Behind-the-scenes of the branding for Dive

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I had so much fun jamming with @FonsMans on the branding for Dive 🤿 We started from 0 and it was a heck of a journey... So I thought it might be fun to give a behind-the-scenes look at the entire branding process 👇

The first thing Fons had us do was start working on a Manifest. For a full week we wrote and then re-wrote... It forced us to clarify the vision for the brand and align on some key differentiating factors. Btw at this point notice how [Name] was still a placeholder? 👀

Speaking of names...as soon as he pitched me on "Dive" I knew it was perfect. We wanted to emphasize going deep on specific topics vs. staying surface level. And I literally ended every intro video for @figmaacademy by saying "Let's dive in" But it did present one challenge...

Being a common word, domains were TOUGH to come by. Eventually we landed on dive.club but that sparked an entire other debate 👇

Should the brand itself be "Dive"? Or should we lean in to "Dive Club"? I flip flopped back and forth on that decision hourly... Thankfully I had excellent sounding boards in @helenrice @mds @multiplay3r @theyuanstudio @richariddering @annariddering ❤️

Fons went HAM on logo iterations at this point.... I was seriously blown away by the amount of concepts he shared in the very first Figma file 🤯 Here's a little taste 👀

He pulled out 3 main concepts to paint the edges of where the brand might fall. I liked the first logo and knew it would work... But there was something about the 2nd concept that felt like it had a much higher ceiling of potential! The problem is it felt... masculine 🤔

So instead of having a capital "D" with a separate glyph... What if we went w/ a lowercase "d" that doubled as the glyph? This was the "hell yeah!" moment in the branding process where things started to really click. 💧🤿 From there we started looking at brand elements 👇

The fun thing about working with Fons is that he's 6 hours later than me. So waking up was like Christmas because I had little Figma file presents in Slack 🎁 This brand exploration was one of the most exciting gifts of all 👇

Btw... I just realized that you might have 0 clue what I'm talking about lol. My B. Check out the announcement tweet for @joindiveclub if you haven't already 👀 Otherwise, on we go... twitter.com/Ridderingand/status/1565353699773280258?s=20&t=eSQUeQO0cKRimaznKCBLog

Anyway... Once we nailed down the logo/type/colors/etc... The only thing left was to work with my animator friend to bring the Dive logo to life 🙌 Check out the animation on dive.club 👇

All said and done, I am SO happy that I decided to work with Fons on @joindiveclub His layer lists and what he's able to accomplish in Figma seriously blow my mind. It makes 0 sense how he does what he does 😆

I'm very excited for the @joindiveclub brand to evolve, especially as we start to reveal more instructors too 👀 First reveal happens next Friday! Any guesses who it is?