Above: Pinterest Mood Board for SCPW
A few months back I committed to showing my work. Well it’s safe to say that I failed miserably, however I am quite excited about a project I’ve been working on for the past few weeks and decided it would be a good time to start sharing my process again.
The project is an identity system for SCPW and in the initial brief, we established that we wanted the brand to have a very mid-century utility aesthetic, inspired by union seals and power & light companies before they had goofy names like Xfinity, Cinergy, Verizon, etc… It’s always helpful when the client comes to the table with a strong idea of what they want as it provides some solid constraints from the get-go making the designers job much easier.
Often the first step of an identity project is to get a concept in place, however, since we established this in the creative brief I can jump right into the research phase. During the research or inspiration phase, I like to create a mood board that reflects the look and feel I’m after. Pinterest is an excellent tool for this, and allows you to work in the open, which helps keep lazy designers honest and own their inspiration.
Once I have a good grasp on the visual I’m after, the next step is to create a couple dozen rough thumbnail sized sketches based off the mood board. Once I have narrowed these roughs down to a solid two or three directions, I’ll not look at the mood board again until after the identity comes into it’s own. We’ll cover the roughs stage more thoroughly in the second part of this process series, so for now, head over and check out the mood board for SCPW on Pinterest.