What is the brand identity?
Corporate brand identity design such as color, design, and logo are all visual elements of a brand that stand out and distinguish the brand in the minds of customers. Brand identity is not the same as brand image. The first relates to the company’s efforts to create a certain impression in the minds of consumers with the brand and other behaviors.
The actual result of these efforts, is the brand image.
It is determined in a few steps:
Brand building
Research, vision and planning
Logo and identity
Monitoring and redefinition
Corporate visual identity design
Crafting an Identity:
Designing a brand’s visual identity is divided into 3 phases:
RESEARCH, VISION & DESIGN
How is the brand perceived & positioned? What’s your heritage? Who is your audience and with which values & beliefs do you enter the market?
LOGO & IDENTITY
How will you represent this brand visually? Once you have a logo, how will you translate it into various design pieces? What should your overall identity look like?
MONITORING & REBRANDING
Has the audience, market, or your brand shifted? Is it time for a change?
VISION & DESIGN
This phase should be as thorough as needed, depending on the deep research and size of the company.
It’s the most crucial part of the overall process and should result in a design brief that guides the rest of the project. Below is a list of foundational questions to explore and document through qualitative.
- How is the brand perceived against competitors in the market for products and services you’re looking to provide?
- Who is your audience? Where will your products/services have contact with them? How do you want that contact experience to make them feel, take action, and think about your brand?
- What benefits do you want customers to associate with your brand? What is the vision of the brand that you want to create?
As you can tell, it’s complicated. But It shows in the way that you describe your completed work as challenge and solution projects.
LOGO & IDENTITY
After the research phase is complete and a design brief has been created, it’s time to start designing the logo and identity system.
- The logo:
- There are many ways to start designing a logo, but most often you’ll see designers begin by sketching out dozens if not hundreds of iterations on paper. The process of getting concepts down on paper and creating variations of those ideas can unlock new directions to explore and the final solutions that you wouldn’t have normally arrived at when starting on the computer. After selecting your best-sketched concepts, you should start iterating on them digitally.
- The identity:
- The identity system usually starts after the logo is complete. The purpose of the identity system is to form a systematic visual language around the logo. One that complements the design thinking of the logo and offers a family of useful, flexible elements that will help to design marketing and business collateral.
- Brand identity consists of: logo, key colors (color palette), Brochure, Business Card and ——- ETC
MONITORING & REBRANDING:
Lastly, after a new brand identity has launched, it is important to monitor and care for it, as it’s a living and breathing thing that interacts with your customers. Honestly, that’s a loaded statement as there are many ways to properly care for a brand. Regardless, over time, if your target audience shifts, the market evolves, or the brand’s products and services change, it may be time for a rebrand. The main challenge with rebranding is trying to maintain familiarity and consistency so that your customers will remember you.