Things You Should Know About Branding Design

Nowadays, competition among companies is exhaustingly fierce. In order to stand out from the competitors, a business must be recognizable and unique. Individuals prefer to purchase products if they come from familiar brands. That is why a strong brand name is what each successful product has behind.

Many people think that only marketers perform all the job in branding. But if you say that to a designer, he or she will tell how wrong you are. Design is not only about mascots, logos, and images. Design is an ambassador of a corporate identity. In this article, we’ll tell you about the design process for branding, essence of branding, and the role that design plays in it.

What is Brand?

This word is often used to describe the logo design. It is not a mistake, but those are just a part of a corporate identity. A brand is a set of relationships, stories, memories, and expectations that, when brought together, account for a customer’s decision to prefer one product or service over another when quality is the same or comparable. From this perspective, brands are symbols representing a serious emotional tie. Brands are represented by corporate responsibility, product quality, price, and customer service along with personality, typography, color palette, packaging, and logos.

What is Branding?

Since brand is a philosophical and emotional concept, brand identity is a visual appearance that reflects it. At the same time, a perfect brand identity depends not only on aesthetic elements but on the details such as emotional appeal and message that stands behind it. Powerful branding is the one which clients associate with a quality and credibility. Thus, to build a proper corporate identity, a designer must first do some research on the market and get deep into the company goals and target auditory.

Branding Process Explained

We have divided the brand creation process into 6 stages which a designer needs to go through.

Determining brand positioning and purpose

To establish a corporate identity, one must determine its positioning and purpose. In other to do it, answer the following questions:

Why your brand is the best option for your clients?
Who it is for?
What is the reason for your brand’s existence? (How can it change the world?)

At this stage, you should make your purpose actionable.

Market research

Using online survey tools, phone interviews or simply talking to people, conduct customer and market research to gather the information on who your main client personas are, and what are their personal and professional traits. This will help you define what kind of identity your business should have to be appealing to clients. If you have a hard time getting started, we have a simple tip for you:

Is there a public personality, musician, actor/actress or any other celebrity that embodies the same traits as your business?
Which public persons will best represent your company?

Now that you answered these questions, start boiling down your corporate personality into a short clear statement.

Create a memorable logo

This is a key part of your brand design. What came first – a brand or a logo? It is hard to answer as brands and logos are constantly being adjusted and refined. But probably a brand must come first, followed by a logo, enhancing, complimenting, and matching it. Great logos encourage an emotional response. And don’t forget about simplicity! When creating a brand logo, think of the places it can be displayed. It should be flexible enough to look perfect as a tiny icon and on a huge poster/billboard.

Typography

This is the time when you should select a font that looks well in all sizes. Finding the right one is crucial. Think of the fonts that remain recognizable even when taken out of context (Coca-Cola).

Few advice to pick a font:

Avoid using all-caps
Don’t use hyphenation
Always align to the left
Avoid mixing contrasting fonts or more than two font families at a time
Don’t use default or fancy fonts

Color palette

Color psychology is intuitive. For example, red expresses energy and passion, while blue expresses calm. A dark shade of blue is conveying reliability, while a light tint is conveying the feeling of tranquility. Basically, you can convey any emotion by color palette. Colors are a powerful weapon, use them wisely! Based on our experience, we would recommend a simple logo with no more than one to three primary colors.

We hope that these recommendations will help you nail down all aspects of your brand design, and do it effectively. Definitely, if you know what you are doing, you can break any rules. But in case if you don’t, please take a minute to contact us to get a free consultation

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