Brand Design is one of the most important marketing practices for creating the name, logo, design, and other symbolic elements related to the brand. Hence, to create a differentiating identity in comparison to the other brands in the market and also provide an advantage for product differentiation.
Branding
Branding is the process of giving meaning to a specific organization, company, product, or service. Corporations do it by creating and shaping a brand in consumers’ minds.
It is a strategy designed by organizations to help people quickly identify and experience their brand. As a result, it gives them a reason to choose their products over the competition. In addition, branding is the process where a business makes itself known to the public and differentiates itself from competitors.
For more information, please refer to Branding-what is it?
Brand Identity
Brand identity is a set of visual components that represents a company’s ideas and allows customers to remember a brand and distinguish it from dozens of others. It helps shape consumers’ perceptions about a company, build loyalty and trust, and make a brand memorable.
Elements of brand design
- Clear Brand Purpose and Positioning – The first part of establishing a brand identity is determining what your purpose and positioning are. The brand purpose is the big reason for your existence.
On the other hand, brand positioning is the naming of who your product is for and why your product is a better option than the competitors. Defining these will inform your strategy as you create a logo, decide on a colour palette, etc. A process called Purpose, Position and Personality is useful for answering these questions.
Brand positioning is the process of making the purpose actionable. By naming your target customer and differentiating yourself from the competition, you lay the groundwork for your brand to accomplish your purpose.
- Market Research – One of the best ways to conduct market research is to simply talk to people. Phone interviews allow for detailed discussions and place a helpful emphasis on the human element of research—an element that’s essential if you want to make an emotional appeal to customers.
Beyond phone interviews, online survey tools are a fast way to gather a lot of information, and government resources can also be a powerful tool.
Good market research can also help you determine who your main customer personas are, a term which I’m using here to indicate a slightly different concept than “target customers.”
Your customer persona goes beyond just defining what problem a customer has and details some of the professional and personal traits of your focus customers. Defining these traits will help you know what kind of a personality your brand should have to be appealing to customers.
- Likable Brand Personality – A common question “If your brand were a person, what would they be like?” It might be a bit cliché at this point, but it’s a smart way to think about brand personality.
And brand personality is an important thing to consider. It will come through in every part of your brand identity if you get it right. Brand personality has a huge impact on the voice and tone used in your marketing materials and other communications.
If a personality isn’t established, customers will get mixed messages and have trouble connecting with your brand.
If you’re having a hard time getting started, here’s an exercise to try: Which celebrities best represent your brand? Is there an actor or actress, musician, or public personality that embodies the same traits as your brand? This could be a good starting point for nailing down different aspects of your brand’s personality.
- Memorable Logo – A Logo is often the first interaction you have with a brand. It is the brand’s character that combines into a visual and easily recognizable image.
Moreover, a brand logo goes on all the official documents, merchandise, online website, or while advertising. Hence, it is crucial to choose a logo for your business that represents your brand. - Attractive Colour Palette – Colour plays an important role in branding design. The reason being colour expresses key values and personality traits. Colours that are used in your brand colour palette have a lot of impact on the consumers strategically. Different colours represent different emotions.
For instance, the logo of the Whole foods market. The green colour in the logo describes the product’s direct link to nature.
- Shape – Shape is another key element of branding design. Just like logo colours, logo shapes have the meaning as well. Not just the logo shape, but the shapes in your web page backgrounds, layout design, packaging, and even your business cards and other stationery represent your brand as well.
For instance, the shape of Domino’s logo resembles the shape of a pizza.
- Tagline – Tagline is also called brand messaging which is basically how you communicate your brand’s unique offer. Here is an example of a tagline that is one of the most well-known,’’ Eat Fresh’’ used by Subway.
More specifically, Subway chose “Eat Fresh” as its slogan to differentiate itself from other fast-food brands by positioning itself as a healthy alternative.
- Professional Typography – The fonts a brand uses is another key element of branding design. Much like specific colours correlate to different emotions and traits, so do fonts’ components.
Wherever a brand uses text, like in their logo, on their website, and as part of an email template, the font used for that text isn’t random—it’s carefully selected to communicate the brand’s personality and values.
Some common digital typography rules are as follows:- Don’t use fancy fonts.
- Don’t mix more than two fonts.
- Choose the right line length.
- Don’t Overuse Word Space.
- Don’t Use all Caps, etc.
For instance: Uber is a well-known brand these days, the unique font used in the typography certainly helps a lot with the brand being instantly recognizable.
- Tone of Voice and Vocabulary – Your tone of voice is one of the most effective ways to shape and reshape, how the world perceives your brand. A brand’s tone of voice is the voice you read in all the copy produced by the brand, like the emails you receive from them, the content on their website and the language they use on social media.
For instance; Starbucks has developed their own vocabulary to differentiate between drink sizes.
- Imagery – Imagery includes the images used in branding, marketing, and advertising. Brand imagery works closely with other elements of branding, like colour and shape.
Brand Imagery is one tool within your Brand Identity kit that defines the aesthetic appearance of your brand’s core messaging. Basically, what it sounds like are pictures. Brand imagery is one visual story-telling component of your Brand Identity.
