Brand Identity Design: What It Is & the Way to Do It [+ Cases ]

Brand identity design is the comprehensive brand messaging which defines how customers perceive your brand on the industry. There are three components of brand identity design — your brand’s values and culture, position in the sector and new visuals. Businesses communicate their new identity design to clients utilizing abstract and tangible elements like logos, company culture and messaging.

Though it’s possible to create your own new identity, it is an important component of your company and it’s a good idea to hire a professional with experience to help. DesignBro, that sponsored this guide, is an internet design agency that offers logo design as well as full service brand identity design. Check out DesignBro today for unique logos starting at $199.

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How Brand Identity Design Works

Brand identity design is accomplished by creating a cohesive message that ties together firm values, signage, business cards, uniforms, menus, shopping totes, automobile decals and much more. The subsequent message clearly communicates your organization’s unique value for the perfect consumer. If done correctly, your brand identity design ought to resonate with your target audience and differentiate you from your competitors.

The planet’s most memorable companies have new identity design. Apple is inextricably tied into a visual picture of a bitten apple along with the design of its products. Nike’s identity is conveyed in a single swoosh. Folks recall a business according to what that company resembles and also the unified message it communicates.

Each of those companies focuses on three components of brand identity design, which include:

1. Brand culture and values: To be able to design a brand identity, your company should define why it exists, who it serves and what it supplies. Your brand identity style embodies those cultures and values.
2. Status in the industry : How you style your brand depends upon who you’re trying to reach — your target market. As with any advertising practice, this begins with understanding your client profile.
3. Visual brand elements (including logo): The most recognizable feature of your brand identity design is the concrete design itself — logos, colours, fonts, mascots, decals, boxes, uniforms, mailers, letterhead, signage — what. It is your brand — elegant, defined, and wrapped up in a collection of eye-catching visuals as well as product design.

Identity design takes all these 3 components and transmits them in a visual message that captures your brand character and makes you appealing to your target audience. Understanding this makes the procedure of creating your brand identity much simpler.

How to Make Your Brand Identity Design in 6 Measures

There are six steps involved with establishing your brand identity design, which will provide you with a group of tools that bring clarity and distinctiveness to your brand. These measures include defining your target audience, clarifying your product, picking your colours, designing your logo, choosing your fonts and assembling it into a brand style manual.

You can do each these steps on your own, but you might wish to consider working with a brand identity design service like DesignBro that can assist you get through the process. Design agencies understand the ability of aesthetic and several have experience in shaping a brand’s identity. This whole process takes only a couple hours for the first three measures, and outsourcing the remaining three measures to an agency costs a couple of hundred dollars.

Let’s look at each of the six steps in detail:

1. Define Your Target Customer

Before you perform things like picking your logo and design your own visuals, first you’ll have to do is define your target client. This is an essential first step because it is going to specify the remainder of your decisions through the brand design procedure. Your target customer determines factors such as the brand colors you choose, the logo you layout and the overall message you communicate.

You will first create a crystal clear picture, also called an avatar, of your intended customer. There are just two things you need to do so as to define your target client — knowing their demographics and psychographics. To help, use this customer profile template and illustrations to create an accurate customer avatar.

Identify Your Target Economy

Demographics are statistical information such as age, sex, place and instructional level — typically the things collected in a census. This is important information to assemble on your target market. The better you know who they are, the better you’ll have the ability to create a new identity that’s good at linking with them, persuading themand keeping them.

You’ll able to specify your target market demographics by asking these questions:

• What is their gender?
• What’s their age category and lifestyle status?
• What is their occupation?
• Where do they live?
• What is their income level?

These questions are just the beginning. Depending upon your product or service, you may also wish to spot issues like ethnicity, education level, living situation, household, religion or physical traits. If, by way of instance, you own a pizzeria, then you may choose to collect demographic information regarding the variety and extent of food allergies in your area.

Identify Your Target Market Psychographics

Psychographics is your classification of individuals according to their attitudes and ambitions and are crucial when creating your brand identity style. Whereas market demographics provide you with the metrical data on your customer, market psychographics dig into the thinking, lifestyle, options, pain factors, belief systems and ambitions of your target customer.

Here are three helpful psychographic questions to ask concerning your target market:

• What types of activities do they participate in?
• Which are their pain points as it is related to the product or service you are selling?
• What are their values as it relates to the product or service you are selling?

Other psychographic elements you may want to consider include food preferences, political views, entertainment choices and spending habits. Maybe you live in an area where the primary spenders would be the wives of business executives and their principal spending objective is trend items. If you want your company to succeed, it has to create a brand identity design that contrasts with these sorts of individuals.

The best product of this step ought to be a client avatar. You may choose to give your avatar a name and a photo. Again, to create this particular profile of your client, download our customer profile template. The template outlines the process in detail and provides you a whole portrait of who you are trying to achieve.

2. Clarify Your Value Proposition

In this step, write down exactly what you’re selling and how it’s different from other services or products available on the market. Also called a value proposition, you need to emerge from this step with a clear one- or two-sentence announcement that communicates what your service or product is and why it matters to your perfect customer.

When you clarify the value of what you’re selling, try to say it as quickly as you can. Something vague like”ACME Apparel sells T-shirts” is not beneficial. Try this instead:”ACME Apparel sells funny and eye-catching graphic T-shirts for new dads that are into strength training” You may have several goods or services, so go right ahead and write down every one.

It’s not possible to style your brand identity without clarifying your business’s unique value. For example, Rolls-Royce, a new that is committed to luxury and higher quality, has a symbol and mascot that subtly convey these values. This new identity is different from a more playful business like Disney World, which has a fresh identity is more casual.

Listed below are a few literary examples of brands that have clarified their product’s worth:

Squeaky Clean Summerville sells:”House cleaning solutions for Airbnb hosts who demand quick turnaround times and with no regular cleaning schedule.” This support is targeted at a particular demographic — Airbnb hosts in Summerville who want a cleaning service and who are working with the erratic schedule of Airbnb guests coming at different times. The cleaning service must provide flexibility and a fast turnaround but the grade is vital.

Allegro Accounting sells:”Tax preparation services for musicians in metro Portland, Oregon.” Allegro has recognized that a single kind of client for its accountancy. When the company owner goes to develop her brand identity design, she will have the ability to integrate both the unique facets of her support and her customer focus.

RomPomTom sells:”Custom, handmade, zippered baby girl rompers with reinforced seams and double-layered tummy panels” Her customers are moms of toddlers and babies. RomPomTom understands that according to the value that they provide to moms of toddlers, its own brand identity design will probably incorporate brighter colours and a more lively feel.

3. Pick Your Brand Colors

From the first two measures, we’ve laid the important foundation for those visuals. You understand your client and you now know your unique value proposition. All these tenets of your brand will specify its visuals. Now, in step three, you will choose three brand colours — the main brand color, a secondary color and a neutral base colour. The results of this step would be to get three hex codes of your select colors that communicate your value to your intended customer.

Brand colours are the building blocks of your visuals — Above all, your logo. Your brand’s colours will appear everywhere — business cards, billboards, signage, site, vehicles and everywhere else that your brand has a presence. Your preferred colours are an instantaneous sign to your customers that this is your brand, this is exactly what it looks like and this is what it provides.

You can choose your brand’s colors efficiently using the two steps below:

Understand Color Psychology

Color psychology suggests that particular colors may affect the brain in different ways. Cultural differences in color association come into play as well. It is not an specific science, but you will find general trends of that you should be aware.

Here are some of the common feelings or feelings associated with every Significant color:

• Red: Danger, enthusiasm, love and urgency
• Yellow: Happiness, heat and optimism
• Blue: Peace, confidence and security
• Orange: Excitement, warning and confidence
• Green: Health, nature and expansion
• Purple: Royalty, beauty and intellect
• Pink: Romantic, female and tenderness
• Black: Luxury, secrecy and concealment
• White: Purity, openness and transparency

According to color psychology and an understanding of your customer, you should be able to identify colors that resonate with your target market. Some of this color psychology may be instinctive. For instance, you might wish to pick a color other than pink as the primary color for the CrossFit gym targeting blue-collar, 20-something males.

Pick Your Three Colors

First, select the principal brand colour since this is going to be a defining feature of your brand — think of Coca-Cola’s red or UPS’s brown. Your secondary brand colour will be a contrasting color. Finally, a neutral color gives a chromatic backdrop and enriches the general cohesion of the layout elements.

Here are the three color choices you will make:

1. Your primary brand color: This is the color that folks will associate with your business.
2. Your secondary manufacturer colour : several manufacturers use greater than one color. Some, like Google, use more than three colors. This color should serve as a contrast to your primary color but not struggle with this.
3. A neutral base color: Your safest choice is something like whitened.

How can you go about choosing just the ideal color? Easy. Just Google”color chooser.” You should see a tool which looks like this in the search engine results page. When you discover the right color, make sure you set the hex code the six-value set of colours and numbers that describe the colour you have chosen.

Should you require assistance, agencies like DesignBro are proficient at this type of color choice since they have an awareness of colour perception and taste. They also understand how these colours will feel and look when they’re integrated into a company logo and other manufacturer visuals.

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4. Design Your Logo

In this step, you will create a professionally designed logo that reflects your business worth, addresses your target audience and uses your preferred colors. Designing your logo is the culmination of the preceding three steps. Through the process of logo designing, you are crystallizing one of the most memorable and identifiable areas of your new identity design.

Because it such a crucial step, I recommend outsourcing the logo design process to a design service that specializes in logo creation like DesignBro. Professional logo design costs anywhere from a couple bucks (fiverr) to a few hundred million dollars (Rob Janoff, the programmer of Apple’s logo). You may not be able to manage Janoff’s support, but you should not skimp when it comes to logo design. Your logo is the center of your new identity design. The value of your brand is represented in the quality of your logo.

How to Pick the Right Logo Design Company

When working with a logo design service, you will typically provide them with as much information regarding your company, product and customers as you can. As soon as you provide this advice, agency designers or individual designers will create logo concepts. Then, you will be able to choose your favorite design, ask any edits and finally settle on something satisfactory.

When selecting a logo design agency, Start Looking for the following attributes:

• Appropriate price ($300 to $1,000): Low-cost logos are rarely custom-designed logos. You’ll need to pay a specialist for the time it takes to know your client, products and message that you want to convey. This usually costs a few hundred bucks
• Design options: Most logo designers will offer a selection of logos. Seeing the options available will help to define the visual style that you want for your own brand.
• Additional security : Keep in mind that new identity design is much more than just a logo. Look for a designer that will also have the ability to design business cards, letterheads and other design solutions.
• Collaborative: Ideally, you learn more about your product and market than the designer does. For this reason, you need to be able to share this info together within the logo design process. You may even have some design concepts that you’d want them to flesh out or examples of logos that you like. Quality designers often invite this feedback as part of this procedure.

Logo design can be a hard process, taking time and costing you money. Luckily, businesses such as DesignBro are here to help with full-service design. DesignBro offers logo design that begins at just $199. Check them out now to learn more.

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5. Select Your Brand’s Fonts

The purpose of selecting your new fonts is to create a cohesive layout for your brand. Although fonts are not as evident as a brand logo or colour, they really do play an essential part in how recognizable your brand is and the design that you wish to convey. Ordinarily, you’ll want to select up to 3 fonts as part of the procedure.

Select Three Fonts

There are three chief fonts you may select — one for your own logo, one for major headers and one for general site or composed copy. These 3 fonts will present a unified visual front for all of your written material, whether it’s on billboard, truck, apron or anything else.

1. The ribbon in your emblem : The logo font is easily the most crucial of your brand’s fonts because it sets the style for the other fonts. If you’ve finished step four — logo design — then you have selected your logo font.
2. Secondary font: Your secondary font is going to be utilized as website header text, signage text or on business cards and letterhead. Pick a font that is similar to your logo font. As an example, if your logo font is sans serif, your secondary font should be sans serif as well.
3. Duplicate font: The purpose of this ribbon is to provide uniformity across your brand — general site backup, menus, memos, letters, PowerPoint presentations and everywhere else. This font is the easiest of all — believe Arial or Times New Roman.

If your manufacturer has a website, you’ll want to pick an Internet-safe font. This is not difficult to do. The process I have outlined below gives you a list of these fonts.

How to Pick Your Fonts

Here are three helpful resources for picking fonts. Every one of the resource listed below features web-safe fonts, which means that you can use them on your website with no issue.

• Google Fonts: Google’s library features 877 font families. You can filter your search according to common styles — serif, sans serif, display, handwriting and monospace in addition to thickness, slant and width.
• Adobe Typekit: Adobe includes a wider selection of fonts than Google but many can be found at a cost (average cost: $29.99). Although a number of the fashions are more acceptable for logos, its own filtering tools permit you to customize exactly what you want to look at.
• Wordmark.it: This simple tool permits you to navigate a limited selection of fonts. There aren’t any filtering choices, but it’s a simple way to have a fast idea of what type of fonts styles can be found.

6. Create a Brand Style Guide

The purpose of a new design guide is to offer comprehensive guidelines for each element of your brand’s visual identity. Many times, this resources is referred to as a brand new book, brand identification manual or new style guide. It is generally a PDF or webpage which contains directions for or links to all the brand identity design info and resources discussed above. All your visual resources will be stored or linked to on your brand style manual.

Here is a good instance of the new identity design (known as corporate identity) for FedEx, a brand which we’ll use an example below. But, every new style guide will be different. A winemaker, as an example, must have detailed information about label sizes, symbol placement and so forth. A restaurateur could have details on menu design, fonts for main dishes, fonts such as dish descriptions along with others.

Here are some of the resources you need to include in your brand design guide:

• Business cards: Business cards are one of the easiest methods to disperse your brand identity. At a minimum, your company cards will feature your brand colors and emblem.
• Letterhead and envelopes: Standard brand identity design should incorporate a letterhead, which usually contains your logo and often brand colours as well.
• Website: One of the significant ways that a new identity is displayed is via website colours. When you are updating your brand identity, your site will most likely need a refresh too.
• Packaging: If you sell physical products, you’ll need a way to package them. Whether it is a coffee bag, cupcake box or napkin, your custom made packaging must depict your brand’s visual identity.
• Uniforms: Even what your team members wear can convey the brand identity design. If clothing a part of your operation, your brand identity design will direct what that clothing resembles.

Every resource your business uses should be clarified in this style manual. Consider it as a repository for all things visual. As you include additional designs, a new grocery bag design for example, you will add to the style guide. The design guide is really where all the design details live, allowing you to retain the cohesion that is so important for brand identity design.

Brand Identity Design Cases

The objective of this section is to show the way the significant brand achieves unified messaging and cohesion through new identity style. The colours, fonts, style and visual demonstration come together to shape the public perception of the brand.

FedEx’s Brand Identity Design

You will notice how FedEx, the brand featured below, utilizes three persistent colors, the identical font family and prominent use of the logo. FedEx and other brands aren’t simply making an aesthetic statement. They are embracing their brand’s values, forming the perception of their audience and enhancing the memorability of the own brand.

FedEx Site

FedEx’s primary brand colour is purple. It is called”FedEx Purple” and has a hex code of 660099. As it is the primary brand colour, it’s used as the website header.

FedEx Boxes

FedEx boxes utilize four colors — FedEx Purple, FedEx Orange, FedEx Light Gray and white. Some boxes include additional advice in FedEx Green.

FedEx Jet

Even the FedEx jet includes the three new colors — purple, white and orange.

FedEx Uniform

FedEx’s uniforms utilize the industry-standard navy, but they, also, include the brand’s most important colour, FedEx Purple and logotype.

Apple’s Brand Identity Design

Apple has made a name for themselves in the design world for their minimalism, cohesion and elegant simplicity. Notice how new identity design permeates every visual element of the company.

Apple’s Website

Apple’s new identity design is exceptional in that it uses mostly black, white and silver. Here’s the website, featuring every one of these colours.

iPhone Box

The iPhone box is a study in simplicity. It is white with silver lettering and emblem. The splash of colour is more a function of the product picture than the brand colour palette.

MacBook Air

Apple’s new identity design is the most pronounced in the products themselves. From the AirPod case to the MacBook Air, the layout is clean, svelte and understated.

Apple Store

Apple stores convey the brand’s monochromatic color choices and clean lines.

Who’s Brand Identity is Right For

Brand identity is ideal for any business — from a Fortune 500 company to the local kid with a lawnmower. Does every business need brand identity design? Only in case you would like to be recalled, keep customers, build a tribe or increase your revenue. A brand identity isn’t essential for a company to exist but it’s crucial for a company to be successful.

Businesses in the following situations should consider brand identity design:

• A startup with no a clear brand or vision
• A small business with no logo, an obsolete logo or several Distinct logos
• A small to medium-sized business that has a brand identity that has not been updated in years
• A business that has not yet taken the time to establish its identity
• Any business whose new identity lacks clarity or efficacy

The Most Important Thing

Brand identity design is one of the most valuable investments of time and money that you could make in your business. Irrespective of your company’s size, audience, merchandise or style, your brand identity will serve to enhance everything from the devotion of your customers to the packaging on your boxes to your financial bottom line. Take some time to perform brand identity style, and you’ll take your company to another level.

Brand identity design might feel bewildering for a company owner who lacks design experience. To get expert expertise in your brand identity style, it is worth consulting with a professional agency that specializes in this type of work. DesignBro is notable for their top-quality work, responsiveness and a price point that is excellent for small companies.

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