Creating A Social Media Identity for Golden Artist Colors

Who

Golden Artist Colors is an art supply brand specializing in paint and painting mediums. Although they primarily make acrylic paint and mediums, they also have their own watercolor and oil brands. Their social media presence consists of tutorials and tips for using acrylic paint and their mediums in your work. 

I was tasked in my GIT 502 course to create a social media presence for a brand of my choice. I chose Golden because as an artist and designer, the brands I choose to do my fine art work matter and Golden is one of the best. I enjoy their high quality products as well as their packaging designs and assets for their online presence. I follow them on all platforms and was previously familiar with their online presence so I had a good idea of what they were already doing and what needed to be done.

The Conflict

With Golden being an art supply brand, there isn't much to work with when it comes to online content. The brand posts tutorials of their products to their website and make the occasional instagram reel. This is the reason I wanted to focus more on their visual brand assets for their social media rather than the content.

The beginning of the assignment was to create a social media posting plan for the brand. I chose to hone in on their Golden OPEN Acrylics line as the product to work on promoting. I started with looking at the different platforms the brand uses the most and which ones they don't use as much, which is TiikTok. I used Maslow's Hierarchy of needs to rationalize to the consumer how Golden's OPEN Acrylics will benefit them as artists.

Screenshot from Slidedeck created for assignment.

From there I created a simple content plan for repurposing content Golden already had to use on TikTok to help reach a larger and younger audience.

Conceptualization

The next part of this project was where I got to begin working on the social media presence for the brand. I was tasked with creating a Data Graphics Poster for Golden. I used this assignment to create my own visuals for the brand in the form of illustrations. Along with this I used those illustrative visuals to also create a visuals-heavy diagram of their paint making process.

I drew inspiration from the simple identifying features of Golden's packaging as well as utilized the black, white, and gray color scheme of the products. The logo placed inside of a black rectangle with a black line under is a common motif in their products. This was useful for creating illustrations because I could use little information from the packaging and still have an identifiable brand. This was continued in the poster illustrating how Golden makes their paints by using this same color scheme and utilizing thick black rectangles matched with thin black lines to keep the same aesthetic going.

From that project I began to create visual assets for Golden's social media platforms.

This is the brand's current social media logo and cover photo. The cover photo is fine but their logo is not a proper social media logo for a brand. This icon is not scalable, has too many small details, and doesn't fit well into social media's current circle icon format.

I started off by reimagining their social media icons using their black bars on a white background motif. I took their iconic G from their logo and created a high contract, easily scaleable social media icon.

I used the illustrations I created previously to make a design for the cover photos. With a combination of photos i've taken myself and photos from Golden, I made my own social media presence for the brand on a few different platforms.

Conclusion

The challenge I created for myself was to completely reimagine a brand's existing online identity while still making it feel like that brand. Though my use of their shapes and colors on the brands packaging I think that my attempt was successful at giving Golden a more modern online presence.