Designing a Sister Brand With Megan Dowd
If you don’t know Megan Dowd yet, you should. She’s a business coach, offer architect, and an all-around amazing human being.
Megan and I (Nicole here!) became online friends fast — at first because we admire each others’ expertise. But when Megan came to the Design Lab for branding help, that’s when it really sealed the deal!
(Side note: Megan is also a part of our team at Rendezvous Creative!)
Megan had a new business venture in mind. Hello, CEO was created to offer neurodivergent folks additional support and mentorship with their businesses. She had already done some pretty solid branding herself, but needed more to play with.
She also needed someone to help out with design decision fatigue — something we can all relate to.
When it comes to design, you have SO MANY OPTIONS. If you have five brand colors, you have 20 possible color combinations to choose from. Faced with a blank screen, you also have to decide on which font to use where, at what size, and with which decorations? When do you use a template and when don’t you?
It can be exhausting creating graphics for your content when you don’t have a really defined brand and formatting styles. That’s why designing a brand isn’t just about providing colors and fonts.
It’s about providing business owners with existing styles and formatting that cut down on dozens of decisions and make it easy as copying and pasting (and then some tweaking for variety).
That’s what we helped Megan do — but let’s dig into how it all went down.
Leading with values
Like we said, Megan was tapped out with decision fatigue. She needed someone to create rules and guidance around how to use her brand and how to pass it to her team for help. Here’s what she drummed up on her own (we’re pretty damn proud of her, too).
To help elevate and expand on the work already created, we really leaned into her brand values. For Megan, her values were human first, biz second; you are seen and celebrated; you can do it differently. This guided everything we did for the moodboard, persona, and keywords.
Speaking of keywords, Hello, CEO’s final ones are:
- Feisty
- Accessible
- Intersectional
- Creative
- Compassionate
We also created a final moodboard, using a lot of Megan’s original inspiration!
We wanted to create a visual that embodied everything Hello, CEO stands for — inclusive, intersectional, and most importantly…Human First, Biz Second®.
Leveraging (and extending) existing assets
Megan had quite a few assets already — and it gave us a lot to work with.
With her logo, for example, all we had to do was clean it up a bit and make it pop a bit more.
One of the most essential elements of Hello, CEO is teaching their audience — so we also expanded on the existing brand to create “badges.”
They help users identify how the content is taught, which learning style it appeals to, and which tactics it uses to help them interact/learn. It was designed to help users not only navigate the content but to feel like their learning style is fun and community-based, rather than a challenge.
As part of these branding efforts, Megan also wanted to bring her community, The Connection Collective, under the Hello, CEO umbrella. In the future, she would also launch a Human First Biz Second shop.
Leveraging existing assets and extending the Hello, CEO brand, we created “sub-brands” for each, to make it easier for her to promote these offers and make them a pillar of the brand.
Want to see other brand designs from The Design Lab?
We had a blast helping Megan bring Hello, CEO to life, but we’ve also had a ton of other fun projects lately.
Want to see more of our work? Check out a few of our recent projects below:
