The Branding Process, Week by Week
A brand identity project for a small business usually takes six to twelve weeks and moves through five stages: discovery, strategy, design exploration, refinement, and delivery with guidelines. Here is what happens each week and what you will be asked for, so nothing comes as a surprise.
The timeline below follows a typical eight-week project. Naming, customer research or approval by a board will extend it.
Weeks 1 and 2: Discovery
This stage is about understanding the business before anything is designed.
- A kickoff meeting with the people who will approve the work
- A questionnaire covering customers, competitors, goals and constraints
- A review of your existing materials, website and marketing
- A competitor audit: how others in your market look and sound
What we need from you: the completed questionnaire, access to existing brand files, and one named decision-maker.
Week 3: Strategy
- A positioning statement: who you serve, what you offer and why you are different
- Brand personality and tone of voice
- A creative brief that sets the direction for design
What we need from you: approval of the brief. This is the most important sign-off in the project, because every design decision after it is judged against it.
Weeks 4 and 5: Design exploration
- Moodboards showing possible visual directions
- Two or three distinct logo concepts, each shown in real use, such as a website header, a business card and a social avatar
- Early colour and typography options for each concept
What we need from you: one consolidated set of feedback and a chosen direction. Separate feedback from several people is the most common cause of delay.
Week 6: Refinement
- Revisions to the chosen concept
- Logo variants: horizontal, stacked, icon or monogram, one-colour and reversed
- A final colour palette, checked for accessible text contrast
- A typography pairing with licensing confirmed
What we need from you: final approval of the mark and the palette.
Weeks 7 and 8: Guidelines and delivery
- A brand guidelines document explaining how to use every element
- Core templates, such as business cards, an email signature, a presentation and social posts
- A full file handover in every format you need, listed in our guide to the logo files you should receive
- A written transfer of ownership on final payment
What slows projects down
- A decision-maker who joins late and reopens stages that were already approved
- Feedback gathered from too many people without being consolidated
- Changing the brief after design has started
- Waiting on content or information needed for the templates
Common questions
Can a branding project be done faster?
A focused project can run in four to six weeks if decisions are quick and the scope is small. Cutting discovery to save time usually costs more time later, in extra revision rounds.
How many people should approve the work?
As few as possible, ideally one or two decision-makers, with everyone else giving input before each review rather than during it.
What does it cost?
That depends on which deliverables you need. Our brand identity pricing guide prices each part separately.
How we run it
Our brand identity projects follow this structure, with a timeline agreed at kickoff and a clear list of what we need from you at each stage.
