Creating Brand Systems: An Overview of Combining Logos and Type

What it actually covers

This class is a case study dressed as a class. Mike Ski and Jessie Jay of True Hand walk through their branding work for Kensington Quarters, a Philadelphia restaurant and butcher shop, and use that single project to illustrate a six-stage process: narrative, illustration assets, typography assets, combining assets, and final applications. There is no exercise file, no software demo, no dataset. What there is instead is a compressed, honest account of how two designers actually worked together on one job, which is worth more than it sounds like on paper.

The strongest idea in the course is introduced early and never fully abandoned: a logo should be designed as a system, not a single mark. True Hand's baseline is three variations, tuned to different physical constraints, a horizontal business card, a square sign or T-shirt, and a circular social icon small enough to stay legible at a tiny scale. For Kensington Quarters that system grew into business cards, signage, T-shirts, social icons, website graphics, hat patches, check presenters, butcher shop labels, and interior murals, all built off the same handshake illustration and custom type. Seeing the same visual DNA stretched across that many applications is the part of the class that will actually change how a viewer plans a project.

The narrative stage is the second genuinely useful section. Before any visual work starts, the two designers describe research that goes well beyond a client questionnaire, touring the empty restaurant space, talking to furniture makers, the butcher, the chef, the bartenders, and visiting the farm supplying the meat. The insight that becomes the entire creative concept, an unwritten handshake agreement between farm, butcher, and customer, comes out of an unplanned conversation, not a mood board. The class frames this as writing a short narrative document plus a reference grid and sending both to the client for comment before any logo work begins.

Where it thins out

Once the course reaches asset generation, the specificity drops. The illustration process is described only in broad strokes: sketch on layered paper, scan or photograph the drawing, bring it into Illustrator, and path-trace it into a clean vector. There is no on-screen demonstration of any of these steps, so a viewer with no illustration or vector-tracing background will come away knowing the sequence but not how to execute it. The typography section has the same shape, tracing and modifying an existing typeface by hand is a legitimate technique worth knowing exists, but the class does not show how it is done.

The combining-assets stage offers a genuinely practical tip, contouring type along the curve of an organic illustration like the handshake rather than forcing it into a rigid grid, but again describes rather than demonstrates. The closing section is mostly a highlight reel of the finished applications and a general encouragement not to get boxed into one way of designing.

As a mindset primer on branding systems and client process, this earns its short runtime. As a skills tutorial, it falls short of what the title promises.

What you will learn

• ·How to frame a logo project as a 'system' of three or more adaptable marks rather than one fixed logo
• ·A process for building a client narrative through research and conversation before any visuals are made
• ·A workflow for generating illustration assets from sketch to scan to Illustrator path-tracing
• ·An approach to custom typography, including tracing and modifying an existing typeface instead of using it as-is
• ·Practical tips for combining type and illustration, including contouring type to an organic shape
• ·Why version control and saving live type layers matters before outlining fonts for production