(Illustrated above) An architect enjoys the richly animated imagery that covers the log in screen of her building modeling application. Once she has logged into the tool, however, its interface becomes a quiet, cool, unobtrusive frame that does not distract from her focused attention on the building model that she is currently working on.

A scientist likes that some dialogs in her analysis application use complementary illustrations to explain certain ideas, instead of just presenting text. Even after she has learned the illustrated information, she still finds the colorful images to be appealing, and they sometimes act as landmarks that help her find her way.

A financial trader finds the branded color scheme of his current trading application more appealing than the black and green mainframe screens that he used to use. There’s something about the new tool’s animations and useful, attention grabbing cues that really set it apart from other trading products. It is all very simple, and it does not get in his way.

How could your team’s interpretation of branding expand to mean more than just a logo or swatch of color?

What types of emotional connections between user and brand are central to your design strategy and application concepts?

What larger design trends could influence your team’s approach to of branding and complementary graphic elements in your sketched product?

How might your computing tool have a unique and recognizable visual character, even if that character may emerge from the sum of relatively small design details?

How could selected brand characteristics of your firm, product family, and envisioned offering be usefully and valuably applied to your sketched application frameworks and functional areas?

How might targeted individuals identify with and respond to certain branding approaches, given that your team is striving to create a highly functional tool for thinking work?

What parts of your application’s scope have attentional and onscreen constraints that might not be conducive to incorporating any sort of “additional” visual content?

What key ideas, processes, and options within your functionality concepts might be clearly communicated to targeted workers through graphic imagery?

Where might instructive content in your sketched screens benefit from illustrations?

Could the user experiences of starting your product, waiting during specific processes, or exiting the computing tool present opportunities for engaging visual communication?

What styles of illustration could be domain and brand appropriate? How might these styles reference or play against the aesthetic conventions of contemporary computing?

Do you have enough information to usefully answer these and other envisioning questions? What additional research, problem space models, and design concepting could valuably inform your team’s application envisioning efforts?