The Standards: Making A Brand In Record Time
Callum on how to turn a .fig into a .com in under 72 hours.
How we built our new ToolKit brand and website in under 72 hours.
So far, the Standards have helped indicate how we leverage proven processes to expedite the creative process, while still creating exceptional work. It’s easy to talk about what that looks like in theory, or for other people’s brands we handover and might never see again. To really put our money where our mouth is, we’re going to step you through how we applied all of our Standards, the ToolKit platform and some elbow grease to rebrand ToolKit and launch a fully-fledged website for it. In under 72 hours. This is the Standard for Making A Brand In Record Time.
At Love + Money we created The Standards as a manual on creating exceptional work that works, every time. It’s a set of processes that leverage a proven structure to blend inspiration with experience, freedom with discipline, and experimentation with certainty.
If you’ve ever worked with us, or any other world class studio, you’ll know that creative agencies are finely tuned to articulate what a particular brand is and what it does. The much bigger challenge is giving that same brand the creative agency to do it themselves when the work’s handed over. While an agency can help you get from 0-1, how do you go to 2 and so on with the system they’ve provided? How do you make it easier to be right than wrong with how you express your brand? We’re firm believers that with the right tools, namely with the right ToolKit, it’s inevitable.
What started as a way to improve internal efficiency and elevate client handovers has evolved into a company focused on exclusively that: ToolKit. Yet in doing so, we needed to disarticulate Love + Money as an agency from ToolKit as a product. Why? Because in wanting to create a tool for agencies like ours, we realised that Love + Money is technically the competition of our customers. It’s an awkward dynamic, and one that necessitated a rebrand. And with all the new brands of note assembling at this year’s Brand New Conference, what better excuse to leverage the Standards and the ToolKit platform we swear by to do just that in record time?
Creative Sprint:
While we’ve written about this process in much greater depth here and here, we began with a Creative Sprint to set the brand’s overarching direction, exploring and refining how that manifests visually. Keeping the experimentation open-ended and endlessly collaborative, we focused on breaking ToolKit’s brand meme out from Love + Money’s own. Intentionally an inverse of LaM’s perpetual dark-mode, a mostly white, somewhat structured and altogether very meta articulation of creation itself began to emerge. Leaning on the symbolism of digital UI, from explicit cursors to more subtle .png-esque checkered patterns, we explored how to best represent the brand that creates brands. Through the introduction of motion, the cycling of fonts, colours and images became crucial in articulating the flexibility and speed ToolKit provides for any brand. Here, the core meme of ToolKit became expressed not by what the product looks like to begin with, but by what the platform enables.
Cursors? Shapes with labels? Visible wireframes and nodes? Lovely.
Dispatch:
The agency process, no matter how impressive, usually yields a codified brand and a creative presentation of some sort. So “Making A Brand In Record Time” is less about how good LaM is at articulating a brand with a Creative Sprint, and more about how fast our files can turn that .fig into a .com. (Spoiler: ToolKit offers these very files for sale here). By atomising brands, including the one we just built for it, ToolKit ensures brands ladder up into codebases that are easy to work with, flexible, and can be changed at any time to suit your needs. Even better, it automatically creates dynamic, flexible systems our proprietary Figma plugin can read and push to the website’s front-end, iteration after iteration. Using the data from local styles and variables, and the data created using slices, ToolKit’s adherence to pre-dispatched components ensured our web library was automatically updated as our designers codified the new brand. And then? The website was born at the literal push of a button, and with it, the purest expression of the power of ToolKit. Here, it’s not just about building a beautiful brand for ToolKit, because every agency has their own proprietary process for doing this. It’s about having the agency to use that brand immediately.
Right now ToolKit can produce a brand guidelines and a website at the push of a button. If you want to see what it’ll be able to do next, we’re conducting user testing all quarter, so book a time to chat with Joe (South Hemisphere) via this link or Adnaan (North Hemisphere) via this link.