Brand Personality Workshop
Week 93 of Founding Typogram
We have been heads-down, hard at work on developing an enhanced and more robust Typogram Free Tier. This endeavor is a significant undertaking, involving a complete refactoring and rewriting of the code from the ground up. The goal is to create a Free Tier that is highly modular, easily shareable, and can be extended quickly. As I progress through each step of Typogram, particularly when revisiting code I wrote a while back about the brand personality step, it brings back memories of our first brand personality workshop experiment. Many of the innovative ideas from that standalone workshop kit will ideally be incorporated into the new Typogram. It feels like the perfect time to take a stroll down memory lane and have a rerun of the third issue of this newsletter series: Brand Personality Workshop. Enjoy!
A brand personality is how you would describe a brand as if it were a person. For example, if Coca-Cola were a person, someone may describe it as lively, youthful, and vibrant. These adjectives are Coca-Cola’s brand personality.
How to choose brand personalities from a list of adjectives? My co-founder Hua Shu created a workshop kit to help your team pin down brand personalities in 3 fun & easy steps. It is best to do this workshop as a group exercise with your cofounders.
First, let’s do a little arts and crafts project to prepare brand personality cards. Make sure to print out the card sheets double-sided. The front side has the card’s designs. The backside has cut lines and fold lines.
We need to cut through the solid lines first. You can use scissors or a knife.
I, on the other hand, cut with magic, so easy…
Now, onto the folding…
Our workshop is open for business! I will create brand personalities for an imaginative company that provides post-retirement travel tours. This creative prompt is inspired by a reader’s question from yesterday. Step 1: choose 10 cards from the pile that matches your brand:
Step 2: flip the cards to side B, where you will see logo examples of that brand personality, use them as visual clues to see how each brand personality translates to logos, and then narrow down from 10 cards to 7 cards:
Step 3: switch the cards to side C, where we have hand-picked a few typefaces that express that brand personality.
Do you see any typeface that caught your eyes? Narrow down again to the final 5 brand personalities.
Congratulations! Workshop success! Our imagery retirement travel company has these 5 brand personalities: Adventurous, Peaceful, Relaxed, Vibrant, and Warm!
Hear from You
You can get this physical kit in printable PDF form, as well as in Google Slides form for free on workshop.typogram.co! If you enjoyed it and want to support me, I have also made this into a Notion template for sale on Gumroad. Let me know what you think of this brand workshop. If this workshop can be helpful to someone your know, please share this newsletter with them!
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See you next week! If you have friends who are interested in founding startups, please consider sharing my newsletter with them!