whole thing was part of a separate project, but I reached out to them to send them recommendations for their business. They are fairly new, and they were open to it. I present this to them and they pick and choose what they would like to use or not, but I am providing everything to them for their use for free. This document is basically a walk through of the ideas that I've come up with after we had an in-person discovery session some time ago. In that discovery session, we talked about I treated just like any normal client. We went through their audience, we went through their goals, their vision, what they think their identity should look like, business background, all that stuff. This is basically what I came up with. You've seen a lot of this in the last video and you've seen how I came up with it in the last video, but for this video, we're showing how I present these ideas to them. This deck itself, I made this one in Keynote when I'm presenting ideas or pitching, Keynote is just faster to dump my ideas into. When it comes to sending actual design work or like final files and things like that, I make presentations wherever I see fit. It could be Keynote, it could be Figma, it could be InDesign, just whatever I'm feeling that day. This one was made in Keynote. Of course, we start with a cover page. This is a 27-page document. I didn't even know it was that long. The first page basically is a walkthrough because I'm sending this over to them and we don't have time for an in-person presentation. Even if we did, I include basically what I would say to them if I was presenting this in real life. Even if I do present it in person, they would keep this for after. It's good practice for me to be able to have an explanation there for them to remember if that makes sense, if they're reviewing it when I'm not there. This basically just explains what the document is, what my expectation is from them, and moving forward and asking them to consider the following guidelines when they look at these things on this deck. The feedback guidelines, I include this on everything I send ever just as a reminder to whoever's viewing it. When you are presenting work, you want to make sure that you're getting what you need out of the person reviewing it and making sure that they consider looking through a particular lens. Some of the questions that I ask them to consider while looking is, does this speak to my desired audience? Will this help carry our message? Can this creative be applied across all assets of this brand? If something that I pitch to them seems like it would work well on digital, but it won't work well in the restaurant or in their physical space, then that's something to consider as well. Will it fit within our existing branding? What do I love and why? What doesn't align and why? Those two questions, the and why part is important because you don't want to get to a point where someone's telling you, I love this and that's it or I don't like this, do it over and that's it. That's not helpful. Do I envision an alternative and does this have longevity? After that, I go into high level recommendations. This is just a one pager that explains basically everything that they are going to be looking at. In the event that they do want to just remember everything that I recommended at once, it's all together on one page. I just high level brief them on that. Then we go into the actual design recommendations. We start with their logo. This is their original logo. I'd show it to them so that they can see it in comparison to what I created as an update. Again, recommendations are spelled out for them there. The next slide shows their logo in comparison to the updates I made. On the previous slide, it explained exactly what I did. I adjusted the composition. I updated the type, things like that. They'll be able to see that happen in real life. This is a update, not a rebrand. I think I said this in the last video. Y'all should just go watch that honestly. I think I explained that we wanted to maintain the general look that they came up with. They built their entire brand themselves in Canva with little to no design experience. I think for what they came up with, it aligns well with what we discussed in their discovery. The thinking behind the design worked well with what we discussed in their discovery. I always go into every project acknowledging that every client has some level of understanding. They're not all starting from zero. I think they had a general understanding of how to communicate what they wanted. They just needed adjustments technically and an expansion because there were just some things that they could include, they hadn't. That's what we did for the logo. Then we went into color palette. This was their original palette. Of course, it's going to appear slightly different on your screen. Again, showing them what they currently have and explaining why it should be updated and how it should be updated. They actually were already aware of some of the constraints that they had with the color palette that they originally came up with. That's just something that came up in practice. Obviously, they picked the colors. Then when they went to make the things for their business, some things just didn't work out. Acknowledging that and then adding my own two cents into there, coming up with a separate palette. This is just a high level overview of the swatches that I pulled. Then I get into specifics here with a primary palette. I kept it generally the same as I explained on this slide, but adjusted certain hues and things like that. Then adding a secondary palette for them, which is an expansion because they did not have one previously. The addition, what I'm explaining on these slides is how this helps or what's the word I'm looking for, how this alleviates some of the constraints. That's not the word I wanted, but whatever. How this alleviates some of the constraints that they had in their previous palette. After that, we go into type. This is again, all recommendations. These are some other typefaces that I pulled and did use in designs that I created for them. This first slide is explaining the typefaces that were selected and where they would be best used. Obviously, they wouldn't all be used together at all times, but each serve different purposes. Then this next slide, I always include this. This is the slide that I also include in brand guides. It just shows the hierarchy and how it all looks together in a paragraph. If you were to see these in use online somewhere or whatever, this slide I think is very helpful because if you're looking just at the type itself or looking at something like this, the average person is not going to know what they're going to be like, what the hell is this? What am I looking at? This shows it all working together and they can say, oh, this looks good or this is really ugly. Then we go from there. Then the photography, these are just general photography guidelines. I show examples. These are all stock images or images available for use from Unsplash. I just pull images from there to show an example of what their photography should look like, in my opinion, how the food should be isolated on non-distracting backgrounds, things like that. I explain that on the side as well. This is the type of slide that you use. These are guidelines and they will go further in depth if you were to put this in a guide, but this is something that you could potentially give to a photographer. Say they do have a food photographer for their business, they could hand this to them so that they could see exactly what type of images they want and that would be helpful for them. It maintains consistency. If they hired one photographer today and another one in three months, the images should generally look the same because of this. Then social media. I started out with a mood board so they could see where I pulled my inspiration from for their digital assets. A lot of music references, I go into detail on this in the last video, you've seen a bunch of this already. I have a combination of music references, social graphics, menus, and other restaurant assets, social assets that I thought were interesting, could work well, a general look and feel that could work well for them. The thing with the mood board is that you want to obviously not create the same thing that you see in the mood board, but use elements that you like from each image and it'll create something totally different. So from there, we have this. This explains, this shows one of the social assets I created. It shows their Instagram feed as a whole and obviously my explanations for why I did what I did and what exactly they're looking at. When explaining the social assets, I want to both explain the visual as well as the purpose and how it kind of engages people or what the psychology or whatever of the idea is. Obviously, I think it looks good, but there is a reason why that copy is that copy. There's a reason why it has all these different elements on it, why it says top five on there, why the mac and cheese is the focal point. Those decisions are all informed by something that we talked about previously in the discovery session. So I'm just reiterating that in this description so that it kind of sells the idea. This is what it's going to look like and this is why it makes sense for it to look like this and for the copy to say this. Explaining that kind of makes it easier for the client to say, oh yeah, that's cool. I do want to use it. The next slide shows a variation or shows multiple social assets and how they all work together. I only created three to pitch this idea, but you'll want to create enough so that they get the gist, they understand what's going on here. Then before and after, I like using these slides so they can see how different their social looked before and how it would look with these new assets and those photography guidelines and the new branding or the updated branding. As you can see, they're not super far off, which is a good thing because it's just a cleaner refresh and something that they would likely be more willing to move into versus me delivering something that was completely different, a full rebrand after they already expressed that they wanted to maintain their original integrity and look. Same thing here, just showing the before and after in a more realistic setting. Then we get into physical assets. These are basically things that I think should exist in person at their restaurant. Of course, in-store signage, which would include a menu and as you saw in the last video, we put a game on the back of the menu. This explains why there's a game on the back, why the menu only has five items on it, all of that. On each side, again, I'm tying it back to what we talked about previously in order to sell the idea. With the menu itself, it's heavily focused on music because that's something that was important to them. Their whole restaurant was named after a music reference, but that was as far as the music reference went. It didn't appear anywhere else in their branding or in their assets. I'm explaining on the side here that this is an opportunity to further include that influence and also to engage their customers while they're in that space. Now, I do think they are moving from the location that they're currently at, but it still works either way. At the time of our discovery session, they were in a food hall, which means that they are one restaurant of many in one location, kind of like a cafeteria. The idea here was that I want their customers to maintain their focus on this establishment while they're waiting for their food rather than getting distracted and checking everyone else out. I want them to stay at this place. We put the game on the back for that purpose. All of that is explained on the side. Here, we're showing the food papers. Same exact thing. I won't stay too long on this, but same idea. Showing that on any other physical assets they have in a space, a simple pattern or just their logo as branding will help reinforce or maintain more brand or develop more brand awareness. Things like the food paper, I mentioned if it's possible, if they could include branded stickers on the buzzers. I mentioned this before too, but when you're in that food hall, when you get your food, they give you a buzzer so that you know when your food is done. If they could put branded stickers on there, that would be cool. I also included the thought or a thought starter, really, where wherever they include additional branding for their physical assets to keep in mind, they'll want to create shareable moments. Wanting to add things that basically make people want to take a picture and post it on their Instagram, if that makes sense. The menu, for example, or if there's trade paper instead of the logo, kind of have a trivia of a quote, a funny quote or a lyric that everyone likes, things like that would be helpful, obviously, for their business. I think that was the end of the deck. What I do from here, I send this off to the client. I still give a little spiel in the email itself. I offer them the opportunity to talk in person about it if they are available. These are busy people and this wasn't a full investment on their part. Understandably, they may just look at this on their own. I make sure that I include everything that I want to say in the email if it's not in this deck already. Then we wait to hear back. Basically, that's all I send for pitching ideas. I'll do another video on a full brand guide later. Hopefully, that was helpful. Hopefully, I'll have an update for you all later. If you liked the video, of course, leave me a comment. Give me a thumbs up. I will talk to you all in the next one. Bye. Transcribed by https://otter.ai