What exactly is brand design?
So what does it mean when we ask ourselves, “ what is Brand Design?”. Well it’s fairly simple really, it typically refers to the logo, color scheme, typography, and other design components that makes your brand stand out from your surrounding competitors. It visually represents your brand identity to your customers.
The term ‘Brand Design’ or similarly “Brand Image”, often refers to a broad view of how a brand is able to express itself, whether its a physical or digital form. It’s seen on social media, stores in the real world, or in cases seen internally within the company offices and premises. It’s not just eye candy, but intentionally meant to present a professional image.
The importance is increasing for companies to produce a consistent and high profile brand design across all platforms in order to give a long lasting strength to their brand image for their audience and customers. This is to intentionally keep an impression and perform the basis for possibly emotional connections, but also physiologically towards the brand.
One thing is for sure, if you want to become competitive against rivals and desire success, identifying your brand is mandatory. If you can produce a successful image on who you are and what you do, you improve your communication with customers and form long lasting success.
How to achieve success with strong brand design
Alright, so maybe you’ve already created a brand image yourself, but who is to say it’s effective? For the basis of a strong brand design, it needs to work for all, everyone. It needs to relate to the internal team of the company, but more importantly connect to those who will intentionally interact with it. To ensure this, make sure it incorporates:
- Bold and Distinctiveness – It’s a “no brainer” really, but it must stand out to competitors and visitors for it to be able to catch people’s attention. Without this, it’s likely to never succeed.
- Memorable – Making an impact visually on people is a good way to allow audiences to consistently recognize you as a brand. Succeeding here can be very rewarding and allow your brand to expand rapidly.
- Flexibility – Only with time can you tell if you have developed a flexible brand design, but keep in mind that the future will bring about change and being able to adapt to that change is crucial in the long-term.
- Ease of application – The question will be asked whether the design or logo for example can be applied anywhere in your business. It must be able to apply on anything comfortably from a website to vehicle just as an example.
- Relatable – If you can make your design relatable, that’s a fantastic way to open the doors. You want people to be able to look at your design and be able to see themselves in some way shape or form.
Ideally, your brand design should represent the general ‘Personality’ of the brand in general, its values, and it’s mainly a productive tool that is able to shape consumer opinions of the brand you are trying to present. It’s often for these reasons that it can be a more productive and long-term time consuming process than most high budget advertising campaigns you can get yourself involved in.
Brand design and psychology
There’s a lot more to it than just a catchy appearance and eye candy you know. A lot of thought goes into all aspects of brand design. You need to think about the use of colors as an example, where and why to use them. It’s all about the connotations and meaning behind it all. Take the color Red, it has meaning from love, passion, courage, rage, danger to determination, this list could go on quite honestly. You need to be able to select the meaning behind all aspects, to fit your goals and aims as a business, to then incorporate them into your design. Ask yourself, Why? Where? And When?
Some of the world’s most popular brands will tend to distinguish themselves in the forms of connotations, not just denoting the value of proposition. Builders for the biggest brands hunger to create just the right meaning in the mind of its target audience. Success in this area of expertise is often rare but precious.
The psychology with brands is all about the individuals and themselves in a group. Brands become aspiring to people. A customer will always ask themselves if they can relate or if they are the kind of person to connect to it. They need to be able to see themselves inside the brand itself, they are a way of expressing identity and intentions to others.
Linking diversity and brand initiatives across media for a cumulative psychological effect on targeted audiences is a very complicated task for building a brand in today’s world. It’s all about what people are thinking, more accurately so, what a brand inspires people to think.
Designing your brand identity
The Identity of your brand can be broken down into so many elements. When you figure out the fundamentals of your design, it’s time to bring your brand Identity to life and translate who exactly your brand is, and put them into tangible design assets you can use throughout your marketing.
You can allow your brand identity to be expressed in many different elements. It all depends on the nature of your business really, one asset or another can have a different level of importance. Common elements of brand identity include:
Logos
It all starts with a logo, you have to be able to be identified as a business or organisation, whatever it is you have set out to do, you need a mark to put on the front to say it’s your work. The logo is self explanatory, but it will need to incorporate those strengths like we spoke of earlier. Try to keep this simpler, or at least not go wacky with over the top designs and patterns, it’s too easy to lose attention that way.
Colour Palette
Once the logo is solid, you can start to experiment with your colour palette. Colour is a great tool to use if you want to differentiate your brand from competitors. Remember the lessons of psychology we spoke of earlier and learn to implement those rules and connotations throughout your designs and identity. This will help you really connect to those audiences you need to succeed. Remember to not go over the top however. It’s so easy to allow your imagination to go wild when it has the potential to put someone’s attention off, there is always a limit.
Typography
Typography refers to the font you choose when you initially design your brand. It’s important to choose logo fonts and all fonts in general very wisely, otherwise your work will look diverse and have no relation with one another. Try to keep it simple, limit what fonts you are using and the number of font families. This way you can branch off using similar fonts, but nothing that looks completely out of the ordinary compared to the rest of your designs.
Photography
Pictures and Images play a huge role in your brand Identity. Ensure they all fit the purpose and all are in context with what your brand is about. Try to find a theme, you don’t want to have different images in styles of context if it’s not even related to the rest of your design. Most importantly is the quality and resolutions, you need them clear and consistently sized throughout the brand.
Website
If you have digital products or an online business, then your website is one of the most representative elements to your brand design.This is where you want to apply all your designs as it’s what people will see the most, it’s where people first come to view your business. Your website is where your brand identity should really come through in full force and embrace all the designs you have to offer on there, it itself becomes an element of your identity.
Conclusion
Your brand design is what will set you aside from the never ending amount of competitors and presents to your customers who you really are and what they can expect from work. If you want your brand to be perceived positively, it’s highly important that you nail down your brand designs and create an identity that accurately portrays who you are to your audience and user base. And with what you know now, it’s time to start designing, good luck!