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Design Strategy: It’s not just a logo

by guest contributor, Kelsey Aanerud

Just like you wouldn’t dream of building a house without consulting with an architect, an engineer and a contractor, your brand deserves the same expert attention. You gotta start with a plan that you can build from.

Whether a company is bringing a new brand to life or reviving an existing brand, our clients benefit from having a communications strategy, user experience and graphic design team on board to create a cohesive and solid foundation for the project.

Measure twice, cut once: Before concepting begins, we collaboratively identify the big picture and what specifically needs to be accomplished. Having a solid design strategy helps us to be more efficient and effective in our solutions. And it saves time and money for our clients too.

Here are some of the project plans items we would address in our initial conversation:

  • Who is the audience?
    (Who is the potential customer/end user?)
  • What’s your primary goal?
    (Brand awareness? Traffic? Sales?) We get that all are important, but what’s the most important driver for this particular initiative?
  • What action do you want the end user to take?
    (Follow/Like your social pages? Visit your website? Come into your business?)
  • What do they currently think/know about your business?
  • What do you want them to think/know about your business?
  • What do you consider success? Any particular metrics you envision?

Some design project details and design preferences come easily. (“The event is in three months” or “I really like red”) We also recognize it can be challenging to have all of the answers out of the gate. In these cases, try identifying what you don’t want, to help recognize exactly what you do want.

We believe one distinguishing factor will become pretty clear: Working with Chalkbox Creative and Spot On Marketing is not just about a logo. Or a website. Or an email. It’s about building and reinforcing your brand.

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Kelsey Aanerud, owner of Spot On Marketing in Seattle, is a Chalkbox guest contributor. She is a creative facilitator of ideas and a marketing strategist who specializes in brand positioning, communications, and creative development. Drawing from 20 years of experience, she has worked both company-side and agency-side with small start-ups and large publicly traded companies. We asked her to share her perspective on the best way to build or reinvent a brand to create awareness, generate engagement, and drive business objectives. Check back soon as she will be sharing her tools for engaging and attracting customers, so they are motivated to buy from you.
We’d love to hear about your design strategy! You can call Chalkbox Creative at (206) 932-8080, send us a message here or connect with us on Facebook.

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Like typefaces? So do we!

On this website we use Open Sans for body copy, menus, and buttons. For headings, and our boiler plate message we use Bitter. Both are Google fonts available here. We chose these typefaces because they pair well with the typeface we use in our logo, Gotham. Gotham is a geometric sans-serif typeface designed by Tobias Frere-Jones in 2000. Open Sans and Bitter pair well with Gotham (in our opinion) thanks to a balance of contrast in the slab-serifs found in Bitter, and similarities in the geometric finish of those slab-serifs along with similar x-height and counter shape in both Open Sans and Bitter.

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