My process
1 - The Deep Dive
Every great project starts with an honest conversation. Before I sketch a single line, we’ll talk about you and your business, your audience, and who your competitors are. It’s important for me to know why you’re starting or started the business, the history of how you got to where you are and your main aims and goals. We focus heavily on strategy here. This ensures your new branding doesn't just look pretty, but actually does some hard work for your business. The best brands I’ve worked with have a great story, what’s yours?
2 - Setting the tone
To stop us from playing a guessing game with first ideas, I’ll create a couple of Stylescapes. Think of these as premium, highly curated visual directions showing typography, historic references, colours, and overall moods. We look at these together to agree on the exact visual world your brand should live in. It completely removes the guesswork and saves us both a massive headache later.
3 - The Proper Craft (Design & Lettering)
Once we’ve locked in the direction, I disappear into my studio to do what I do best. This is where the years of experience comes in. I hand-draw custom letterforms, customise type, refine layouts, and build out a whole visual system for you. Every single line, weight, and detail is crafted with intention to ensure your identity feels totally unique to you, works in the real world and speaks to your audience.
4 - The Grand Reveal & Handover
Branding has to look great out in the wild, not just on a laptop screen. I’ll package up your new identity system so it’s completely bulletproof and ready for action. Whether you need assets engineered for complex digital platforms, giant festival merchandise lines, or premium, textured artisan product packaging, your files will be perfectly organised, easy to use, and built to scale beautifully.
This video is a timelapse of my typical process. I don’t always record all my client projects, which hopefully is reassuring to you that i’m more focused on working on your project than making content. Also as you can see my video editing skills could use some work! However, my initial ideas always start on paper, then I rework and try new ideas in procreate on the iPad, then refine and clean up in Adobe Illustrator. This was from a fun self motivated project for a sticker sheet.