Today is a big day at Castos. We reveal a new website, new logo, new color scheme, and new brand.
In the spirit of transparency and showing what the creative process looks like for us as a company and as a Brand we talked with several of our team members about what they took away from the brand process. In particular, how this can apply to you as a podcaster, whether your show is a standalone brand all to itself or if your show is part of a larger organization.
Brand Design Process
When starting the brand design process we began with the basics. Who are we as a brand and company, what are our vision, mission, and goals, and who we serve.
At Castos we chose to run a modified version of the 3-hour Brand Sprint, popularized by Google. In this process, we were able to place very specific data points around the attributes of our brand. This then guided the creation of the visual components.
Brand Personality Slider
The Personality Slider was a key component of identifying easy-to-recognize landmarks of other brands that we would like to see in our own. Do we want to be Conventional or a Rebel, Serious or Playful, etc.
Similarly, each member of the brand team was asked to choose 3 words they believe described what Castos stands for. The summation of these words detailed much of our Purpose.
Style Guide
When the brand design process was complete the result was a complete Style Guide, which we call Tempo. This Style Guide is not just a fancy document to show off all the hard work we’ve done, but rather to be a living, working document for our team to reference whenever we’re creating.
This can be anything from developers creating visual UI elements within the dashboard, our content team using the Voice and Tone guides when creating blog posts like this one, or our Support and Success teams when guiding on writing a help doc or customer support ticket.
By standardizing our brand elements (things like colors, fonts, logo, etc.), our content (in things like Voice and Tone guides), and our actual on-site visual elements, all of the teams within Castos have a central place they can reference to ensure that every piece of content we create is on-brand.
Consistency is hugely important when beginning to solidify a brand, and even more important when it comes to maintaining that brand over the long run.
