Natalie Lynn Kindergarten - Brand Identity Design
Stacey Troutman
⭐️ About Natalie Lynn Kindergarten
Meet Natalie, our client and a former teacher who has swapped the classroom for the creative desk. Now, she's all about creating fun and educational resources to lend a hand to pre-K to first-grade teachers. With her vibrant brand colors already loved by many, Natalie still feels there are some missing puzzle pieces to her branding story.
She's on a mission to weave more cohesion and uniqueness into her brand fabric, and that's where we step in. Natalie is super excited about boosting her social media presence and sprinkling some more magic into her logo design. She's dreaming of a compact, eye-catching logo that truly captures the spirit of her brand. Although she has a wordform logo currently, it doesn't quite hit the spot for her, so she's looking forward to exploring a fresh, modern twist that really brings her brand identity to life.
👉🏽 The Brief
Design tone:
- Fun
- Colorful
- Professional
- Clean
- Helpful
- Aspirational
- Supportive
- Caring
- Informative
🎨 Visual Inspiration
☝🏽 First Step
Natalie already had a set of colors she likes, however, she was opening to tweaking it to better uplift her brand. Here's a view of her new color palette!
Choosing the color scheme for a project can be a daunting task, but when I presented Natalie with some options, she quickly fell in love with a particular combination!
She had one request, though - that there be a similar pink shade to what she currently had. Not wanting to disappoint, I scoured through various options until I found the perfect replacement - a lovely Red Violet color.
With this addition, Natalie was over the moon, and we were able to move forward with the project with renewed excitement.
✍🏽 Iterations
This is where the fun begins!
I have my own processes of how I generate ideas and inspiration (besides Pinterest, of course).
The first step for me to gain more insight is through word mapping. Yes, words. I rarely go straight into Pinterest for logo inspirations.
I feel that in order for me to truly understand the root of the brand, I have to list out words that resonate and represent Natalie's brand.
After a lot of trial and error with past clients, I felt word mapping was the best strategy for me to come up with more ideas of what would work for a client's brand.
I chose Natalie's top 4 words and created a list of words that I felt would match Natalie's brand underneath it.
The highlighted words were the ones I felt were important under that main word. Which then helped me think of nouns for her logo.
On to the next step - getting into the canvas!
Now, don't ever judge a creative's process okay? 😅
It always starts off as a hot mess, but that's how I start to figure out what looks good and what doesn't.
I have the colors to remind me at the top, however, I always start my designs in black so I'm not color-biased.
Here's one concept I came up with, however, I felt like it didn't have much personality.
My mind then went 100mph into different variations of this combination.
Then I remembered that a lightbulb was on my word map and decided to doodle some lightbulbs.
Getting a little closer to what may align with Natalie. So I stuck with this one but made some more tweaks.
✨ Final Designs
Some time has passed (I honestly can't remember the timeline because we had Thanksgiving and Christmas around the project timeline) and we've finally come to a decision for the final designs!
All in all, Natalie and I collaborated really well. She was always so prompt with her feedback and her feedback was informative for me to understand what was missing in her eyes.
It felt great to partner with Natalie on this project, especially since we are both former teachers. Helping a fellow former teacher who supports our current teachers was a rewarding experience.
Want to see more of Natalie?
Check out her website below to see the designs in action!
