Brand identity is the collection of all elements that a company creates to portray the right image to its consumers.
Brand identity includes the visible elements of a brand, such as colour, design, and logo, etc.
Complete Your Brand Strategy
Your brand identity will help you in executing your brand strategy. Your strategy is a detailed plan that outlines exactly what you are trying to achieve and how you are going to achieve it. Your brand identity, along with your content strategy, helps you communicate in ways that will let you achieve those goals.
As such, before you dive into your brand identity, it’s important to have a fully fleshed-out strategy.
Understand What A Brand Identity And Its Importance
Brand identity is more than a logo and colour palette. When designing your identity, you need to create a comprehensive visual language that is versatile enough to be applied over packages and used in websites. Depending on your brand, your needs may be more expansive, but a basic brand identity includes:
- Logo
- Colours
- Typography
- Iconography
- Interactive elements
- Video and motion
- Web design
Build Your Identity
Get information from competitive analysis, customer feedback, brand audit survey, and brief to help form ideas. You need to take the text-based information and translate it into visual concepts. Luckily, the information you have is often steeped in emotional language about your brand’s personality, goals, and values. Now the challenge is to figure out how to communicate and enhance those sentiments through visuals.
The goal is to bring those words to life. The associations may be abstract, but it is important to get everything out.
Logo
A brand identity is an intricate design system. Each element influences the other, but it starts with your logo. As you go through iterations, flesh out logo mark, core shapes, and complementary imagery—all in black and white. As you receive feedback and iterate, you want to make sure that the core imagery is powerful enough to deliver the message on its own, without the enhancement of colour.
Colours
Certainly, emotion plays a huge role in colour choice. This is also, as previously mentioned, a good chance to differentiate.
A good colour palette is clean and flexible.
Typography
Your brand identity is a cohesive language. Typography should be informed by the shapes of your logo. You will think it is a simple choice, but typography is just as emotional as anything else. It needs to communicate the brand persona effectively.
Photography
Consider the type of imagery you will use, as well as the visual treatments. Include guidance on filters, treatments, sizing, etc.
Illustration
When it comes to illustration, you need a cohesive and uniform language. Do not over-illustrate or use clashing styles. Instead, think of how your illustration will be used in conjunction with other visual elements.
Additional Elements
Again, your brand may have unique communication needs, depending on your industry, content, etc. Make sure that your design:
- Interactive elements
- Motion graphics
- Video
- Web design
Build Your Brand Style Guide
Ensure that your designed brand identity is used correctly. A brand style guide should be created promptly.
Include clear, easy-to-follow guidelines for every part of the brand identity, including examples.