A Brand Design Sprint is a structured approach to identifying and designing your organization’s brand. It’s structured in both time and in approach. It’s run as a series of time-bound exercises that are intended to help you better understand your own brand. The brand design sprint offers useful and actionable insights.

It offers insights for how to approach your brand’s mission & vision. It helps to give your brand a personality. This personality helps to inform the “voice” of your content on your website and any other materials that you need to create. It also helps to settle your brand’s “personality” so that visual identity design work has a solid design brief to work from. The up-front investment in doing a brand design sprint will both save time and money later, and will allow for better decision making later, as you’ll have your brand design sprint documents to refer back to.

When you have a brand design sprint, you’ll want 5-6 people from your organization attendance, one of them being a key decision maker. These people should represent different functions within your organization. The key decision maker should be somebody who can make decisions about the organization’s brand. You will end up making some decisions about your organization going forward in this sprint.

A brand design sprint can last anywhere between 4 hours and 3 days, depending on the approach and goals of the organization. You’ll want to clear the calendars of each person in attendance, so I try to stick to a 4-6 hour timeframe. This is because I want to leave time for communication before and/or after the brand design sprint for the day. While we’re in the sprint, we’re fully committed to the sprint. This is very focused and structured time, so I try to allow for the needed communication around the time that we’ll be in the sprint.

As silly as it might sound, it’s honestly best to have some sort of healthy (or health’ish) snacks and drinks available during the sprint. It removes a silly barrier. If you’ll be working over lunch, it’s best to have that arranged ahead of time. Sprints can run longer than 4-6 hours, but the logistics of that timeframe start to get a little more complicated. You have to plan for multiple meals, multiple days of snacks, multiple days of limited communication, etc. For these reasons, I usually stick to shorter, more focused durations, though we can do longer, more involved sprints with more detailed exercises.

The day of the brand design sprint, attendees will typically meet in a room large enough to facilitate a group of 6-7 people, sometimes less. Snacks and drinks will be made easily available. All attendees need to commit to being focused in the room for the process (there will be breaks to tend to emergency communication, etc.) The outline for the day looks like this:

• Welcome, ground rules
  • A general welcome to everyone, and a quick review of the ground rules of the sprint process.
• Introduction and explanation of the day’s goals and the process
  • The day’s goals will be reviewed, and the exercises that the brand design sprint team will be participating in will be introduced.
• A series of “note and vote” exercises
  • “Note and vote” exercises are exercises where everybody makes notes on Post-Its, the team reviews them all, and comes to a conclusion, with the Key Decision Maker having the final say. The Key Decision Maker may agree with the team, or may have other considerations to bring to the team. The insights discovered during, and decisions made from, these exercises are used to define your organization’s brand and used to inform and document your organization’s mission, vision, and brand personality.
• Breaks at certain intervals (based on the exercises being used.)
  • Depending on the exercises and length of the sprint, breaks are typically every 90 minutes, sometimes less. The time really does fly by once you are deeply involved in these exercises.
• Review of outcomes of each exercise
  • Once the exercises have been completed, at the end of the day, the outcomes of each of th exercises are reviewed.

Once all of the exercises have been completed and reviewed, I take that information and create a Brand Design Sprint Outcomes document. This documents all of the outcomes of each of the exercises. The outcomes help to determine the voice and personality of your brand, which will inform writing, images, photography, and design.

If you’re having a visual identity designed, the documentation is used to create mockups of your brand’s visual identity. This includes a logo, colors, fonts, and examples of photography and images used in your brand’s communications. Once a decision is made from the mockups, the finalized visual identity is created.

For smaller companies, even a one or two person company, the brand design sprint process is still valuable. I’ve run them over long lunches with one or two person companies. Sometimes a single long lunch will do, sometimes we have multiple longer lunches. It’s more informal, but we can still accomplish the same goals. The framework and documentation is such that it’s easy to pick up where we left off, if this is a better approach than dedicating a single stretch of time.

The final outcomes of the brand design sprint and visual identity process are:

• Mission and Vision statements and documents
• Visual Identity
  • Logo
  • Colors
  • Fonts
  • Imagery guidelines
• Brand “voice”
• Brand Design Sprint documentation

Assets such as a website, business cards, letterhead, etc. can all be designed separately from this design process.

The finalized identity will make creating assets such as a website, business cards, letterhead, signage, and any other merchandise simpler, as the major design decisions and voice have already been established. This is where having a brand design sprint really pays off in terms of savings in time and money.

The investment in having a brand design sprint more than pays for itself later in important and key design processes. It gives you a solid foundation from which to move forward on many aspects of your organization’s brand. It also gives you a place to point back to when you want to change something about your organization’s brand.

The brand design sprint process adds massive value as a structured framework and approach to both better understand your brand, and taking purposeful, insightful action.