When you think of a brand, what do you first see in your mind? More often than not, you’d visualize the logo of the company, its color, and typography. This set of characteristics is called the visual identity. With a compelling visual identity, you have an edge to make your brand easily recognizable and unique among its competitors.
A brand’s visual identity plays a crucial role in representing consistency in the graphical information of the business. It expresses who the brand is by carefully developing a coherent design with which your audience can associate and connect. Suppose that first impression lasts. In that case, it also goes without saying your visual identity is also what sticks to the mind of your customers since it’s the first line of interaction when one encounters a specific brand.
Creating A Visual Identity For Your Brand
It may appear easy and effortless to create a logo for your company. After all, a logo is just a combination of images, colors, lines, textures, and fonts. But then, a logo is just a tiny fraction of what visual identity is all about. In a deeper context, the essence of your business on a visual level should serve as a guide your company could use in conveying your brand.
If you already know how important branding is for the business, then all the more reason should you invest in creating a solid visual identity. Your branding won’t be complete without it in the same manner that it won’t be as consistent and credible if there are no guidelines to follow. The two components go hand in hand in building an effective representation of your business.
Below are several ways you can follow to create a visual identity:
- Get To Know Your Audience
As with any approach in business, knowing your target audience is key in making a visual identity. Your brand needs to speak directly to its audience, and as such, you need to know them more deeply so you can tell their personalities, desires, shopping behaviors, and more. The first step is to define a buyer’s persona based on several factors such as age, gender, job description, educational attainment, income, values, interests, and lifestyle.
Additionally, you’d want to identify your customers’ pain points and how you can help them in addressing their problems. By doing so, you can then tailor your solutions and you can create a visual identity that speaks for those.
Another reason why knowing your audience can help is it can affect your approach to storytelling. When you focus on finding out what and who your customers are, you can connect more to them, and they’ll be able to relate to your brand just the same.
- Establish A Clear Purpose For Your Brand
What’s the mission of your brand? Do you have any short-term and long-term goals? Are there any visual elements such as typography, imagery, and colors you think can best represent your brand? These are just some of the questions you might ask yourself when trying to identify your brand’s purpose.
You should be able to answer similar questions when working on your business branding. Whether hiring a professional graphic designer like https://www.shopstrange.net/ or doing it all on your own as you create your visual identity, you need to establish a clear purpose for your brand. Only then can you effectively convey the personality and values of your business through the elements you align it with.
- Define Your Key Elements
At the heart of your visual identity are some integral elements, including imagery, type, colors, and logo. The colors, for instance, need to make use of a palette that best represents what you want to be associated with your brand. Luxury products, for example, would often use silver, gold, and black to convey sophistication and luxury. Meanwhile, products that are of financial nature usually use the gold color to signify growth and a brighter future.
As for the logo, it needs to convey what your business does. The imagery should cling to the mind of anyone who sees it. While you can always change your brand logo as your business evolves, it’s important to come up with an effective and powerful one to make an impact on your audience. Graphic designers might be able to help you in conceptualizing a logo that’ll stick to the recollection of your audience, but you need to work with them effectively to ensure your brand’s visual identity will be clearly established in it.
Aside from the color and logo, it’d help to put some thought into choosing the right font for your visual identity. No matter how short the words may be, your text’s arrangement, font, and scale could potentially impact how others would see your brand. If your business is offering funeral services, you wouldn’t want to go for text styles that are in a playful or comical font because that could confuse your audience. If you look at other reputable brand’s fonts and logos, you’ll find that less is better and simple is always beautiful.
- Make It Flexible And Scalable
Any business-minded person could relate to how a brand or business would always have room for growth and expansion. You can never tell when your brand’s going to pick up and start evolving, so you have this factor to consider when creating a visual identity for your business.
For example, for now, you may be offering just one type of product or service. However, try not to associate your identity with just that type of product. Come with a representation of your brand that can be scaled and varied so when the time comes you plan on evolving, the identity won’t need to change.
- Be Consistent
It can be tempting to get creative and use several designs, colors, and logos for your brand so you can interchangeably use them across multiple platforms. However, you might want to shy away from that because consistency still wins, especially if you’re trying to create an impactful visual identity.
Your visual identity should manifest in all your platforms in a way that it represents a recurring theme people won’t mistake for another business or brand. What you’re using on your website should be consistent with what your social media channels and other platforms are using. You can’t possibly use a color palette of, say, black and pink on your website and then use blue and yellow on your social media pages. Your customers could get easily confused and even turned off with how you tend to be fickle-minded in creating a visual identity.
- Tell A Visual Story And Evoke Emotions
All brands have a story to tell, but the real challenge lies in how one can effectively tell their story in a way that can evoke emotions. An emotional appeal is highly powerful in connecting with your target audience since it’s how they can ultimately see your brand. Yes, utility and functionality are among your priorities when creating a visual identity, but that doesn’t mean you should forget the emotionality it comes with.
Through emotions, you can make your brand more credible and memorable. An excellent way to assess the feelings you want to evoke is by using color charts. Visuals and emotions interact in a certain way that colors can heavily affect one another. When choosing colors for your brand, don’t just go for anything that looks bold or different. Instead, pick colors that support the kind of personality you think your brand represents. From there, try to come up with colors aligning with the character you have in mind.
As mentioned, green represents growth, peace, and health. On the other hand, Orange is often associated with dynamism, expansion, change, and enthusiasm. White is for tranquility, cleanliness, and brightness. Red symbolizes dexterity, urgency, and action. If you feel like one color isn’t enough to tell an engaging story and represent your brand’s personality best, you may opt for a color palette to enhance and enrich your identity.
Conclusion
Your visual identity isn’t just a collection of colors, pictures, and logos. It goes beyond what the naked eyes can see because it has to speak on behalf of your business. To create a solid visual identity, you need first to identify and know your audience. There should also be a clear purpose or mission for the brand.
Next, define your key elements and be consistent with them. Furthermore, your visual identity needs to be able to tell a story and evoke emotions. Lastly, consider making it flexible and scalable in a way that it’s still aligned with the brand’s identity even after evolving or expanding in the future.
Creating a visual identity isn’t a walk in the park. Moreover, it’s not something you can develop overnight. It’d help if you had a better understanding of what your brand truly is. From there, you can work your way up and establish a stronger and meaningful visual identity your customers can relate to.
