With a name finally sorted it was now time to start thinking about building up our whole brand identity. Obviously we needed to develop a cool logo to go with our cool name (it feels weird that I still can’t tell you what our name is – I’m a bit paranoid about revealing it too early – is that weird?) but we also felt that adding a character or a group of characters would also help us to stand out and be a bit more memorable against the millions of other sites out there.
It was difficult to know where to start with this though. Would it look right to incorporate a character into our logo or should it be a stand alone asset? Should it become so integral to our branding that the name and logo cannot appear without the character - or should we treat it in a slightly more subtle way so that it has its own identity and lives by itself? How many characters should we have? Was it even the right thing for us to add to our brand or was it just some strange notion that we got into our heads that it would be a good idea? There were so many unanswered questions yet the only way we could really find out the answers was to explore our options and try a few things out. With this in mind the first thing we needed to do was to decide the design style that we wanted our characters to be drawn in. There were loads of options open to us and some really talented designers out there, which made it pretty diffcult to know which look to go for.
We decided quite quickly that we didn’t want our characters to look too realistic - we didn’t want it to become lifestyle based nor represent a real person because it may alienate people who are not able to identify with it. Instead we wanted the characters to be more fun – to go with the whole ethos of the site that we were trying to build. We liked the idea of using really simple characters, drawn in the Southpark kind of style. These could be made to look quite cute, and if we did it in the right way would hopefully appeal to people across the whole age spectrum, young and old alike. Obviously we couldn’t just copy the Southpark style though – as well as the obvious copyrigth issues we didn’t want people to think that we couldn’t think of anything by ourselves. We wanted to at least try to be a little different and create our own unique identity for our brand. Eventually we decided that the characters should be cute enough to retain an element of fun, but not too cute because we didn’t want to appear too child-like or look like we were trying a cheap trick to atract a young audience. The best way to describe what we were looking for was a set of ’fun characters’ but fun in a cool kind of way. It’s hard to explain what I mean by all of this but hopefully you can at least begin to see what I mean?
Our guiding light was an old illustration that Hirshy’s cousin had developed for another project. It hit the spot on both the cute and the cool angles so we became set on this style. It really helped us to now be able to visualise what we were after rather than just have a feeling that it was the right style to pursue. The only problem was that there was only one existing character like this and it wasn’t 100% right for us to use ‘as is’. We made some tentative enquiries about him producing about 10 or so characters for us (one to reperesent each theme of or site) and wrote a design brief to explain what we wanted. Just like us though he has his day job and a family to look after too, so with the best will in the world found that he didn’t have enough spare time to help us out. It was really frustrating because I felt we were so close yet so far but had now hit the proverbial brick wall.
So we were forced to ponder: ‘who else can design in that style?’ We had to once again consider our options – either change the style to match an illustrator who was available and willing to help us or else find an illustrator with a similar style to the one we were after. As a last resort we could also approach an illustrator and ask them to copy the style but I had nagging doubts about the viability of this - was it a faux pas in the etiquette stakes? Would the illustrator take offence that we didn’t like their own personal style? Would Hirsh’s cousin be put out or would he actually be flattered that we loved his style so much that we wanted to find someone to replicate it?
Keen to progress with things and make a final decision we began to search for some examples online. I’d used this website called i-stock to find some images for work before, so thought this would be a good place to start. I wasn’t really sure what I was going to find or what to even search for. Who knows, maybe I’d even find something totally new and unexpected that would throw the cute and cool idea out of the water.
I searched for ‘characters’ and ‘illustrations’ and was pleasantly surprised with what I saw. It seemed that there were at least of couple of genuine contenders – I became a bit more confident that we’d be able to find something here rather than have to find and commission an illustrator, which would also cost a lot more to do compared to i-stock images where you just pay a one-off cost and you can then use it pretty much as you please, aside from for commerical reasons which require a different (and most expensive) license. The only downside to buying on i-stock was that other people could also use the image too, as the buyer has no exclusive rights to it. So in this case we’d have to rely on building up a strong brand presence so that the images become synonymous with our site and so it looks like other people have copied us if they happen to stumble on the same images. Anyhow, we were confident that the way that we were going to use the characters – one for each event theme – would be unique so overall the threat of others using it to the detriment of our site was minimal.
It was a pure eureka moment when I stumbled on a set of characters that were almost exactly the style we were after. In a way they were even better than the illustration we’d used as the benchmark. They had big eyes and cute faces, and were wearing the sort of clothes that could represent our themes well. We were also allowed to adapt the images – change the colour or the props that they were holding. It was a brilliant moment, one where all my fears about never being able to find a high quality affordable solution was extinguished in a moment.
Just like the name of the site had felt right once we found it after an almost endless search of hundreds of names, so too did the design approach that we were taking for our characters. I had this gut instinct that it would work, and in these situations with so many options open to you, you need to somehow find a way of making a decision. It may not be the right one in the end, but no one can fault you for having the guts to make it in the first place. Only time will tell.
Tags: brand, characters, design, identity, Illustrations
