Shuffle & Stack
Case Study | Branding
Shuffle & Stack is a conceptual tabletop game company, focused on small-run games meant to bring people together. Their games start as prototypes on their own kitchen table, with handwritten cards and mismatched game pieces.
The goal of this project was to create a coherent brand system that would help Shuffle & Stack appear consistently across marketing materials. They needed a brand based on those handmade, family game night roots, representing the fun and whimsy their products provide. With conceptual projects like this one, my personal goal is to push myself into a new style or learn a new technique I haven’t used before.
The Goal
Brand Systems & Personal Growth
The Process
Research, Draft, Revise
The Brief: Every branding project starts with the Creative Brief. This consists of both independent research and a meeting with the owners to learn more about what drives them, their values, and the story that brought them to where they are. This initial research and meeting are the most important steps of the process, as it guides the direction of the rest of the project.
Since this was a conceptual project, I had my lovely wife stand in as the “business owner” to help provide additional direction to the project. This also helped to challenge my initial ideas and push me out of my comfort zone.
The Drafts: After the Creative Brief is completed, it’s on to moodboarding and sketching initial concepts. Based on the brief, the moodboard needed to inspire feelings of nostalgia, playfulness, and connection. My sketching process is often a bit messy, but it allows me to quickly iterate on ideas, knocking out more obvious solutions to discover more interesting ideas.
From the sketches, I brought my favorite ideas into Illustrator to vectorize, add color, and further iterate on different elements of the logo mark. Ultimately, 3 designs are decided on and prepped to present to the client. The goal of the draft presentation is to gauge which of the directions they prefer and what changes they’d like to see.
The Brand: Concept 3 was decided on, but they wanted to see some more playful elements added to the full brand, as the logo alone was too geometric and made the brand feel too strict, being the only visual element. They really liked the playfulness the font brought to the design, so I decided to create some Illustrations in a rougher hand-drawn style to add more of that playful nature. These illustrations were then turned into a brand pattern, giving the brand a recognizable visual to use across its marketing.
While this brand was conceptual, it demonstrates how the story behind a business is important for creating effective branding. The end result was a playful brand guaranteed to bring people together.
This project pushed me to explore illustration in order to add more playfulness to my original design. This project also challenged my process for logo design and has led to improvements in the way I begin the discovery phase of my project.
The Result
Story Driven Branding