3D Cloud Identity System

Key Takeaways

  • Identity Systems are more than a style guide, a logo, and some brand fonts. They’re a living collection of work from first principles.

  • Collaboration is vital to creating brands that last, they’re bigger than any one person.

  • Small teams with highly competent specialists can produce a surprisingly large volume of work.

Software & Skills

  • Adobe Creative Suite, Invision, Sketch

  • Icon Design & Systems, Illustrations & Illustration Systems, Color Systems, Brand Design, Content Marketing, Video Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Videography, Audio Design, Audio Engineering, Storyboarding, Exhibit Design

Step 1 - Grow up with the Company and Do Everything

Establishing the brand of a startup is more work than I ever imagined possible. Coming from art school, I thought that a visual identity was a collection of colors, a few typefaces (the fancier companies have their own!), and a well assembled .pdf with a visual identity system.

I was wrong, and now I know, because I made not one, but three identity systems, one every three years as our company grew from four employees in Beaver Creek, OH to a regional tech industry mainstay in Ohio, Florida, and London. And not only did I make those, I learned everything I could about how B2B Marketing was done, how to make sure that the work you have time to do is targeted at the most important stakeholders, and how to scale a small team’s work into a consistent content pipeline.

Growing a brand in an evolving commercial space is a constant process of researching trends, identifying the best ways to scale your efforts, and a lot of hard work producing websites, video content, a podcast, and anything else industry can think up to get the word out.

Step 2 - Learn how to Delegate, Scale a System, and Let Go

There’s only so much you can do yourself. You can learn how a process works, you can study all the youtube tutorials you like, but you can never make more time and you definitely can’t clone yourself. Ultimately, once a company grows up, you’ll need to let specialists and subject matter experts do the work they love to do.

You can help people learn though, and guide them as they incorporate your design thinking into the work that they create for the brand. This creates a positive feedback loop as the team creates reinforcing work that can be used in so many ways across a variety of formats, whether it’s video, web, or print marketing content.