The visual identity of a brand is its unique visual representation. A brand’s visual identity helps clients and customers recognize it, especially from its competitors. If you want to know how to create your company's visual identity, here are some tips to consider.
Consider Brand Goals
For the most part, a company's visual identity will involve its logo, its colors, its unique selling proposition, and perhaps one or two other elements. The first step in identifying your branding objectives is to determine the overall marketing strategy that your company will follow. If you are working with a limited budget, you may want to consider whether it makes sense or not to advertise on television, radio, and/or the internet. These marketing strategies tend to be more expensive, but they offer some unique advantages, such as being instantly accessible. Your company’s visual identity might change based on where you plan to put your content.
Make Intentional Design Choices
As a business owner, one of the most difficult things to consider when it comes to branding is making intentional design choices for your brand. While it is important to choose appropriate fonts and colors for your marketing materials, what many companies fail to take into account is how their chosen fonts and colors will impact their current branding and marketing materials, as well as how they will impact potential future client communications. Branding determines a lot about your company and your products, so it is important that you make intentional design choices for your brand to be consistent with everything your company stands for and represents.
There are some elements of your brand that are inherent and should be included no matter what type of marketing strategy you decide to pursue. For example, your company logo should represent your company, and it should be created in a way that immediately reminds potential customers of your brand. Your marketing collateral should represent your company as well and should be designed to be accessible and easy to understand. Your website, which is probably your most visible page on your company's website, should be professionally designed and include certain elements that would further increase your branding efforts.
Pick a Color Palette
Choosing the correct color palette can be confusing and overwhelming at first. There is no one-size-fits-all rule about color palettes. Generally, it is best to choose a color palette that is complementary to the look and feel of your business. Start with one color and choose a few more to compliment it. However, if you find it challenging to make a decision, you can ask a designer or a marketing pro to help you make the right color choices for your company.
Select Typography
The typography and fonts that you use are also an important part of your brand’s visual identity. You can choose a few fonts to consistently use in all marketing materials and your company’s website. You can choose all serif or sans serif fonts, or a combination of the two. You can opt to always use the same font in the same usage, such as headers are always in Arial 13 pt. font and Verdana 11 pt. font for the accompanying text. By consistently using fonts in the same manner, it can contribute to your brand’s look.
Create a Style Guide
A brand style guide is essentially a comprehensive rulebook containing specs on everything that plays a part in the look and feel of a brand, everything from color and typography to imagery and logo. Brand style guides can help you consistently choose the colors and other elements that make up your visual identity. Your brand style guide can provide a lot of guidance for all aspects of your brand’s marketing strategies, including photos, punctuation, and other rules. Brand style guides provide you with guidance as to which combinations are best, as well as helping you decide what colors and other specifics should be used for what so that all collateral works together.
Since colors are such an integral part of identifying your particular brand, it is important to pay attention to color matching. The colors on your business cards, brochures, website, and marketing collateral must perfectly match each other, or your branding will suffer. Sometimes it is a good idea to use different fonts for the same document or to use different colors, but too many changes can easily become unnoticeable over time.
Creating your brand’s visual identity requires careful consideration and intentional choices. These decisions will be the forefront in your company’s advertising campaigns, website, and mobile application. At KitelyTech, we can help to create the systems, software, and platforms your company needs. Call (800) 274 2908 to learn more about how we can help your company create and maintain sites that align with your brand’s visual identity.
