So now we've got our company's name, we've got our research, we've got our goals for the company. But so far we've worked mainly with texts and ideas. Now we're going to start looking at visual research. And what we're going to do is, we're going to look at things from the past and from the present that might visually relate to our company. We're going to put those images together into a collection of images. And they're going to try and sum up the mood or atmosphere of our company and what we think the mood and atmosphere of the identity should be. So when we're looking at the past, we're trying to get ideas to inspire us. But we're also trying make sure that we don't create an identity that already exists somewhere, that we weren't aware of before. An interesting way to also think about it, is that we are not really trying to copy anything from the past, what we are trying to use it as an influence. We are trying to develop our design from something that might already be part of visual culture. So if we look at our real world example of the Pasadena Conservatory of Music. Here's some visual research that was carried out when were working on that identity. So we were looking at visual identities from around the world for music conservatories and for orchestras. And we were really looking for marks and symbols and typography that had a flowing musical feeling to them. And so they were existing examples of what our goals were for the identity that we were going to redesign. So it's really useful to see a range of ideas and a range of competitors both typographically and in terms of how symbols and icons might work as well. So, as well as looking at existing identities, existing logotypes and existing marks, we also looked at the overall look and feel of some competitors. How they used imagery, how they used color. And then we also looked very specifically at typography. Trying to find some examples that were musical in their forms. And this is something that you can do online as well, where now it's very easy to find Websites where you can type in your name and look at it in a certain typeface to do initial research. So you can see the forms of that typeface without actually buying that typeface. So it's a great resource to try out typographic form for the name of your identity. We also looked a lot at the history of music, especially experimental music and scores. We were really interested in how music had been visualized in an unconventional way, and we thought a lot of these forms were very energetic and very exciting. In a lot of ways, they were visual representations of the music itself, and that was one of the goals for our identity. There was a lot of energy and a lot of movement in these scores, and we were very interested in taking some of that visual energy and having that be a key component in the mark that we were going to design for PCM. As well as looking at the more experimental scores, we also looked at traditional music markings and other language notations that are used for music. We also looked at the relationship between graphic design and music. And looked at how different kinds of visual forms have been used to visualize different kinds of music. Visual research is a lot easier these days, with the Internet. There was a time when you had to look through books and meticulously spend weeks trying to search for images so you could put, mood boards together. But nowadays, you can do that very, very quickly by searching online. Sometimes you even find that someone's already collected a group of images that are exactly what you're looking for. So now let's go back to our imaginary identity. Here's my food truck selling snails, the beginning of my brand identity manual. So here you can see some visual research for my imaginary start-up. So for the contemporary images, I mainly looked at the form of the snail and the form of the car and the van. And I looked at really how a snail could be represented in a wide range of ways, scientifically, in a cartoon, a photograph, graphically as an icon. For the more historical images, I looked at how the 1968 protests had been represented graphically at the time, but also I looked at documentary photography from the time. I looked at some old technical illustrations of snail shells. I also looked at how escargot had been packaged, and I looked at some art nouveau posters that felt very French. One of the things that's important to remember when you're doing this visual research is that you're not actually going to use any of these images and copy them. They're really there to inspire you when you're making your own graphic forms.
