How to design a MVP visual identity in an hour

Ayush Soni / HEX
Creative director and founder of a full-cycle brand and creative studio (hex.inc).

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This really isn’t an end-to-end tutorial with organized instructions, but general brain dump of my general thought process when it comes to designing a “first shot” identity very quickly.

Over the years, this process has become more honed and I do feel there’s some value in this writing for those looking to test out an idea quickly. The first thing I’d start with is just summarizing what u want to do in 1–2 words. This is going to help you narrow down who you / your company are and what you want to explore visually.

I want to build a CPG brand while I do this tutorial. This one’s going to be for a water company called _thewatercompany. And the 1–2 word summary is going to be “Rimowa for Water”. Water packaging is something I’ve wanted to always explore, so here’s a cool idea that I don’t think has been done before. Correct me if I’m wrong though; I did no research.

That already gets us like 50% there. Not just visually but also strategically. The goal here is to get to a place where I can test this concept quickly, not to build a full-scale brand identity.

Now, the next step should be to build a quick mood-board so you can visualize the end product. This helps you even if you don’t know how to execute; a mood-board will help save time (money) + back and forth when working with a designer.

Cool so that above was my little 5 minute mood-board. Since I’m designing for myself there’s no reason to do too much at this stage. It gives me a very clear picture of what I want the brand to look and feel like. To get here, I just browsed through cosmos and pinterest for a little while and pulled together all images I liked on a figma file.

No need to waste time looking at thousands of designs, case studies, and ideas. There is an infinite supply of inspiration online and the best way to move forward is to narrow down, pick a few things you like, and get to work.

Now, time to dive in and start exploring things. Again, don’t take your ideas too seriously and just start jamming things together and see what sticks. I wouldn’t recommend this approach for a real client project where there are certain angles + demographics to watch out for, but this is a fun sprint.

Below is the first thing I designed. Taking inspo from one of the screens above; the + style. Idk why but I love the idea of using the circles with plus signs in some capacitiy…remind me of particles and feels like something scientific which is what I want for this water company.

But the contrast is putting me off a bit, even though that’s kind of what I wanted looking at the inspo. A more brutalist exploration with the same idea:

I do think this works a bit better, but it should feel like a blend of both worlds. Clear and brutalist, but also aquatic and glassy.

meh. At this point, I feel like this direction is inherently uninteresting to explore. Even though I think there’s a lot of cool things you can do with physical design when branding it like a Rimowa, the digital design potential is limited.

But, I’m still going to try a few more ideas to see if something sticks. I like this one exploration that interpolates gradients into the identity and adds a bit more depth to the design. I think pairing liquid circular gradients with the circular geometric symbols could be interesting.

It’s a bit harder for me to imagine a darker packaging for water, but anything goes at this stage. I want to explore something a little bit more “technical” for this brand since I want it to feel premium at first glance. This should feel like a product that has gone through multiple stages of iterations and sampling, passed multiple industry-standard testing, and put in the most rigorous research environments.

I think the exploration above feels closest to what I’m imagining. I like the use of using molecules to shape patterns and organic designs and having a distinct brand mark with the line art. I think those two elements can go really far to become defining motifs of the brand. Typography is relatively simple but I still wanted to experiment with a more technical display font for product naming.

I think I’m okay with sticking with this for now and building it further, just because I don’t want to spend TOO much time on this little sprint. From here, my goal will be to build core graphic elements and see how the brand reacts to web, social, and general print collateral.

Of course, packaging + physical product design is missing here but the brand elements are defined, which was ultimately the goal of this sprint. I could potentially do a part 2 of this where I do packaging design for a sample product for this brand. I like the name Water+Studio as well.

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Alirght, final product:

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Below is a very quick summary of the identity. Everything I talked about and tried out is summed up below. From here, it’s easy to create new pieces of collateral like the website or packaging or social assets. Just need to think about each piece of collateral independently and find nods to this base identity system.

Alright that’s it. Let me know if you ever want me to do a v2 of this.

hex.inc

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