A behind-the-scenes of the branding process for Dive

I had so much fun jamming with Fons Mans 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 Academy 2.0 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 Dive if you haven't already 👀

Otherwise, on we go...

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 Dive.

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 :)