What is brand identity?
Brand identity is the look and feel of a brand combined with its voice and tone. Together, they communicate a brand’s values and mission and play an important role in connecting with customers. Brand identity embodies the visual and emotional representation of your brand.
How do you create a brand identity?
Creating a brand identity involves multiple steps and elements, making the branding process difficult to track. To create a strong brand identity, you must keep tabs on each brand element, such as visuals, text, and animation, and track the various tasks performed by different team members.
What is a strong brand identity?
A strong brand identity can be a game-changer for businesses, startups, and marketers looking to make their mark and grow their businesses quickly.
What is the difference between brand identity and brand image?
Brand identity is the visible elements of a brand, such as colors, designs, and logos, that identify and distinguish the brand in the minds of consumers. Brand identity is different from brand image. Brand image is created to form a certain perception in the minds of consumers.
How to design brand identity?
Designing your brand identity is a fun and creative process, but the pressure to create a design that reflects both your business values and commercial appeal can seem overwhelming. You have to be patient. A structured plan will help you move your ideas forward. Here, I am sharing an essential nine-step guide to brand design, which will help make your business identity unique, sophisticated, and professional.
When designing a brand, the number of tasks required (logo! website! stationery!) can seem overwhelming. By breaking down the process into manageable chunks, you can balance creative and administrative work, which will lead to real improvement.
Let’s take these nine steps to create a new brand identity design.
- Do your research yourself
No business exists in a vacuum, it is clear. But it’s surprising how many business owners completely forget this when they start a brand design project. Many will immediately dive into design concepts, ignoring the fact that their brand will inevitably exist in a competitive market.
To avoid looking like your brand was designed by an alien, or worse, incorrectly imitating an existing design, you need to do some research on your competitors’ brands.
If you’re a freelance creative, take a look at how local design firms and advertising agencies present themselves online and in their offices. Designing a brand for a product? Google and research images in the sector to understand what is considered appropriate for brands in the industry. Pinterest is a niche website where you can research which brands in different sectors have expressed their brand through their designs.
Grab a notepad and write down some of the most common characteristics of the brands you are researching.
Cosmetic research?
Look for common colors or font styles used by several skincare and makeup brands.
This rough list will be your anchor in the larger commercial market as you look to design your brand. When you have completed the design process, refer back to this list. Are there any features listed in your design? If not, it could be a sign that your brand will be too outdated to do well in a competitive market.
- Know your Niche
You looked at the competition and broke down how they approached their brand design. Now you need to file this knowledge away in your brain and focus on your brand goals.
How can you ensure that your brand fits into the right market sector and looks relevant to competing brands in some way, but also ensure that your brand is not unique but superior to these competitors?
Now that you’ve put together your competitive brand research list, you can put it to one side for now. Don’t worry—you won’t forget what competing brands look like now that you’ve spent time researching them. What matters is that you are in a position to create a brand design that feels fresh and unique. A design that defines your position against these competing brands.
You now need to focus on your USP (Unique Selling Point). What makes your business offering completely different from your competitors? Suppose you are designing a brand for a graphics agency. You’ve looked up local graphic designers and seen what they have to offer. Don’t start a business without knowing that you can exploit the market in a different way than others. Perhaps you offer superior post-editing services. This is your USP, and it needs to be mentioned in your brand design.
Knowing your brand values can help you feel more confident about what your business is offering customers.
- Put Pencil to Paper
When a consumer comes in contact with a brand for the first time, the first thing they may encounter is the brand logo. What’s the first thing you see in a store sign? Yes, the logo. Unless you encounter a product blindly—for example, you try on a product that a friend already bought without knowing its brand—it’s almost impossible to interact with a product without seeing the logo of the company that makes it.
For most brands, their logo is a brief explanation. You can interpret a lot of information about a business just from its logo. They might have chosen a serif font to look more formal, whereas a script font might make a brand feel more craft-oriented. Color psychology can also come into play—orange feels optimistic and good-natured, blue cool and technical. Bringing in metallic tones like gold or copper can up the luxury factor and make a brand feel more aspirational. Because a logo is not only a means of identifying your brand for customers but also a visual summary of everything your brand is, a logo is a common starting point for creating your brand identity design.
To start creating a logo, you need to grab a pen or pencil and a large sketchpad. Start creating quick doodles that represent basic ideas.
Look for ideas that have a symbolic emphasis (more image-based) and others that play with the style of the business name. Don’t dwell on any single idea; a few minutes will suffice for each. Jot down each idea with notes to remind yourself later of any ideas you have about color, style, or possible ways to improve the idea.
After you fill out the page, put it aside and move on to the next page. Aim to fill it with interesting ideas. Don’t worry if you think some ideas are weaker than others; you never know which sketch will be a springboard for an amazing idea.
When you’re done, step away from your sketchpad and take a coffee or tea break. When you return to your work, you will be able to see your ideas in a new light with a fresh mind.
- Finalize three logo concepts
Refine, then seek outside feedback. Value the brainstorming process and avoid committing to an idea too early.
When you return to your logo sketches feeling refreshed, take a critical look at your designs. Which sketches immediately appear stronger than others? Are some of your symbolic concepts too complex for an outsider to understand immediately? Identify the three designs that have the most potential—perhaps they have a strong thematic idea or simply a strong visual style—and refine them further in several sketches, giving each idea its page.
At this stage, it is better to keep your options open. Even if you think one of the three ideas is the strongest, you need to avoid committing to it too early. Once you have a refined sketch, seek outside feedback. Grab a few friends, family members, or colleagues and ask them to look at the three designs. You may find that they like a design that is not to your liking, but don’t despair. This will ensure that your brand has commercial appeal.
Narrow the sketches down to your strongest design based on your own opinions as well as those of others. Make a copy of the sketch in black ink, using the opportunity to further refine the design. This is a great exercise to judge if you’ve made the design more minimal and silhouetted.
All logos must work equally well in plain black and white as they do in full color. Then you’re ready to transfer your logo design to the computer for vectorization. Scan the black ink sketch using a scanner if you have one, or use a camera or phone to take a high-resolution photo.
- Think about color
Now that you’ve uploaded your black-and-white sketch to your computer, it’s time to vectorize it! You can use your scanned design as a template to create the final vector logo.
Place the original design on a locked layer in your program of choice (such as Adobe Illustrator or CorelDRAW) and create your vector on top of it, using the image as a tracing aid. While it’s not ideal if you lack confidence with vector software, there is another way—try the Image Trace function (Window > Image Trace) in Adobe Illustrator.
Now it’s time to start experimenting with color as well. What were the colors that cropped up frequently in your brand sector? You can also tap into the principles of color psychology. Try changing the color of your logo and judge how it changes the overall effect. How does a particular color make you feel? Does this emotional pull align with what you are trying to achieve with your brand?
For example, if a gold color makes a gym logo feel luxurious, it may send the wrong message if your gym’s USP is cheap membership fees for customers. In that case, a more subdued, efficient-looking blue would be a better choice. You should also consider the effects of long-term color associations with certain brands and products.
- Expand your brand
Once you’ve vectorized your logo and decided on an appropriate color, you’re ready to expand your brand. One of the key ways to define your brand personality is by choosing the typefaces you want to convey your brand identity. Most brands adopt two ‘brand typefaces,’ one for headers and slogans and another for body text. Some big brands may commission a custom font that is unique to them, but most businesses will only accept fonts that fit their brand. Adobe uses clean and Minimal fonts for its brand identity.
Browse through a wide range of fonts to get an idea of what might suit your brand identity design
Uppercase sans serifs feel confident and modern. Substituting a rounded style for a more edgy, graphic look can make a brand feel more assertive and masculine.
Make print-outs of several options and compare them.
- Extend your brand: Photography and graphics
A brand identity is not just made up of a logo and type. Other visual elements such as photography and graphics continue to expand your brand by thinking about how brand identity is built. While your logo, colors, and typefaces may remain constant across your stationery, marketing, and website, the images you use to communicate specific messages, such as special deals, advertising, or product-specific packaging, will inevitably change.
When you are using different images, you need to make sure that there is an element of consistency between them. It can be as simple as deciding to use only one style of photo to advertise your brand. Let’s say you’re designing a brand for a lifestyle company with multiple offices. You may want to create a few more image rules so that all marketing output looks consistent and aligns with your overall vision for the brand. You can decide that all images must be photos of people, but not only that, they must be black-and-white portraits, and the person must be facing the camera.
- Implement your brand
You’ve chosen a logo and font, and set your rules for using images. Now is the time to start implementing your brand in print and digital media. Prioritize the media your business uses on a daily basis to communicate with customers—if you work remotely, this might mean prioritizing your website, and don’t forget to add your logo to your email signature, too. If you attend a lot of networking events or conferences, a branded business card will serve you well.
It is really important to extend your brand to print stationery too. You can use a branded letterhead when you want to introduce yourself to potential new clients.
If your business has many employees or offices, you should also look into creating a brand instruction manual. It will be a document to show staff and contractors the correct way to apply your branding to anything—from small-scale items like stationery, flyers, and marketing materials to large-scale interpretations of how the company is publicly represented, such as office design, advertising, and websites.
- Review your brand
You’ve finished designing your brand identity, congratulations! What now?
Well, it might seem like the last thing you want to do, but you need to keep your mind open to review how your brand is currently being used.
The first part is research-based. Observe how customers respond to your brand. If you have a physical store, this can be easier to do, and you have a great opportunity to conduct surveys about your brand in person.
If your business is based online, you can use email lists to run surveys (use discounts and offers to drive feedback) or analyze sales performance in the weeks and months after you launch your new brand look. If your sales are improving, this is a strong sign that your brand is performing well. If your sales are staying the same or worse, it could be a sign that your brand is not being well received. If your brand isn’t working perfectly, you shouldn’t be disappointed. This is really common as businesses try to find their visual identity and unique niche in the market. How you react is more important.
Now is the time to review your brand and either tweak elements of the existing identity (changing simple elements like color can have a huge impact on how a brand performs) or create a new identity from scratch. Go back to the market research stage and see if you might have missed anything. Could you be more thorough with your industry research? Would you like more outside advice on your logo design?
Designing a brand identity isn’t an exact science, but with a systematic, measured approach, you can create something that connects with people on a commercial level.
