Dear Young Designer: Case Study
The Dear Young Designer Podcast is a new platform that is seeking to provide guidance and support to young designers and freelancers as they navigate the competitive world of design. As the host of the podcast, Sarah wanted to create a strong foundation, a good brand, a solid style guide, a website, and a social media strategy to achieve her goals.
To achieve these goals, Sarah set out a series of milestones that helped would her establish a strong foundation for the platform and help me as I built the brand from the ground up. The milestones included conducting a competitor analysis, developing a brand mapping and strategy research, creating a strong visual identity for the platform, setting up the website for the podcast, and developing a strategy for social media.
My design process involved creating thumbnails, roughs, and finals to build a brand that resonated with her audience. I started by developing a brand and style guide that helped ensure consistency across all platforms. I then created a podcast “cover” and social media “covers” and icons that matched the brand’s visual identity.
I also conducted a website needs assessment, created a web map, and developed the layout of the website. She proofread the website and checked all links before getting it live. She set up the backend of the podcast and developed a list of topics for future episodes. (Website and podcast coming soon!)
I began this project by doing some initial visual research on different possible aesthetics, color schemes, and logo designs. I came up with three possible aesthetics or themes for the look of the podcast pieces and did research on each one individually to find out which one would be most appealing to the target audience. We decided that the neon aesthetic would be best for this podcast. I also did a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analysis of four other graphic design podcasts that could become competitors. This helped us understand areas where we could bring a new voice in both the visuals and marketing.
My next step in the initial research was to create a mood board to present so that we could really get a strong visual grasp of how we wanted to proceed.
The next step I took in the creative process was to (extremely) rough thumbnails to get all of my logo ideas onto paper. This a helpful step to take when designing just about anything as it helps me not to get stuck on one idea. It’s also a place to store ideas to look back on for future projects.
After I met with my internship supervisor, we decided on three thumbnail sketches to further explore and turn into roughs. This is also an important step of the process as it helps to further visualize the ideas you had. This is just adding more detail.
After the rough stage is the most exciting step — the final! Here is where all your visual research and preliminary work pays off. After another meeting with my internship supervisor, we decided to use two logos. One for vertical uses and one for horizontal uses. I fully refined the ideas using the changes requested in Adobe Illustrator.
I also produced a couple of different color variations so that they would have options.
Once we had the logo, the next step was to create the cover artwork for the podcast and the rest of the creative collateral. I started with the cover. I deviated from my usual creative process with this one, as I only did visual research and no thumbnails or roughs. I had a very clear idea of the direction I wanted to go with the cover.
I created the cover artwork for the podcast using Adobe Photoshop. I wanted to keep it simple and clean while leaning into the idea of graphic design. We had thought about making the desktop larger and putting it in the “design field” to almost make it look like it was created on the cover, but it didn’t look quite right, so we stuck with the original idea.
I also wanted to give a few different color options similar to how I did with the logo.
The next step was to do some visual research. This involved a font study, asset collecting, and website research.
For the font study, I gave them three different options to choose from.
We decided we liked the middle option. It felt clean and the fonts seemed to look the best together.
After the font study, I took the visual research I had conducted to start creating some of the additional collateral. The first thing I made was a surface pattern.
We wanted to keep the neon aesthetic and keep it simple so it would be versatile.
The next step was to do web research. This included choosing what type of site would suit the podcast best, creating a webmap so we know what pages we would need, and creating a final mockup in Adobe Xd after we settled on a single-page site.
Some aspects and details of the site mockup aren’t perfect, but it proved very useful for my internship supervisor in designing the actual site.
After the website work was complete, I took all of the assets and visual research I had gathered and created several social media templates for the podcast. My internship supervisor asked for an end card for TikTok, and three different Instagram post templates; one to introduce the podcast, one to announce new episodes, and one for pull quotes.
The final step was to create a brand style guide for the Dear Young Designer.
This final piece, although simple, encompassed all the research and work put into this project.
We wanted to keep the guide simple to make it easy to access all of the design elements when designing. The less they had to search to find what they needed the better.
Featured on the guide is a miniature version of the moodbpoard, the brand colors with easy access to their HEX Codes, the brand fonts, and both versions of the logos.
You can check out the work I did for the Dear Young Designer podcast in action at: (website coming soon!)