Brand & Visual Identity for a Female Band

Ellas Cantan al Amor

Ellas Cantan al Amor is a Bogotá-based music project that reinterprets iconic Latin love and heartbreak songs as a collective emotional experience. The brand needed to feel nostalgic, feminine, powerful, and emotionally intelligent, while clearly separating itself from the more generic, sexualized, or chaotic visual language often associated with the genre.

The Challenge

Create a visual identity that could do more than look “retro.” It had to position the band as a distinctive cultural project: one rooted in female friendship, emotional release, and live connection, while still feeling commercially strong and scalable across decks, live-show materials, and social media.

My Approach

I did not begin this project with aesthetics. I built the brand strategy first through a multi-document research process that broke the identity into separate layers: context, archetypes, foundational visual codes, symbolic narrative, brand universe, characters and narrative engines, story plots, audience psychology, full brand story, and narrative/visual rules. Each document solved a different strategic problem, and together they created a system rather than a moodboard-led direction.

I started by defining what the band actually is, who it is for, and what it is not, mapping the audience, the emotional arc of the live show, the role of nostalgia, and the project’s anti-positioning so the brand would not feel vulgar, overly sexualized, generic, or bar-party driven. From there, I built the identity through Jungian archetypes, defining it as 60% Hero and 40% Caregiver based on the band’s origin story, stage dynamic, audience response, and emotional promise. I then deepened the strategy through audience psychology, looking beyond demographics to understand the real drivers of connection, identification, emotional aspiration, and emotional entertainment, and using a real fan profile, Carolina, as a strategic mirror to test whether the brand felt emotionally clear and aligned with those archetypes.

One of the key strategic decisions was defining the brand’s “villains” as systems rather than people: inherited patterns, emotional loneliness, and the idea that it is too late to begin: which gave the Hero archetype a real battle without making the brand feel aggressive. From there, I built a brand universe with both public and internal layers: outwardly, the band is a real group of women whose friendship and emotional connection are visible and believable; internally, I developed a hidden symbolic system around an analog radio, year dial, static, and frequency waves that acted as a creative operating system, giving later visual decisions more coherence and depth.

To keep the strategy usable, I translated it into practical decision tools, including an elevator pitch, character roles, content filters, universe rules, and clear “what this brand is / is not” guidelines, and even used a Save the Cat lens to test why the audience roots for the band and whether the project feels like a story worth following.

That research phase is where I turned a music project into a brand with clear emotional logic, narrative architecture, and visual intention, so by the time I entered development, I was not choosing colors or references based on taste alone, but designing from a fully articulated system.

Design Development

My process moved from research into visual synthesis: first identifying recurring cultural and aesthetic codes, then turning those findings into a clear system of typography, color, texture, symbolism, and composition. This helped the brand feel intentional from the inside out, instead of just moodboard-driven on the surface.

From Strategy to Final Identity

The final identity was the result of aligning two layers of work: strategic research and visual development. The research phase gave me the emotional and narrative foundation of the brand, which led to early decisions around tone, symbolism, color direction, and visual behavior. I then tested those instincts against a broader visual analysis of the category, studying competitors, recurring color palettes, typography, styling, and overall brand patterns, to see both what felt aligned and where the band could stand apart.

What was most interesting was that the elements that emerged most clearly from strategy were also the ones that created the strongest differentiation. In other words, the same choices that made the brand more true to itself also made it more distinct in a category where many projects were starting to look the same as we can see in the competition analysis where we gathered visuals from different competitors.

The final design came from combining the strategy documents that defined the brand’s personality and emotional feel with the findings from the competitor analysis, so the project could stand apart visually within its category. Because the band performs songs from earlier decades, we needed a visual bridge between past and present without making the project feel like a costume version of the 80s or 90s. That is why I brought in graphic references from the 90s digital era, using them as a language, not a gimmick, to connect nostalgia with a more current and intentional identity. The graphic and visual elements were drawn from the symbolic narrative, allowing the identity to do more than look distinctive: it became part of a deeper brand story that strengthens the messaging and gives the entire system more meaning and cohesion.

This is me. I play the bass ;)