If you’re working with a tight budget or deadline and need a website quickly, we offer a two-week sprint to create a basic brand design.
There’s a paradox we often encounter in our work: Some clients have a product or service they want to promote with a website, but they don’t have any brand design in place.
We could design a website for them, but without knowing what their brand looks like, this can result in a website that feels bland and generic. You’ve seen them before: forgettable sans serif typefaces, generic blue-and-white color schemes, and layouts overloaded with text or stock photos.
There are cases when this is perfectly sufficient. But as brand designers, we believe that it’s instrumental for a website to be easy to use, memorable, and to project a sense of quality. That’s why we insist on thinking about the visual language before embarking on a web project. Our experience has shown that the time invested in brand design pays for itself when it comes to creating an attractive and consistent website.
The name says it all
But: We also understand that you might be operating on a tight budget or a timeline that doesn’t allow for a full branding process. You might even have some branding in place, but you might be missing the kind of documentation we need to make effective use of it.
In those cases, we offer a two-week brand sprint that results in what we call a “minimum viable branding”. This is an idea we adapted from product design, where a minimum viable product is used to quickly push out a product to test the viability of an idea.
The name says it all: Instead of a full brand design system that caters to all kinds of applications and eventualities, the minimum viable branding is a limited but focused design that covers the essentials for recognizability and consistency.
Here’s what it contains:
- Typefaces: A selection of two typefaces at different weights that ensure contrast and legibility.
- Logo: We keep your existing logo or or typeset the name of your company, product, or service in the selected typefaces.
- Colors: We create a a basic palette of 3–4 colors and complementary shades.
- Composition: Simple layout examples showing how to combine these elements—typically in a web context.
Whenever needed, the minimum viable branding may also include photography style or iconography.
How the design sprint works
- Kickoff: If it exists, you show us your existing branding and tell us how it came about. You tell us if there’s anything you would like to keep. If there’s no branding in place, you tell us what you’re looking for and we create a quick mood board that reflects your vision.
- Week 1: We research and design the ingredients for your brand. At the end of the week, we present you what we’ve identified.
- Week 2: You give us feedback on the presentation and we tweak the branding accordingly.
- Figma library: At the end of the week, we set all typefaces and colors up as a Figma design library.
That’s it—at the end of week 2, we will have gathered the essentials for your branding.
Your minimum viable branding becomes a jumping-off point for future work—typically for us to design your website or by your internal team if you want to adapt the design for internal use.
The best part: A minimum viable branding doesn’t have to be the last word when it comes to your brand. It’s fully possible to build on it at a later date and turn it into a full-fledged design system.
Interested in a minimum viable branding sprint? Get in touch and we’ll help you get started.