PBJ Marketing - Brand Guidelines
Role: Brand Designer
Overview:
PBJ Marketing came to me with the start of a brand: a logo, their mascot Sammy (a PBJ sandwich character with real personality), and a working set of colors, but nothing documented past that. There was no system for typography, iconography, or how those existing pieces were supposed to work together, so their design team was making those calls project by project.
Challenges:
PBJ already had its literal food reference covered. Sammy, their sandwich mascot, was doing that work on his own, and doing it well. The real risk was letting that theme spread past Sammy into everything else. If the icons, backgrounds, and decorative elements all leaned into peanut butter and jelly too, the brand would tip from "marketing agency with a memorable mascot" into "novelty snack brand." Additionally, the client requested an extra color for the palette, a raspberry red, while retiring the tan tone that had been standing in for peanut butter, without it reading as a rebrand from scratch. I needed a system where everything around Sammy stayed playful without competing with him or repeating him.
My Approach:
I built a full guidelines deck that covers color, typography, iconography, illustration, and real-world applications, so anyone on their team could pick it up and know exactly how to represent the brand. Rather than duplicating Sammy's literal sandwich imagery elsewhere in the deck, I translated the "PBJ" idea into texture: a jam-drip and spread motif that operates purely as a decorative background element, distinct from Sammy and never competing with him for attention. That motif carries through the whole deck. It appears in the color story, gets formalized into an element catalog, and then gets demonstrated "in practice" across two dedicated spreads so the design team can see how much (and how little) is too much, and how it should sit alongside Sammy rather than duplicate him. The raspberry addition gave the palette a fourth core color alongside the existing brand colors, and I built out a full color scale and colorway system so it could scale across tints, dark mode, and multi-color applications without feeling arbitrary. For type, I paired a rounded, friendly primary face with a cleaner secondary face to balance the playfulness with legibility in dense applications like business cards and templates. I closed the deck with a full applications section, including business cards, social avatars and posts, swag, and co-branding, so the guidelines weren't just theory but proof the system works in the real world.
Conclusion:
This project gave PBJ Marketing a cohesive, documented system to build from, one that protects the personality Sammy already brought to the brand while giving the design team clear rules for everything around him. The raspberry addition rounded out the palette without disrupting existing brand equity, and the jam-spread motif gave them a signature visual detail that's theirs alone. This project demonstrated my ability to build a full identity system around an existing brand asset rather than overriding it, translating a client's personality into a set of rules their whole team can use.
