Analyse a Brand

Explanation

In this assignment, you’ll choose one of your favourite brands, and examine its brand identity and how it works.

Instructions

Choose a brand

 Set your timer: 10 minutes

Spend a maximum of 10 minutes choosing a brand to analyse.

For this exercise, it’s important that you have access to as many examples of the brand identity in use as you can — so we recommend choosing a fairly mainstream brand.

This will allow you to discover a lot of images through Google, and help you to stay within the time limit for this assignment.

Gather images and information about the brand identity

 Set your timer: 40 minutes

Next, spend up to 40 minutes finding images and information related to your chosen brand and its brand identity. Here are some things to look for:

• Logomarks, wordmarks, and examples of these being used in different applications like ads, reports, packaging, etc.
• Examples of the main colours that the brand uses
• Examples of the main fonts and lettering that the brand uses
• Examples of the brand’s voice – for example, how it presents itself through slogans or voiceovers in ads, and how the brand sounds in longer passages of text on its website or in reports
• Styles of photography and/or illustration used by the brand
• Principles of spacing or layout, including any grids you can identify
• Details of web or mobile user interfaces, like navigation icons, or repeated ways of interacting with the brand’s app, website, or other services
• Any sub-brands you can identify (for example, Coca-Cola has sub-brands like Diet Coke)

More specifically, you can also look for any brand identity manuals that your chosen brand has available online. Sometimes brands will publish these as PDFs, or even have whole websites about them. They might also be called something like “brand style guide” or “brand guidelines”.

Create a style tile with your research

 Set your timer: 40 minutes

Bring your research together by creating a style tile for your chosen brand, using this Figma template  .

Don’t worry about making it too polished — just do the best you can with the images and information you’ve found. The purpose of this step is simply to allow you to gather the different brand elements, and see how they add up to an overall brand identity.

Here’s an example we put together about MUJI:

In conclusion...

Now that you’ve studied how the different elements of a brand identity fit together, in the next two assignments let’s look more closely at logo design. First off, let’s explore the main types of logomark.

Assignment version 1.0
Last updated 7 June 2021