Strategy-Based Brand Identity Design vs Logo Design with Draplin: Secrets of Shape, Type and Colour

Fifteen lessons and 1h 59m cover brand strategy, discovery workshops, competitive research, positioning, and a full visual identity system — logo, colour, typography, and pattern. The strategic framework is clear and genuinely useful. The trade-off: at under two hours the execution depth per topic is limited; reviewers consistently describe it as a conceptual map rather than a deep technical masterclass.

Kevin Craft brings genuine industry authority — clients include The North Face, Cisco, and PepsiCo. Reviewers praise his professional clarity, calm pacing, and the willingness to teach the client-facing and pitch dimensions of brand work. The professional credibility translates into lesson content that feels like real studio practice rather than classroom theory.

One-time purchase of roughly $19.99 (frequently discounted) with lifetime access and 15 additional resources. Good value for the strategic framework; less so if you expect technical depth on any single skill. The brevity means the knowledge-per-minute ratio is high but the breadth of coverage is narrow.

Students build a single complete brand identity system — logo, colour palette, typography, and pattern — from discovery through pitch. One polished deliverable is useful for a portfolio but limits the breadth of practice that a multi-project course would offer. No software instruction is included.

The strategic framework — discovery, competitive research, positioning, and pitch — is directly what studios and freelancers use in client engagements. Reviewers who already have design tool skills consistently describe the course as filling the business-side gap their visual education left open.

Tight 70-minute walk-through of one logo (a family crest) from research to vector polish. Praised across the corpus for clarity and density of Illustrator tips. Capped because the syllabus is narrow — no full brand-system work, no presentation deck, no client process.

Draplin is the single most-cited reason to take the class. Reviewers converge on the same descriptors — funny, no-nonsense, generous, "honest and electrifying" in Skillshare's own framing. Nine years of consistently positive coverage from HN to Logo Design Love.

Included in the Skillshare subscription (~$14/month after trial). A single 70-minute class is hard to compare to multi-month bootcamps, but for the price the catalogue access alone — five Draplin classes plus thousands of others — makes the value case clear.

One end-to-end project — a family crest — produces a shareable portfolio artefact, and the Skillshare projects tab has hundreds of completed submissions to learn from. Capped because peer feedback is minimal and there is only one brief, not a series.

Illustrator shortcuts (Envelope Distort, Offset Path, "keep it live") and the simplification mindset transfer directly to client work. Limit is scope — the class does not cover briefs, presentations, revisions or brand systems, which a real logo job demands.