It depends on who you are and what you’re after. I love agencies, and they’re a perfect fit for a large multi-national company that needs to invest in a huge rebranding project or a new marketing concept that will take a year or so to implement across their large organisation. They need, and have the budget (and time) for, a large team of creatives working together for a long period of time, being led by project managers to make sure the project runs smoothly.

But if you’re a slightly smaller company, a one-woman strategy based design studio (like this one!) might instead be the perfect fit. In the case of designing a visual identity, the Art Director is typically responsible for around 90% of the work in an agency (the other 10% being project management, like booking meetings and setting up the project scope and time frame), making the whole agency experience a bit unnecessary.

When working with an experienced brand designer instead of a whole agency, you get the same result as you would if that brand designer had been employed at an agency – but without paying extra for project managers, production managers, agency partners or fancy office spaces. The process will be the same, the collaboration with a network of experts in different fields when necessary will also be the same, but the cost will be lower and the timeframe will be shorter.

It’s important though, that the freelancer/consultant that you choose, also have the strategy skills to make sure that you don’t end up with something purely decorative.

The boring answer is of course that it depends. There are no set price lists, since each project is different and I tailor make each branding project to the specific client’s needs. After our initial start-up meeting I will set up a project time line, project description and a quote for your specific project.

I follow a process that I spent the last 15 years refining:

1. Understanding
Start-up meeting, and sometimes a workshop, to form a clear understanding of your business, your situation and the problem that we need to solve. 

2. Research & Strategy
Discovering your business today: your environment, competitors, challenges, opportunities etc. Setting the strategy and creative direction for your business and for the project – a step that is vital for a successful brand identity project.

3. Creation/Design
This is where the fun starts! With all the pieces of the puzzle in place, we start boiling down all the insights that we gathered in the previous step to design concepts and sketches, guided by a clear concept.

4. Iteration
Sorting through all the experiments and sketches from the previous phase, testing and iterating, choosing and fine-tuning the design until we find the perfect solution. 

5. Implementation
Once we have a final design, it’s time to start crafting all the assets and putting together the brand guidelines. This may entail collaboration with other experts such as photographers, illustrators, copywriters or web developers.

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(6. Implementation into the organization. This step is outside the brand identity design process, but it’s a vital step! I’m happy to help make the transition and hand-over to inhouse design teams as smoothly as possible.)

An estimated time frame is 7-9 weeks for a new visual identity.

Sure! But in most cases I don’t recommend that.

If you already have a working visual identity that was built from your strategic goals and everything else is in place, except your logo needs a refresh – then, absolutely! I can rework your logo to suit your business properly and work seamlessly together with the rest of your identity.

But if you’re a startup, with no visual identity or direction, and “just need a logo” I would not recommend it. The logo is just one part of the toolbox that is a visual identity. Every time you communicate with your audience you’re going to use some kind of typography, some kind of colour palette and some kind of overall visual expression and tonality. How can you make sure that your brand has a consistent, and professional, look across all channels and on all different kinds of assets, with just a logo?

Absolutely! In fact, I highly recommend keeping the brand designer involved, when it’s time to implement the new identity into the organization. This is where many beautifully crafted visual identities fall flat, when the agency or designer hands it over to the client, and moves on to the next project without looking back.

Keeping the brand designer involved during the implementation phase makes sure that everything created inhouse aligns perfectly with the visual identity.

In some projects, I act as a consultant and give feedback on different assets as they’re being produced, and in other projects I’m hired to design specific assets or work as an Art Director, e.g. when the website is being developed.

I love collaborations with other creatives! I have a large network of amazing freelancing creatives, but I’m always interested in adding more. If you are a creative freelancer of some kind, in fields such as web development, UX, 3D, animation, copywriting etc, don’t hesitate to contact me for exciting collabs – client based projects or creative passion projects on the side.