BuildABrand.com is a new online service available shortly which will empower you to create and develop your brand, be it for yourself, your company, or whatever. The basic premise is, you give the app a bunch of details about the brand, such as the industries it relates, plus other related info, and the app will quickly generate some brand designs (ie a logo and font design) for use anywhere you want, as well as some pre canned options which we’ll discuss later.

BuildABrand say that the ease and speed of creating a new brand is as fast and simple as registering a domain name. I’m gonna test that, so here’s how it works:

Step 1 – Related Industries

The first thing you have to give BuildABrand is some idea of what industries your brand relates to (that is, after you’ve told the app the name of your brand). The app uses a simple horizontal scroll navigation for you to cycle through the industry sectors. When clicking on a specific sector you are given various options within it to select.

The navigation is smooth and sleek, the icons have been well chosen, giving clarity to what you’re looking at.

I think one area I’d love to see modified slightly would be to allow you to see all the sectors you can choose from, rather than blindly scrolling through them, not knowing what’s coming next, and if it’s relevant. A minor tweak though

Step 2 – Some more detail about your brand

So next up is giving the app some more pointers around your brand, such as Tone, Style, Outlook etc. You select an image from each category which most relates to your brand, with additional helpful keywords explaining your choice to make sure it’s relevant. Very easy, and very quick.

Again, I think one minor tweak that could be made would be to label the images up with their names from the start (perhaps underneath, or as part of the image), so you can instantly see which images are more relevant to you in the gallery. Otherwise though, this is a pretty intuitive way to make your selections, no horrible forms to fill in, no drop downs etc – all easy to press buttons.

Step 3 – Choose a symbol

Now I get to choose a symbol out of a vast gallery presented to me. These symbols are recommendations from BuildABrand based on the decisions I had made in steps 1 & 2. As you can see in the screenshot above, I have 21 pages of 15 symbols, so the choice is quite large. That said, the designs are really good, the team at BuildABrand have worked with some talented folk to get some really interesting designs.

The navigation here works seemlessly with some lovely ajax goodness. It uses a similar effect to that of Panic’s Coda website. Horizontal scrolling is all the rage right now, and BuildABrand have implemented it well.

I am told that the gallery of symbols above is not limited, meaning that designers will be adding to the pool of symbols over time, so it should grow with more and more relevant results. The key for the development team will be to try and give the users enough choice over symbols, but not kill them with too much choice.

So anyway, you select a symbol, and move on. At this point you should ignore the colour scheme presented to you, that is coming up next

Step 4 – Select Colour and Font

The final piece to the puzzle is the font and colour scheme selections. Again, the selections and options presented to you are recommendations from BuildABrand which are most relevant to your brand and symbol you have previously chosen. You can spend 30 seconds here, 30 minutes, or hours depending on how picky you are about it – either way, you’ll have a preview in the middle of what your brand could look like instantly.

That’s it. It’s that simple. As long as you are clear in your mind what you want out of your brand, and what it is, using these 4 steps should give you something very sweet in a really small amount of time.

Brand Created.

What happens next is excellent, you get to see your brand in situ in various ways around the site, inspiring you with different ways you can use it. Banner ads on the site use your new logo and font – for example – one for creating business cards which is 100% relevant to you.

In addition to this, BuildABrand will soon offer WordPress templates pre-built for you with your brand and colour scheme, or you can simply go ahead and download your logo and use it wherever you want. With each download you use up credits, which is the way BuildABrand are monetizing the website.

Business Card Creator

As I said above, the stand out feature for me (well at this stage of the first beta anyway! There is much more to come!!), is the business card creator. The live previews of your business cards are brilliant, as you swap out designs for front and back, as well as adding information such as telephone numbers etc to the card – it’s all there for you to preview instantly.

I don’t think I can say much more about how cool this actually is, other than I seriously considered getting personal business cards at one point – they had me!! I think the only way I could possibly foresee an improvement here is for the ability to edit the information on the card inline, rather than through a web form.

Conclusion

At the start of this article I said I would test BuildABrand’s theory that creating a brand should be as quick and easy as registering a domain. My verdict? Domain registration should be this fun! The app met all expectations in this area, the 4 simple steps really were simple.

What’s really exciting about BuildABrand is the simple fact that this is just the start. Having the ability to build a brand, design business cards, build a wordpress blog template, all from one place is instantly an exciting prospect – and you did it all yourself. I can’t wait to see what the guys come up with next for the app.

If you haven’t already, sign up to get on the beta if you can – otherwise the site will be launching soon.

Follow @buildabrand on Twitter for more or check them out at http://buildabrand.com.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009 and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.