Mitchel Hunt – Symbol Design For Branding

Learn how to create symbols for brand identities that allow people to understand your brand right away.

After Completing This Course You Will Be Able To

• Have a deep understanding of the use of symbols in brand identity systems
• Ace the initial stage of a project by clarifying intent and working with a client brief
• Master key creative techniques required to create brand symbols
• Bring your ideas into a digital space, pair them with type and finish them off like a pro
• Take your symbol to the next level by using a set of refining techniques
• Create mockups for your symbol to demonstrate real-life usage

About This Course

Symbols have significant cultural value, hold meaning in different settings and are immediately recognizable to large numbers of people. As such, brand logos harness the power of the symbol to create engaging, memorable identities that people come to know and love over time.

This course will equip you with practical techniques to create beautiful, functional and recognizable brand symbols. The course is divided into 4 major sections covering an overview of symbols as a design practice and cultural concept, defining the needs of a branding project and setting up a good working process, ideation techniques for illustration and typography and bringing your ideas into a digital space.

You’ll build your own set of brand symbols throughout the course and by the end, you’ll have a full presentation showing off your best design thinking.

What You’ll Learn In Symbol Design For Branding

• What makes a good symbol, minimalism vs. abstraction and types of brandmarks
• How to generate key ideas from a brief and create moodboards to illustrate ideas
• How to free sketch, illustrate with shapes, customize type and build letterforms from scratch
• How to critique, refine and tighten up your symbol in a digital space
• How to create and present a variety of solutions to your client’s brief
• How to create a set of guidelines and rules to make your symbol part of a larger brand identity system
• How to insert your symbols into a brand deck ensure that they’re presented cleanly

Who is this course for?

• Designers and illustrators wanting to work with symbols
• Logo and brand identity designers wanting to enhance their existing skills
• Freelancers wanting to add Symbol Design to their skillset
• Digital marketers and brand managers wanting to expand into brand design
• Branding experts wanting to learn more about the role of symbols in brand identity
• Anyone wanting to start a professional career in the world of branding
• Digital nomads looking for work that they can do from anywhere in the world
• All levels of experience
• Basic experience in Adobe Creative Suite

About Author

Expert Freelance Graphic Designer; Worked With Nike, Fender And Oakley

Mitchel Hunt is a Los-Angeles-born, Brooklyn-based freelance graphic designer with a focus in brand identity. He has also directed and produced projects in packaging, print, product ideation, apparel, environmental graphics, web/social marketing, motion graphics, videography and photography. His time in all of these disciplines has had him working on projects with massive brands, but he is always eager to talk with small businesses who could harness the power of design at the beginning of their ventures.

Mitchel is passionate about sorting things out, and making a message as efficient and impactful as possible. He believes that graphic design is really about thinking and communicating visually, so it’s important to be considerate, intentional and pragmatic with every design problem you are trying to solve. There are a lot of misconceptions about what design can and can’t do, and as a teacher, Mitchel is looking to help define the practice and give students the tools to think for themselves.

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