To begin my branding project I definitely did not expect as much time and effort to go into the branding side. This project has made me realise that the brand is to be looked at similarly as a personality or identity rather than a design or perception. When we learned about apsects such as brand values I was shocked to learn that the brand is to be personified to have values and morals, however after deciding on my values and looking back at my final design I have realised how important this step was in the process, as this determines how the branding of the product or service operates throughout. The values have allowed me to stay consistent and make the online banking service appear reliable and trustworthy which is my main value. I feel like I understand branding more and the attention that goes into it, I have been noticing I am appreciating other branding more deeply than before.

Something that I found rather difficult during this project was the wordmark and logomark. It took longer than planned to decide on the final logo and name. I felt like I was pressuring myself to quickly come up with a logomark and wordmark and got lost in trying to make it look nice rather than making it reflect everything my brand stands for. Something that really helped was looking at other brands logos, researching this topic and explaining to others my feelings on it.

When I had decided on “Bloom” I had clearer idea of the brand itself, the brand values and knew exactly how I wanted the branding to effect users. When designing the logos that will now be thrown to waste, I didn't have much clue on what my brands purpose was and exactly how I wanted it to operate. I have now learned that this is such an important step that I need to be aware of before creating the logo for a brand, otherwise you don't know exactly who or what you are creating it for, limiting your ideas. Next time I am asked to create a logo or design for a brand I need to know exactly my wants and needs for the app to be, otherwise a similar situation of creating logos for the sake of getting that part over with will take up a lot of time.

After completing this project, I will be making sure I carry out certain processes in my next project to abstain from avoidable struggles. I want to collect more research, I think the amount of research I did collect was standard but collecting more would have avoided the loss of time I could've spent working on other aspects of the branding. Another thing I will be improving on in the next project is consistency, the colour pallete was too large therefore deciding on a smaller colour palette would be beneifical as eight primary colours were extremely difficult to include in the brand guidelines and landing page.