Companies with a powerful visual brand identity always have a leg up on their competition because of their strong and memorable visuals. When customers can recognize your brand through a unique logo, custom font, or aesthetic images, they tend to remember you when making a purchase decision.
For instance, since the launch of the iPhone, Apple’s visual brand identity has included clean text and a lot of white space -- which resonates with their product design as well.
But you don’t have to be a big brand with a huge budget to create a successful visual brand identity. In fact for small businesses and startups, a unique and strong brand identity can be just the right push you need to take your company to new heights.
What is a visual brand identity?
A visual brand identity showcases the personality of your brand and its values. It defines how you want your customers to perceive your brand. A strong brand identity has the ability to stand out against competitors and create a reputation of trust and credibility that extends beyond the services and products you offer.
Your brand identity includes all the visual elements of your brand -- color, logo, font, social media posts, packaging, and messaging. It's important that you keep your brand identity consistent in order to reinforce and represent the emotions of your brand. It also helps make your brand more identifiable by customers.
Factors to consider when creating a visual brand identity
1- Decide your brand’s purpose
The first thing you need to do in order to establish a visual brand identity is to determine the main purpose of your brand and its positioning in the market. By the end of this stage, you should have the answers to all the questions below:
How is your brand better than your competitors in terms of pricing and quality?
What is the main USP of your brand?
What is your main brand messaging?
What is the problem that you are trying to solve?
2- Define a target audience
You should have a clear idea about the age, gender, income scale, behavior, and interests of your target audience before you start designing. The visual brand identity you create should resonate and connect with your audience, otherwise, no matter how great your brand identity looks, it might not be able to help you improve sales or conversions.
For instance, 72 percent of users on Spotify are millennials. The company knew they wanted to target this age group and the current Spotify logo was created with that in mind.
3- Select a colour palette
Color can give your brand the ability to fit different varieties of moods. It can also express your brand’s main values and attributes more clearly. According to a report, choosing the right color palette can increase brand recognition by over 80 percent.
In fact, over 60-92 percent of consumer buying decisions are based on the type of color they see. That means when used effectively your brand’s color palette can evoke the right emotions and help increase sales.
The idea is to use colors that fit what you want to convey. Start by understanding the meaning behind each color and then pick the ones that align with your brand strategy to create a whole color palette around it.
4- Design a memorable logo
Your brand’s logo is the face of your brand. Your logo needs to clearly convey what your brand really is and it should be memorable enough to stick with people. The logo can be a combination of your color palette, fonts, and branding guidelines. It can also just be a graphic design inspired by the kind of products or services you offer. More importantly, your logo can evolve as your identity evolves.
For instance, here’s how Pepsi’s logo has evolved since the brand was first launched in 1898.
As the main elements of your brand’s visual identity, your logo will always be exposed to people, which is why it's crucial to perfect it before you launch your brand.
5. Choose a font
Fonts are a great way of putting context to your message. Some brands skip the usual graphic logos and go with font-based logos because that’s how powerful fonts can be.
Uber, Vogue, and Times are just some of the many examples of successful brands that decided to go with a font based logo.
But a logo isn’t the only place where you will need a font. You’ll need primary and secondary typefaces to lead your brand design. You also need to make sure that the font you pick aligns with your brand’s colour palette. Beyond that, the arrangement, scale, line spacing, and height of the font also impacts the visual identity.
For instance, numerous luxury fashion brands that have been around for decades updated their logo, all in similar looking fonts. Why? Because they wanted to look timeless, yet current. They needed to appeal to the new generation which they couldn’t have done with their old logos.
Too overwhelmed to create a visual brand identity?
Prrowess can help.
There are a lot of elements that go into perfecting a brand’s visual identity and it's easy to make a mistake, especially when you are new to designing.
Prrowess is a design agency with a team of talented designers and marketers who can help you create the most fitting visual identity for your product. Moreover, it offers unlimited graphic design services, which means you can get all of your branding work done and more at a flat price.
Sign up for a free 7-day trial to understand how Prrowess can help take your brand to new heights.
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