
Brand Design
A company’s brand encompasses everything from its name, logo, and colors to the emotions it evokes in customers. While a brand may seem intangible, the visual elements that make up its identity are crucial.
Professional brand design brings all these components together into a cohesive, memorable identity that resonates with your audience. Partnering with an experienced marketing agency for brand design elevates your company and sets you apart.
In this article, we’ll look at the key brand design services an agency provides to help craft your unique brand image.
Brand Strategy
Before the visual design work begins, an effective branding process starts with strategy. Brand strategy looks at:
- Researching your target audience – demographics, psychographics, needs, and pain points.
- Defining your brand mission, values, personality, and positioning.
- Analyzing competitors and conducting SWOT analysis.
- Pinpointing what makes you unique and your competitive advantages.
- Determining brand pillars and key messaging.
With in-depth strategy work, the design process focuses on your differentiators and creates maximum resonance with customers.
Logo Design
Your logo is the anchor and most recognizable symbol of your brand. Logo design considers:
- Brainstorming creative concepts that encapsulate your brand identity.
- Exploring different fonts, icons, symbols, and styles.
- Ensuring adaptable logo forms for different uses.
- Testing logo concepts across target demographics.
- Refining and finalizing the optimal logo option.
- Delivering logo files in all necessary formats.
An effective logo captures attention while representing your brand in a memorable way.
Color Scheme
Color psychology plays a big role in brand recognition. Color palette design may involve:
- Selecting primary, secondary, and accent colors.
- Ensuring enough contrast for visibility and accessibility.
- Conveying brand personality through color choices.
- Referencing colors from existing brand assets like logos.
- Complementing visual content like photos and illustrations.
- Developing gradients and variations for added depth.
Vibrant, thoughtful color schemes leave a lasting brand impression.
Typography
Typography choices expand the brand’s visual language beyond just the logo. Typography design includes:
- Selecting brand fonts for headings, body text, and display usage.
- Ensuring chosen fonts work across print, web, and digital applications.
- Creating typographic hierarchies for different usages like titles and captions.
- Developing styles and treatments like bold, italic, and letterspacing for visual interest.
- Choosing sizes and weights to establish contrast and rhythm.
Polished typography elevates and strengthens brand presentation across mediums.
Graphic Assets
Graphics like illustrations, patterns, and icons provide stylized visual content to represent your brand. Graphic design may involve:
- Creating reusable graphic elements based on brand values and personality.
- Illustrating concepts and metaphors aligned to products or services offered.
- Designing backgrounds, frames, and other embellishments.
- Producing icons for menus, features, actions, and more.
- Developing repeating brand patterns for use across touchpoints.
These graphical assets give your brand extra visual flair and personality.
Tone & Messaging
Beyond visuals, brand design also defines the tone, voice, and messaging used in communications. This includes:
- Determining ideal brand tone – casual, formal, funny, heartfelt, etc.
- Outlining guidelines for content, conversational style, terminology, and voice.
- Crafting brand messaging around products, services, differentiators and value.
- Writing taglines and slogans that become synonymous with the brand.
- Developing naming conventions for products, programs, content series, etc.
Consistent tone and messaging in verbal and written communication reinforces the brand.
Guidelines & Standards
Brand guidelines distill visual and verbal elements into an outlined system for internal teams or vendors to implement. Guidelines may cover:
- Logo usage standards and restrictions.
- Color codes, palettes, and applications.
- Typography selections and hierarchy structure.
- Graphic assets and usage instructions.
- Tone, voice, and messaging protocols.
- Rules for imagery, photography and icon styles.
Detailed brand guidelines and standards allow wider adoption and cohesion.
Mockups & Presentations
The design process isn’t complete without showing how elements come together through mockups across key brand touchpoints:
- Print collateral like business cards, letterhead, brochures.
- Website and mobile designs.
- Packaging and labels.
- Presentation templates.
- Apparel and merchandise models.
- Signage and environmental graphics.
- Concepts for booths, vehicles or retail spaces.
Vibrant mockups make the brand vision tangible prior to final production.
Asset Delivery
The final brand design package includes all necessary files, standards, and instructions for implementation:
- Logo files like .EPS, .PNG transparent, high-res, and color variations.
- All chosen font files and licenses.
- Finalized color swatches in multiple formats like HEX, RGB, and CMYK.
- Graphic elements, icons, and illustrations as individual files.
- Pattern libraries and repeatable background textures.
- Tone and messaging guidelines documents.
- Mockups and specifications for key branded formats.
- Detailed brand guide documenting entire system.
Consolidated asset delivery empowers smooth brand activation.
Ongoing Collaboration
Professional design partners become an extension of your team, available for ongoing collaboration:
- Supporting implementation of the new brand identity.
- Reviewing new concepts and designs as marketing evolves.
- Updating guidelines as offerings expand into new areas.
- Producing additional graphic assets and mockups as needed.
- Answering brand-related questions and addressing challenges.
Experienced agencies help brands stay fresh, flexible, and consistent through years of growth and innovation.
Conclusion
A strong brand forms an emotional bond and connection with its customers. But establishing that relationship starts with getting the visual, verbal and written elements right. Through brand strategy, logo design, color schemes, typography, graphic assets, tone guidelines, and usage standards, brand design pulls together the components that leave a powerful impression.
If you’re ready to define and elevate your brand, reach out to learn more about our strategic design process. Let’s create something memorable. What are your top tips for crafting memorable brands? Share your thoughts below!