Brand Design: Deep Dive Process 2026

I've been using Affinity now for about a year for all my graphic design and brand identity work. And it was a little bit of a shift at the beginning, but the more I used Affinity, the more I started to realize I really liked this application and what it can do, especially for an app that is completely and utterly free to use for everyone. So, I want to show you my brand identity workflow in Affinity, how it's benefited me, what I do differently, and take you behind the scenes of a full brand project, and you should get some good information and some inspiration for using it yourself. So, this is magic. And this didn't always look as good as it does now. It actually took a long process to get there. And I'll walk you through how I did it within Affinity. The first thing is mooboarding and ideiating. Now, Affinity is great and the way I love to use it is a all-in-one app for vectorzing and layout. So, what I did is I created a essentially a page layout like so in the layout workspace uh and put all my mood boarding information in here. So, all my images and you can see how I did this. Essentially, all you do inside of here is you use the frame tool and you frame it on your grid and then you bring in any old image like this and it will stick within that frame. And it's so easy to do especially when you have a grid laid out for the top here. You have a master page when you're on the layout mode. So I can put open magic mood board version one. So that in all these pages I can actually just use this as the master page behind everything too. Some of these are a bit blurry, but for the mood board, it is really important for the client to be able to see the kind of vibe and feeling. And you can already see here the colors that are coming out of this and some of the crazy shapes when we look at, you know, this the final part of Magic. And if you look at Magic here on their website, they're using these colors already. We chose a brand concept of purple for the color. Very bright, very modern. So, I do all my moo boarding in either Canva whiteboards and then I bring it into Affinity so I can present it nicely. And it's just a nice way for them to be able to see the work that you've done. The way I like to create is be very messy when I'm by myself, whether that's through mood boarding or like just drawing. And then I like to pick out the best bits and neaten it up and organize it in a presentation to show the client on a call or send it over an email. And in this case, we shared this on a call and we went through it all, including sort of the keywords and feelings here that we're trying to evoke in the brand. We're keeping it very visual, you know, with some archetypical naming conventions like playful, you know, monolithic, vibrant, all this sort of stuff here. Uh, and this mood board acts as a place for me to kind of reference and a way for the client to see where we're sort of going. If they're visually aligned on the mood board, they're visually aligned on the project. Now the next step is creating the logo type. This is where I start to sketch by myself. Sketching is a huge part and I use I have a Procreate um I use other apps as well for sketching and the whole point of it is so I can just get my ideas out. And what I did here is I actually brought this into glyphs my sketches as you can see here. This is a screenshot that I've brought in. And the reason why I normally use glyphs is for when I'm designing type faces. I'm used to designing typography inside of glyphs. As you can see, it's made for fonts. And it's got certain tools that I like to use, such as like, you know, the fit curve tool here, so I can get these splines looking exactly the way I want them to. But you can do this in Affinity. And since then, I have been using Affinity more for my logo type needs cuz it's a bit easier to ideulate and change them, which I'll show you soon. So, from here, I go into another document, and it looks terrible to work. Um, you know, I don't blame you for judging because I think it looks awful, too. But the whole point of this exercise here is I'm trying to show or kind of explain where I could go to myself. I I'm a firm believer that your work will look terrible until it looks good. And at the beginning stages, if your work is just looking flawless and amazing, then I feel like you haven't pushed the boundaries out yet. I feel like you haven't done the work that you need to do to get that idea across. So here I'm just playing around with the word magic in I think this is space grotesque. Yeah, space grotesque. And then modifying it slightly. And I'm able to do this in affinity because of the artboards. Now my first ideations always start on paper, but sometimes I really do like to come into Affinity to show my ideations as I go. And you can see here I've got loads of different artboards here showing different shapes. And I'm just playing around with shapes, seeing where we can go. This is something that clients would normally never see, but if you watch my video about the 5 minute versus 5 hour versus 5 days, you'll notice that I did all of these concepts within them. And the whole point is to explore and to allow yourself to create bad work. And the great thing about Affinity is the artboard staging that you can just stage an artboard anywhere. You can duplicate it. It's fast. It feels very airy and freeing. You can duplicate work like nothing else. Like there you go. And then you can make some edits to it if you need to. So you can see as I'm going through this, I'm sort of making tweaks. I'm adding 3D elements in. As we go further down here, we started to see that I've got this star feature. This is at the time when generative AI was becoming more prevalent in a visual language. So I wanted to see what we could do with the star. However, we sort of went away from that a little bit. This is kind of like the notionesque star that we went through and it didn't work very well. Over here, I wanted to see if we could go a bit elongated. A lot of logos feel very, you know, compositional and there's nothing different. So, I wanted to see maybe, oh, well, we have magic like so. And then we have this. Can this sort of design fit nicely within this? But it just didn't have enough personality. And as I keep going, you can see that I'm just iterating, iterating, and I'm just everything's really messy on my artboards. And that is a okay in my opinion. As I keep going, we get to a point of where I have this idea. And this idea came specifically from this, which is created using a Pilot parallel calligraphy pen. That's like for creating black letter and gothic type styles and whatnot. I'm a big fan of using traditional tools and then making them digital later because it gives you a different perspective and it feels just more creative. It gets you out of those ruts. Anyway, I bring them in to Affinity because I like to be able to edit them within here. I feel a bit more free. And as you can see, I just bring them into these super ellipses or these squirles in this case. And I'm able to just duplicate them and edit them in with speed without having to worry about it. As you can see here, you might notice as well that I'm treating this very much like layers on a page where I can just move things around and I'm not particularly worried about what people are thinking. I'm just ideating in a way where I can prove to myself visually something works. So, we get through all these documents and then I need to present something to the client. This video is sponsored by Fresh Books. Are you constantly chasing late payments, wrestling with clunky spreadsheets, and trying to figure out which invoices have actually been paid? Well, there's a way to simplify your finances faster than you can say past you invoice. That's where FreshBooks comes in. It's the small business software that makes the hard parts of running your business easy. Whether you're a freelancer or a small business with employees or contractors, FreshBooks gives you all the tools you need to manage your finances in one place. With Fresh Books, you can create and send professional invoices that get you paid faster thanks to flexible payment options like credit cards and bank transfers. You can effortlessly pay your employees and contractors with FreshBooks payroll. Collaborate seamlessly with your team and clients. Manage expenses and track time with ease and also generate powerful financial reports to keep a clear picture of your business. And most importantly, keep your books organized all from a single intuitive platform. And right now there's a brand new offer just for channel subscribers. Head over to freshbooks.com/wilpatterson to unlock your exclusive offer. Now my first presentation was actually created in Affinity as well. Here I created another document. It's in the layout workspace which is always good with two masters, a dark and a light master and a cool little modular grid. And I'm going to make these presentation templates available for you guys to go and use because they're really powerful and they really do help tell the story of your brand creation. Uh so I talk about the initial direction which is this. I wanted to show them how this can work and you can see it's locked here because I've exported this as an image itself. Then I go into the concept by itself. The great thing about Affinity is I didn't need to switch apps to do this. I could just simply take in from anywhere. Let's say the social media bit like let's just take this in and I can just paste it in and it's already there. Everything that's available to me in one workspace here or in another file is available to me in this file. So I can even go in here and make some edits to this or with the typography. I could go in and make some typographical element different. As I go through, you can see how I'm presenting it. I'm presenting it in different ways. I liked this concept a lot at the start, but it just wasn't what people wanted. It's not what magic was about. They really liked this sort of style here with this M being all crazy and, you know, slightly different but still contemporary at the same time. So, we get to a point where the logo type is sort of finalized and we have a direction for it. However, it is still not fully there. What we need to do is make sure this works on social media assets. And this is where Affinity really shines because of the artboards and the way that you can create layouts. You can be in vector. You can be in raster. It's everywhere. So here I've got some sort of social media templates that I'm working on with compositions. I'm trying to see how things would work on an Instagram story or on like splash backgrounds. Seeing what templates could look like for them if they were to do a presentation, create type faces. And the way that I create these artboards is by simply going in and just duplicating them like this all the way across. And I can just edit and make different edits to it as I go. I'm not being precious with it. It's very freeing. Again, here we've got more with the old logo and all these crazy splash backgrounds, but you can see the amount that you really can do within one identity. When we get to the end of the identity and we're doing more of the finalized stuff for the brand guidelines which are here like so it's important to show clear space and the way that I present that is like this in Affinity where we do the rule of thirds and I'm able to just design this in Affinity as a tool and then bring it in to the guidelines document here and then export this as a PDF or upload it to Canva for them to see as well. Now the client handover is pretty seamless as well. You can export all of this to Canva and Magic are using Canva for a lot of their social media things. So I can literally take any image like this one and I can export as a JPEG to Canva as for location to Canva and it will upload it and if I'm part of their team they'll be able to use it uh and they're able to see all of the work that I've done as well once I've exported it. This is a studio that I use quite a lot which has got some of the AI features of portrait lighting. I've put in a picture frame rectangle. I've even added a dust and scratches tool. The great thing about Affinity is you don't need to switch apps to do different things like presentations or, you know, social media graphics or even just photo manipulation. You can do it all in one app and create your own studio. So, everything is just in one. I like to separate my artboards here. As you can see, a lot of the time, whether I'm doing, I don't know, like a presentation or whether I'm just playing around with social media graphics or something. So, I created this brand within Affinity. It's a completely free app. And it's really professional what you can do in it. Just because there's no price tag doesn't mean it's not professional in my opinion. I've been using it for other brands, even for Krez, which is a car manufacturer. I was able to I on my iPad through Affinity Designer and bring it into Affinity on my computer and carry on working with it just as normal. And you can see here it's just very free flowing. And we did the brand guidelines within Affinity on here too. Everything was just easy goinging and very natural feeling. So give Affinity a go. I think it's very underrated at the minute for the power that you get from it. It's got all the tools that you could need for logo design, brand identity. It's got everything in there. Thanks for watching.