Become a sleuth (start with your research)
Learn the company, conduct a brand audit
It's important to not come in and start knocking down walls. Understand where the brand currently stands, and who the company is. What are the company's core pillars, values, and mission? How is the company organized? How are files organized and tasks managed? Has the company undergone previous rebrands? What do employees love or hate about the current brand?
Play around with the brand in-situ. Make sure you understand what the offerings are and how the product works, who the audience is, and how the product impacts the audience's life or process. What purpose is the product serving? What is its reputation or how is it publicly received?
This will give you an idea of the landscape you're playing in. Getting an initial feel of what’s working/not working, what's important to maintain and what can be let go can go a long way in getting the project oriented. This will also help you understand what final assets will be needed, and where the gaps in their design system are. Start a list of initial recommendations.
Throughout the rebrand, respect the company’s history, and be a good steward.
Conduct a competitive analysis
It's important to understand the context in which the company sits. The best way to do this is to understand the competitive landscape.
Collect as much information as you can on all relevant brands in the same industry, or selling a similar product. Understand who you're up against and what these competitors are doing right and wrong, visually and strategically. This will ensure your new brand stands out in the market, while staying relevant to the given industry.
Align with the team
It's important to consistently meet with the team. Set up team meetings to share initial findings, and make sure everyone is oriented in the same direction.
One-on-one meetings are also important. Folks may be more open about pain points and preferences in a one-on-one environment.
This also helps build trust so you and the team understand each others' working style and feedback style preferences. It's important, if you're coming in new to an established team, that you make it clear you're collaborative and not intending to steamroll or throw away their hard work.
Get your hands dirty (start building)
Make moodboards
Start gathering what you’re personally drawn to and what you think would work well for the new brand. Collect inspiration for colors, web design, social posts, shapes, UI style, icons, typography, and marketing campaigns. Moodboarding is important to gain buy-in before going down a path, and will also reveal your preferences and the direction you're thinking the brand should evolve.
Moodboards are a way to explore multiple style directions before putting in the work of building any real components. This will also get you thinking about what kind of resources you’ll need in your library.
Don’t commit too soon
It's important to explore multiple different directions and not get locked in on one idea too soon. You may get tied to an idea that isn’t practical, that contains elements an important player dislikes for some reason, or doesn’t work at different scales. Moving in a few different directions at the beginning will help you feel more confident you went in the right direction — or maybe you’ll end up mixing and matching.
Test test test
I find it's important to not play around with brand elements in isolation. Applying design elements as soon as possible to mockups allows you to understand how it will come to life, and reveals where the system may break, before stakeholders get excited about certain ideas.
Do colors pass accessibility? Does the typeface read well in large-scale event materials and also a small display ad? Once the brand is dispersed to the larger team, are there a lot of rules they'll need to follow for the visuals to look as intended, or is the system hard to break? It might all look pretty laid out in a brand book, but the only way to know if it’ll really work is to put it to the test.
Avoid fatigue
Testing brand elements in-situ early will also reveal if the visuals allow for enough variety. There is a sweet spot: Too few branded materials will get overused and repeated quickly, but too many can make the brand feel busy or disjointed.
Make time for important things (get meticulous)
Make lists
Any good rebrand is made possible with a good project manager. But regardless of the workflows in place, it's important you keep your own running list. Write out every type of resource you’ll need to create, and communicate all the smaller steps you'll need to take to achieve each bucket of exploration, so appropriate timelines can be established.
Also write down what you want to experiment with. Sometimes you get pulled into side projects or need to jump into different aspects of the rebrand. If you still need to test tints and shades in situ, or want to make sure you push texture and pattern exploration a bit further, make note of that so it doesn't fall off your radar.
This is also a great way to look back at the end of a project and have record of everything you accomplished.
Strategy comes before aesthetic
Throughout the rebrand process, you should be asking yourself how the visuals serve the overall goal of the company. Keep mission and sales goals in mind throughout the process.
Align with voice & tone and messaging. Messaging and visuals should evolve in tandem and require consistent communication. You don’t want to build a visual brand that’s super fun and quirky when the associated copy is serious and professional. Make sure you’re telling the same story. If your customer is just reading copy or just seeing the visual, each should evoke the same gut feeling and sense of the brand.
If the visuals don't align to the messaging and mission, it won't be a success.
Bring it over the finish line
Communicate
Share the strategic reasons for why you’ve developed the brand this way. Serif versus san serif typefaces, style of photography, and the colors you've chosen are all part of a larger story. Make sure team members understand the intent. It's never just to make the brand "prettier."
Folks that are less visually inclined will be more likely to get on board with your vision if you explain to them how it serves the company’s goal, and how you reached certain conclusions. A rebrand is asking a lot of the team, from adoption to implementation to good stewardship. Buy-in and excitement go a long way.
Stay organized and make the brand accessible to the team
Make sure you have a robust brand book. And then create a “lite” version of it, or a one-pager, so folks can easily be reminded of essential components, like HEX codes.
Make templates for high usage materials. Organize components and files in easy-to-navigate folders. Make brand adoption easier on your team.
Also, be accessible to the team to answer questions and conduct informal reviews along the way so folks feel confident proceeding with the new identity.
Keep evolving
For a brand to be used consistently across the myriad of ways it’ll show up in the world, there needs to be clear rules around usage, (e.g., consistent font weight and leading, consistent color corrections across photography, logo usage requirements). Grids and templates and component libraries also help the brand stay consistent.
However, I believe the brand guidelines should be the beginning of the identity and not the end. A brand should be fluid and adapt and grow as the company adapts and grows. Creating a flexible system allows creative designers to apply their own creativity to problems their solving, and will ultimately create a more dynamic and lasting brand identity.