Background
Demand is a data analytics platform conceived out of Area 120, Google’s internal incubator for experimental projects. This product hopes to provide artists, venue managers, promoters and others in the live music industry actionable insights such as artist trends, ticket pricing, announcement effectiveness and audience insights.
Task
To accompany the announcement of their product launch, the Demand team needed help with branding which included a logo, visual identity, style guide, landing page and marketing collateral. I also helped to build out a light design system to help with the visual language of their UI
How I brand.
For branding and visual projects, I use a combination of creative concepting and divergent thinking to ultimately align on the best visual identity for a brand.
Creative concepting
Start by making 2 - 4 concept boards to explore very different styles, basing inspiration off the brand personality, vision and values. I include these sections on the boards: Theme & theme description, inspiration and moodboards, color palettes, word marks and favicons, and applications of the brand
Converging
Through dot voting, the team can explore the concepts and point out things they like from the individual boards. Oftentimes a single board is never the ultimate source of truth for where the brand is going, and the end result will be a mix of two or more concepts.
Design System
After aligning the desired attributes of multiple boards, we can usually solidify enough visual elements to be translated into a design system, such as the color palette, typography and component styling.
Application
Applying the brand system into mocks is important, as the stakeholders can start to see what the application of their brand translates to web, print and other marketing materials.
Identifying who we are
Before kicking off and putting anything on paper, it's important to align with the organization about "Who they are". I use the Brand Deck to help gain valuable insights into how they want to be perceived and understood.
Once I've received some keywords around who they are and who they are not, I can start mood-boarding.
Brand System
We ended up taking the favorite attributes from the first and second board above and fleshed out a Design System.
We wanted it to feel far enough from the Google ecosystem that it would hold as a stand alone brand, but still remain familiar to standards.google. This included bringing in UI components from Material 2.0 and color choices such as Google Blue 500 and 'off black' typography.
Application
The brand system was then applied to their landing page (live), marketing collateral for conferences, press releases and promotional videos.
Press Releases
Following product launch
• 9to5 Google: ‘Demand’ is a live music data analytics platform from Google’s Area 120
• Venture Beat: Google’s launches Demand to bring data-driven insights to promoters
• Forbes: Google’s DEMAND Startup Wants To Transform Live-Event Ticketing
• Blog.Google.com: Demand Where Live Music Meets Data