Premium Brand Identity & Brand Guidelines for a Children's Footwear Brand

//About the project We're building Marlo, a new premium barefoot footwear brand for children, based in Portugal and launching across Europe. We're looking for a senior brand designer to create our complete visual identity and brand guidelines (brandbook). We already have our brand strategy fully defined (positioning, personality, tone, name). What we need now is someone to give Marlo its visual world: logo, typography, colour, photography direction, key applications, and a proper brand guidelines document. The creative direction of the logo is open, we want you to propose the concept, but we'll give you a clear strategic foundation and a moodboard so your work is born inside the right world. //About the brand "Barefoot" footwear is designed to respect the natural development of a child's foot: wide toe box, thin flexible sole, zero heel drop, letting the foot grow the way nature intended. Marlo is not a cheap, mass-market children's shoe brand, and it's not a cute, babyish one either. We are the premium, design-led choice, think of the quiet, editorial confidence of Scandinavian and Mediterranean fashion brands, applied to footwear. Important: although we start with children, we intend to sell adult footwear too as the brand grows, so the identity (and especially the logo) must feel ageless and premium, never like a "children's brand". It should be a footwear brand that happens to start with children, one that could sit on an adult's shoebox tomorrow without changing a thing. //Positioning The only Portuguese barefoot footwear brand designed to respect every stage of a child's natural foot development, combining the science of how a foot grows healthy with premium, timeless design that grows with the child. //Personality Warm but never babyish. Trustworthy. Protective (we love the spirit of a pack that looks after its little ones). Ambitious and self-assured. Honest. The feeling the identity must convey is calm confidence, premium without coldness, natural, warm, human and grown-up. //Visual direction (open, but with a clear world) We're drawn to a minimal, editorial, timeless aesthetic. Strong typography with generous white space. A neutral, warm palette (greige, taupe, stone, cream, off-white) that reads unisex and premium and lets the product be the hero, with one quiet signature colour used sparingly (we lean toward a soft, dusty blue-grey, but it must never dominate or read as "boy", the brand is strictly unisex). We admire different things about two reference brands: from Muris (murisbrand.com) we admire almost everything, the logo, the website, the editorial style, the whole package; from Igor we admire the product itself, the shoe models they make, not their logo or branding. Outside footwear, we love the quiet premium of Scandinavian design and warm editorial fashion brands. We'll share a moodboard. Please read it as a collection of feelings and directions, not instructions. It contains many different logos, typefaces, colours and photography styles, we are not asking you to copy any single element from it. It exists to show you the mood we're drawn to, so you can capture the direction and propose your own solution. //What we do NOT want Nothing cute, babyish or "fofinho": no mascots, no cartoon animals, no baby-block lettering, no rainbows. No loud, saturated primary-colour children's branding. Nothing that reads as strictly boy or strictly girl. No generic or templated looks, no trendy effects that will date quickly. No literal wolf illustration. And no violet/purple (it belonged to a previous brand and is being retired). //Deliverables Full brand identity and brand guidelines: Logo system: primary logo (wordmark), stacked and horizontal versions, a symbol/monogram that works standalone (favicon, shoe sole, label), black/white/single-colour versions, clear space and minimum-size rules, all in vector (AI, EPS, SVG) plus PNG and PDF exports. Colour palette with HEX, RGB, CMYK and Pantone codes and usage proportions. Typography system: chosen typefaces (with licensing notes, open to Google Fonts for web), weights, scale and hierarchy. Photography art direction: two languages, product (clean neutral background) and lifestyle (natural light, real children, warm tones), with editing guidelines and reference/example images. Note: at this stage we need the photography direction (guidelines and reference images to show the intended style), not a real product photoshoot, that's a separate job done later once we have physical stock. The distinctive brand element(s) and rules for their use. Application mockups: packaging (a kraft shoe box direction), a label/tag, an Instagram grid, and a simple website header. A brand guidelines PDF (roughly 25 to 40 pages) covering brand foundations, logo usage (correct and incorrect), colour, typography, the distinctive element, photography direction, and application examples, plus organised master files in a structured folder. //Practical details Markets: Portugal first, then Europe. The identity must travel internationally (Portuguese, Spanish, English contexts). Full ownership and commercial rights transferred on final payment, all source files included. Please tell us your timeline, how many concept directions and revision rounds are included, and your price for the full scope described above. //To apply, please Share 3 to 4 complete brand identities you've created (full systems with typography, colour and applications, not just standalone logos). Tell us about any premium, fashion or lifestyle brands you've worked on. And after reading this brief, tell us how would you structure visually our brand. I've attached our moodboard. Please read it as a collection of feelings and directions, not as instructions, it contains many different logos, typefaces and colours. It's there to show you the world and mood we're drawn to, so you can capture the direction and propose your own solution.