Finding Creative Direction
Let’s talk about one of the first steps a designer starts with when creating a new brand. It takes time, energy and strategy to get the vision out of your head or your client’s head, and onto something tangible that you can see and use.
When I start designing a new brand with a client, the first visual presentation I prepare for her is a Creative Direction. Which is a collection of ideas that come together to show the mood and tone my client is going for; along with her Brand Essentials, the written statements that we developed in the deep dive we took during the first two weeks of my Brand Design & Coaching Package. This is where we define her brand values, mission, audience, and unique offering. If you haven’t done this deep dive yet, you can download my free resource to define your brand essentials now, and get started on your own: Get the free branding cheat sheet now!
Spending time to put together a Creative Direction, or as I also like to call it, a Mood Board, is an important and fun step in the brand building process that you can also do for yourself. You will find that it gives you so much clarity on your brand’s look and feel so you can more easily design a logo and website that fully represents the heart and soul of your brand.
In the Creative Direction document, I start with the Brand Essentials, followed by a listing of the feelings my client wants her audience to feel when they encounter her brand. Then comes a page with a bunch of visuals that I think convey those feelings and will set the tone and mood for her brand design.
Some of my favorite places to look for inspiration and to save visuals from are Pinterest, Shutterstock.com and CreativeMarket.com. There are so many places you can look, but I try to focus on just 3 resources so I can be efficient and complete my mood board in a timely manner.
One tip, I’ll throw out there, is to save the images with a thoughtful method so that you can find them again in the future. For example, if you want to go back and purchase the image to use on your website 2 weeks from now, it would be handy to know where you found it and what it was called so you can find it again quickly. This is much more efficient than taking screenshots of everything you like and then needing to search all over again to find them later.
Once I have a bunch of visuals saved into a folder, I’ll start placing them on the Mood Board page of the Creative Direction document. Below is an example of a Mood Board I created for a client. Please note that these are not my images and I’ve credited them to their proper sources by leaving the Shutterstock watermark on the photos that I don’t own, or by adding a credit to the designer whom I saved them from.
Sometimes my client loves the images or patterns I gather and then I will go back and purchase them for my client so we can use them as elements in her brand design. Other times, this exercise is a great talking point that will take us in another direction as we explore what she is really going for with her brand’s mood and tone. It’s always so valuable and I definitely recommend you set aside a couple of hours to create your own Creative Direction, it will really help you take your brand identity to the next level!
If you are interested in having some guidance through this process, please sign up for my Branding Course Waitlist here. I am creating a course that will help you get all of this accomplished step by step, from your Brand Essentials, to your Creative Direction and finally a logo and Brand Doc so that you can confidently market your services online with a purposeful brand that represents you well.
