An Introduction to Trekk’s Branding and Logo Design Process

I’m Trekk’s Summer Intern, and I’m just a week into my job. Despite that, I already feel like I’ve learned a lot from being around different people and areas of the marketing agency. Agency culture, search engine optimization, and copywriting have all been big points of emphasis throughout my short tenure, and that’s not to mention what I’ve learned about branding and logo design.

With my background in journalism, I thought I’d sit down for an “interview” with Managing Directors Emilee Christianson and Mike Wilson to learn more about Trekk’s approach to brand and logo design. Our 30-minute-long conversation covered all the bases, from Trekk’s brand workshops and how they run to why using generative AI for logo design probably isn’t a good idea.

How can you effectively come up with a brand? And how do you come up with design ideas solely based on the tone of your brand? These were two big questions I had going into our interview, and you may have wondered the same at some point. Thankfully, Emilee and Mike answered all that and more during our interview — here’s what I learned.

What is brand identity and what does branding do?

To understand how to effectively carve out your brand identity you naturally need to understand what a “brand” encompasses and the importance of consistency. 

While one could immediately think of iconic logos like the Nike swoosh, branding reaches beyond just the visual elements of companies. Brand identity is the tangible expression of a brand, or how it looks, feels, and sounds to the outside world. 

“Customers have expectations for your brand and how it should feel,” Christianson said. “A clearly documented brand identity empowers everyone at your business to speak and sound consistent.”

Having a well-defined identity is crucial. It serves as a true north for your brand — a guide to how you should interact with customers. Without it, people wouldn’t know what to expect from you. You don’t want that.

How Trekk helps clients build their brand identity 

When clients come to Trekk needing assistance with branding, the agency holds “brand workshops.”

“We get everybody in the room who is a stakeholder in that company or has influence on how that brand should appear to the outside world,” Christianson said. “It’s a series of curated activities that we do to lead the group to a consensus.”

Workshops can be game changing for organizations without experience in marketing or branding, as, a lot of the time, stakeholders have opinions on brand identity that they can’t express well. Our client services team brings that out of them.

“A very underrated thing is there’s all of these expectations that stakeholders have about what their brand should look like and how it should sound that they can’t articulate,” Christianson said. “And they can’t know it until they see it.”

Through our brand model exercise, we help clients land and agree on their brand’s mission, tone of voice, personality, values, and purpose. Then, our message map takes this a step further by connecting brand identity with how the brand should effectively communicate with its buyer personas.

For more information on Trekk’s brand workshops, check out our step-by-step breakdown of how to run a brand workshop.

Visualizing your identity with brand and logo design

After identifying your brand’s needs, our creative team takes the wheel for the next step — branding and logo design. 

“Once we’ve done the workshop, we’re using that information to help drive our design decisions,” Wilson said. “You’re not going to have contradictory visuals to brand vision and voice. The workshop educates our decisions with logo styling, color palettes, and more.”

The results from the message map and brand model help our creatives narrow down exactly how your brand will look. Then, it becomes a collaborative process between agency and client as we refine our designs based on your company’s needs and desires.

Wilson called this process “putting the designs through a refinement funnel.” The team will usually come up with 3-5 design ideas and then communicate further with the client about what they like, dislike, and what they want. Furthermore, Trekk’s designs are created carefully, with all the little details in mind. 

“We’re thinking ten steps ahead,” Christianson said. “How’s it going to look printed or online? We design with web, print, everything in mind. If you just make something in Canva, you’ll often run into issues down the road. Our touch of professionalism is often evident when you get down the road further. We think ahead.”

Wilson expanded on that thought: “When a company is representing itself digitally, on business cards, letterheads, or apparel, or on their website, color will be consistent across the board,” Wilson said. “You’re getting that thought in the process along with many other complexities we consider.”

Why not use AI logo generators?

With the rise of artificial intelligence in recent years, you could find various AI logo generators across the internet that can make your process fast and easy. Many people assume that using AI for your brand design is simple, easy, fast, and most importantly, cheap. So why not go this route?

“It’s gonna fall flat at some point,” Wilson said. “You’ll run into issues. There’s not that thoughtfulness.”

While AI technology has seriously developed, entrusting it with your brand design can present issues with color, sizing, and an overall lack of thoughtfulness that Christianson and Wilson spoke on. Furthermore, AI-generated logos are created without a deep understanding of your brand that a true agency partner will have. This may lead you to go with an option that isn’t truly consistent with your brand identity.

That’s not to say that generative AI can’t sufficiently make your logos. It can — but to get high-quality designs from it, you’ll need to put it through that refinement process that our professional designers would normally take care of, placing a larger workload on yourself.

One last but very important issue with using generative AI for your brand design is that you can’t copyright it, and obviously, not having your visual identity copyrighted can present many issues of its own. 

Brand Identity and Logo Design: A Conclusion

While my interview with Emilee and Mike really went in depth on Trekk’s approach to branding and design, I have a few main takeaways from it.

First, partnering up with an agency is beneficial in many ways, but particularly, for its safety and security. Emilee and Mike both discussed how a good marketing agency puts a deeper level of thought into its designs that can be hard to find when going in other directions for your brand and logo design. Going with a well-equipped agency like Trekk eliminates the potential for future issues with your designs relating to the little things like how they look on apparel, merchandising, and more. 

Trekk provides that thoughtfulness, but it doesn’t just come out of thin air. A lot of the ideation process for Trekk’s creative team is heavily dependent on your brand’s identity and characteristics, which is why it’s important to know your brand like the back of your hand. Our agency can help with that through workshops, but the bottom line is that both the client and agency need to have a clear understanding of the brand’s identity for smooth sailing in logo development.

Furthermore, you need to have that same understanding if you choose not to go with an agency. If you don’t have a clear identity carved out for your brand, logo and brand design will be difficult. Whether you’re using generative artificial intelligence or going to your nephew with a solid understanding of Canva, you’ll likely run into issues down the line.