Raw Alignment is the personal lifestyle brand of Alyse Parker (formerly Alyse Brautigam), social media influencer and YouTube personality. In 2018 Alyse hired me to rebrand her company and the associated social media outlets.

Thanks to a lot of investment to content on Alyse’s part and a few viral videos, Raw Alignment had amassed quite a large following by the time we started the branding project. Alyse had been a one-woman workforce, doing most of the work on her own at that point including the establishment of the brand.

Alyse’s tiny and youthful presence established an audience for Raw Alignment that was majorly young girls, from teens up through 20s. She was promoting a very wholesome message, including a raw vegan lifestyle, how-to videos on natural beauty, and vlogging travel adventures, amongst other things.

She also developed a strong Facebook community where her audience could share their experience and ask Alyse and other members various lifestyle questions.

Strategy

As always, we wanted the look of the brand to match everything that was, and to feel as a culmination of what it had become. It was important that it felt youthful and vibrant like its figurehead and audience, as well as have a touch of magic or fantasy due to Alyse’s spiritual philosophy of the law of attraction.

As a symbol, we wanted it to match the mission and message of Raw Alignment, which was heart-based living, positive direction, and alignment with one’s highest purpose.

There were also distinct aspects that the brand had encountered or saw premonitions of that we wanted to dispel, or make clear. According to an interview that I had with Alyse and a questionnaire that she filled out upon starting, I determined a 14-point list that served as the game plan for the branding project. I called it ‘Raw Alignment – What it is. And isn’t.’ You can see it here:

Logo

Style

Although Raw Alignment had come to represent a community and we wanted to move away from it being simply a nickname of sorts for Alyse, the brand was yet at that stage especially very much centered around her as a personality, so much so that we could still consider this in many ways a personal brand. Being so, it was important to take Alyse’s personal style and preference into measure in order to determine the flair of the logo and brand items.

Form

The symbol would be extracted from the name of the channel and its deeper meaning. This was a more challenging aspect of the process…

Raw

The term raw was in direct reference to Alyse’s raw vegan diet that was a subject and basis of much of her content, however we both acknowledged that was all but guaranteed to continue, and besides it did not really provide of tooth of material to work from in comparison to more we could interpret from the word. We decided to focus more on the raw-ness of an individual, or should we say the concept of authenticity and leading from one’s center, the heart.

Alignment

Alignment was even a bit more complex to boil down, not necessarily because it is a difficult idea but because the word is a mouthful however it has a seemingly limited range of connotation. Thoughts often travel to the image of spinal alignment, or in spiritually towards alignment of the chakra system. You see it has this sort of vertical or stacked feeling – and I indeed played with that at some length in the brainstorming and sketching phases – however I intuitively knew that I wanted to move past it.

It occurred to me at some point rather than aligning a series of objects, the idea we were after was the sense of alignment as a singular state of being, or in a moment. It is clear to see how the visual depiction of these two definitions is different. Once this simple realization became clear, the symbol of a waypoint, or compass, was rather obvious.

Raw + Alignment

When the waypoint became obvious, the symbol clicked together just as fast. Cliche or not, raw was to be represented by a heart, and alignment was to be represented by a compass arrow, and they would be unified.

I need to backtrack to mention that – I also knew early on on an instinctual level – I wanted to create a symbol that was not proprietary to the distinct way that I form it as a logo.It seemed important that the symbol to be able to represent the community by being rudimentary enough to be utilized by anyone. It could be seen but once, identified with, and then fingered on a foggy window, or drawn in the sand with a stick. In this way, I wanted our icon to be iconic. And for this reason as well I wanted it to feel imperfect, hand-drawn, human.

Hence, now with the concepts of our brand name and the forms that would represent it, we created the visual symbol for Raw Alignment.

Lettering

We decided to make this symbol our emphasis, using it on its own to represent the brand at times, and otherwise to have it be the primary focus. The type would wrap around the image and become a seal or stamp.

After trying the type treatment in some typefaces that matched the handwritten feeling we began to convey, the plan to make it actually handwritten because clear. Our experiments with existing fonts also showed that we wanted to utilize script, like a signature.

A new challenge then arose to combine our desire to have both a curve-wrapped title and to make it appear in script. This is no easy task. Geometric fonts work well on curves, but organic lettering is markedly more of a challenge.

With lots of renditions, we of course made it work and came up with completely custom lettering that matched our symbol and embodied the whimsy of our brand.

26 Pieces of Flair

Often a logo stops at a symbol plus typography. For this logo, we wanted to tie it together, and make it feel like its own little world. Since we wanted to emphasize that Raw Alignment is about community, we wanted to represent an ecosystem.

To accomplish this, we added a sprites and stars that gave the logo boundaries, an aura, planetary bodies and an elemental quality that make it feel like an environment teaming with life.

Brand Style Guide

I created a 2-part brand style guide for Raw Alignment in order to communicate how to properly carry out and maintain the brand identity.

Logo Usage Guide

The first part is a multi-page PDF Logo Usage Guide:

Brand Style Infographic

The second part is a fullscreen PDF Brand Infographic outlining logo versions, color palette, and typography:

Social Media Branding

Raw Alignment’s social media was an important focus, as it was the primary landscape or medium from which this brand in particular operates. In other words, these social networks are where all of the Raw Alignment content is created and exchanged with.

It was also a significant strategy for us that, while each of the Raw Alignment social media images should suit the brand style, they should also fit well within the particular social network and the way people use each medium. In other words, rather than all use the same banners and such, we wanted each Raw Alignment social page to feel connected however distinct, whose look & feel matched the nature of how the platform was utilized.

Photoshoot

We wanted a powerful image of Alyse to introduce the new branding and to adorn her Facebook page and homepage, so we designed a photoshoot to create the tone – both in feeling as well as color palette – that the new brand look establishes.

We captured the following photo at the golden hour on Kua Bay beach in Kona, with the Hawaiian mountain Hualalai in the background:

Facebook Fan Page

Facebook Community Page

Youtube

Twitter

Website

Results

Raw Alignment online activity and acclaim rose sharply through the rebrand. In 2019 however, Alyse changed her legal name as well as the name of her channels to Alyse Parker.

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