Fine Art Meets Branding

5 ways I infuse my fine art background into my work & process as a brand designer.

Believe it or not, my path to graphic design started with fine art.

I’ve been an artist all my life, and even started out studying fine arts in college. While I ultimately fell in love with graphic design, you’ll never pull me away from my fine arts roots. I’m still a huge fan of fine art, and I love creating my own art pieces. Over here at Star Castle Studio, I work with a ton of fine artists helping them create a professional brand so they can become known online and build a business around their fine art work.

Many of my fine artist clients are surprised when they see the similarities between the process we go through to create their brand, and their own process to create their art. When you think about it, branding and fine art have a lot more in common than you might realize. They both require the ability to think conceptually to portray abstract thoughts while maintaining an engaging visual aesthetic, and you have to work to successfully convey the desired message.

One of the things I love most about my work is that it allows me to infuse my love of both fine arts and graphic design into my branding process. I honestly can’t imagine doing it in any other way.

Here are some of the ways I infuse fine arts into my branding process:

1) Logo Sketches

When I create initial logo concept sketches for my clients, I end up creating close to 30 sketches. Each one includes a brief write-up explaining the rationale behind each unique concept. Creating so many sketches this early in the branding process allows me to explore tons of different options without getting too caught up in the details. It also helps me to keep idea flowing between myself and the client so we can discover totally new possibilities for a fresh and completely unique brand.

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2) Printed & Framed Moodboards

It’s a standard part of any brand design process to create a digital moodboard that inspires the mood and style of the brand. I like to take it further and use the moodboard as an opportunity to create a one-of-a-kind custom art piece for my clients that physically embodies their brand.

Many of my clients are in the early stages of turning their passion into a business, and this moodboard creation process helps bring their eclectic dreams into the visual realm so they can see their passion as a tangible, obtainable thing rather than a pipedream. Their moodboard art piece serves as the vision for their brand and helps them to shift their mindset to visualize and manifest what they want for their business.

3) Hand-Drawn Elements and Typography

Every element I include in a brand design starts as with pen and paper as a hand-drawn sketch. This means the sky's the limit for hand lettering, calligraphy, and illustrations and icons for your brand. All the elements I include in a brand are 100% unique and made from sketch to vector. We can even add in elements of YOU like your signature, a simple heart you always draw or other elements that make your brand even more personal.

4) Painting + Watercolor

On top of the hand-drawn sketches I create, I also incorporate painting and watercolor into the brand design process. By starting with a real paintbrush and canvas, I can create textures, maps and illustrative elements that are 100% original and unique to your brand. Many of these textures and elements could be created by vector images alone, but there is something much more “real” about the final results when I start with hand-painted elements.

5) Printed Style Guide

This one is more influenced by my time designing for the “big guys” when I worked at Element Skateboards. It’s so helpful to have a printed style guide for your brand to help you stay consistent, cohesive, and on-brand throughout ALL of your visuals. I always provide a printed and bound style guide for my clients to use as a physical representation of your brand that you can use for reference to keep your brand looking on point!

By incorporating all these fine arts influences into the branding process, my clients get a final result that is totally unique to them. It helps them create a memorable and impactful brand that deeply connects with their audience.

I’d love to share a little taste of what that personalized, fine art infused branding could look like for you!

So I’m giving away custom illustrations that I’ll hand letter and then vectorize into a quote graphic.

GIVEAWAY:

How to win one of 5 custom hand-letterings:

Follow me on Instagram @starcastlestudio
Send me a message on Instagram with the word you’d like custom lettered
The first 5 people to message me with their word will get a custom hand lettered & vectorized quote graphic created by me.

Imagine the possibilities!

Whether it’s a word you live by, a simple mantra, the name of loved one or the name of your brand, let’s turn that idea into a beautiful hand lettered asset you can use in the future. :)