If you’ve ever thought about starting your own company, you most probably would have come across the term branding. In layman terms it’s creating a distinctive identity for your brand so that it is recognisable for your customers.
A strong brand is more than what you show, obviously. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a beautiful brand identity as well. And that’s where brand design comes in.
What is Brand Design?
Brand Design is the process of crafting a unified system of design elements like logos, colours, typography and illustrations. It is the aesthetic embodiment of your brand’s personality. Designed to invoke emotions in your customers and make it memorable.
In order to have a successful brand image, it needs to be backed by proper research and strategy. When executed perfectly, it can come to life through websites, packaging, presentations, marketing materials, etc.
But before any of this comes to life, you need to decide what goes into your brand identity.
What Makes A Good Brand Identity?
An integral part of making a successful brand image is to decide what goes into making up the brand’s visual identity. .
Since these elements are important to making up the brand image, it is crucial that they work together in a system. It is important to keep in mind this system as a whole when designing your brand identity.
With the marketing space being more crowded than ever, and having similar products in the market from one competitor to the next, brand design has become more important than ever to standout and resonate with your target audience.
- Logo
Logo is an acronym for logotype, derived from Ancient Greek λόγος (lógos) ‘word, speech’, and τύπος (túpos) ‘mark, imprint’. It is a symbol used to aid in identification and recognition of a brand.
Whether its a wordmark, conceptual mark or combination mark, a logo is the brand’s signature on the world. A logo should be a symbol that is powerful enough to communicate your brand’s essence to everyone who experiences it visually.
- Colours
Colours are essential to a brand’s design. Colours have the power to invoke a strong emotion in the viewer’s mind.
Emotions are powerful and drive us into making decisions. And as a brand you should try to cultivate that emotion with your target audience, and using colours provide a shortcut directly to their heart.
- Typography
Typography refers to the art of arranging letters in a way that makes the copy legible, clear and visually appealing. It involves font style, appearance and structure. This can invoke certain emotions in your target audience.
Brand typography is a visual element in a business’s style guide or book, which helps to coordinate the tone and voice of your brand’s written materials with the overall brand identity. Although there may be some visual similarities between a typeface and a font, there are significant differences to typography.
- Shapes
According to the Sequence of Cognition, shapes are the first thing that a person identifies. Even though we see them as basic, that does not mean they do not have meaning to them.
Be it directly or indirectly suggestive, shapes are a powerful component of brand design.
Although there are other elements that come together to form a brand image, these are some of the fundamental parts of brand design.
We’ve seen what brand design is, but why do we need it for our brand?
Why We Need Brand Design
Branding for businesses is becoming more and more important in today’s competitive market. Branding is not just about creating a logo or choosing unique colours, it doesn’t stop at that, branding is a long-term investment.
A strong brand image can increase brand recognition, attract new customers, retain loyal customers, build trust and increase business value.
A well designed and professional looking brand is more likely to attract customers and be recognisable, and helps establish its mark in the market. By creating a positive image, customers are more likely to remain loyal to your brand.
Branding also helps create a sense of trust among customers through a consistent brand image. Making the brand more reliable and professional increases customer confidence and loyalty.
A strong brand can also help motivate your employees and make them more likely to be involved with the company.
The Takeaway
Your brand’s visual identity plays a critical role in making your brand stand out. In order to create a strong brand identity, you need expert brand design.
From the logo and colours to iconography, the elements that make up your brand identity all play an important role in creating a close-knit aesthetic system.
Remember that although you cannot see the results of branding immediately, branding and brand design will contribute to the long term success of your business.
