Brands Of: The way Latin American brands connect with the world.

Brands Of is an organization that provides strategic and logistics tools to empower entrepreneurs and brands from the Latin American community, so they can connect with consumers around the globe.

They are an online seller that provide services on brand identity, brand architecture, strategy for marketers, products and services on these communities.

But how does Brands Of work as a brand itself?

The Task at Hand

As design consultants, we headed to a challenging, yet very fulfilling task of bringing together all of these countries under one name and we want to share our experience with you.

We are presenting parts of the creative process made for Brands Of as a whole, Brands Of México, Brands Of Dominican Republic and Brands Of Puerto Rico. Here you’ll get to know about those challenges we faced, but also how we achieved to make a successful brand strategy.

The Original Design

“We needed to redesign the original logo, so we focused on the elements that can still provide recognition of the brand.”

Graphic values from the letter “B” and “R”, and the use of the letter “O” as a container were elements that we wanted to explore with the new version of Brands Of.

From creating a custom type to learning from different cultures to add identity values, Mampostea’o developed a brand strategy and research to come along with solutions aiming to build the best possible brand.

The Type Design

Developing a custom type design is always a goal to achieve at Mampostea’o. We embraced the strategy of providing a sense of culture and structure to strengthen the brand recognition by the association of these values present on the brand.

¨We designed a brand that can be extended to every country, maintaining a strong relationship between the container, the symbols, the typeface and color usage. ¨

For the brand architecture, we tried variations of writing everything sideways, separated, etc., but here’s what happened. The name México is short, but in the case of Dominican Republic it was way too long. We opted for maintaining Brands Of together and placing the country’s name underneath it maintaining the visual language.

The Container

¨Specifically designed to be removed from the logo and be used as a series of independent symbols that represent and differentiate countries culture itself.¨

The Symbols

¨The design of the symbols will provide emotion and identity elements so audiences can relate to them.¨

There will always be a debate in which people do not specifically identify with some symbols while others do. We went by the book and researched what are the most identifiable elements a country can have, and this is what we came up with as the symbols that are going to be used in the container:

• National Fauna
• National Flora
• Architectural Heritage
• Archaeological Heritage
• Prehispanic
• Popular culture

The Color Structure

One of the things that popped out immediately was the use of the flag as a main element that represent a country and its people. It is the one thing we can easily recognize and visually will bring structure to the color system application on every brand.

From the beginning, we knew we wanted to use the flag as a guide for color representation, but there were some challenges. The most evident problem was that some flags share the same color structure.

Brands Of México

Using the colors of the flag, we created this unique color scheme with the brand. The container will be red with a white icon or white with a transparent element so it can adapt to the background. The logo and background can interchange colors, but the brand will always

maintain the red, white and green.

Brands Of Dominican Republic

So here we have a red, white and blue case. The backgrounds can be gray (5%), red or navy blue. The container can be red with a white element, or white and a transparent element so it can be filled with a background photo or color. For DR we used “El tambor” of their popular “Merengue” music as an element.

Just like Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, share the same colors, or at least, the same palette. Check out Brands Of Puerto Rico next so you can see how we were able to apply a different color behavior.

Brands Of Puerto Rico

Not too many people know this, but PR’s blue is a Sky blue, not a navy blue as depicted in many pictures and illustrations. So here we have something different from DR’s color palette. This Sky blue will be the protagonist of Brands Of Puerto Rico. The container will have the same behavior as the others: Sky blue as the primary color with a white element, and white container with a transparent element. Here’s an example of how the element is used outside the container.

There’s a lot more to this process. We wanted to keep it simple and show the general idea of how it all came together. To know more about Brands Of, visit their website: https://brandsofamericas.com/. To know more about us here at Mampostea’o, visit: mamposteao.com and follow us on Facebook & Instagram.