Have you ever heard about brand identity? Well, is it about your palette color? Your logo? Your info graphic style? Oh well, we will discuss more about brand identity. A brand identity can be defined as “the outward appearance of a brand, which involves such as name, trademark, visual appearance, and communications.” Therefore, every business is always trying their best to strengthen their brand, so that they are able to compete with their competitors.
Furthermore, if you want to make your brand succeed and strong in the next future, then you should establish a brand identity that can cover the essence of yours and it is flexible to develop with you. And here are the steps to build an influential brand identity.
Make Sure to Complete Your Brand Strategy
Well, every brand identity has a function as a tool to assist you to execute the brand strategy that has already been planned by you. While a strategy is a plan with its detailed which highlights precisely what you want to achieve and how you will achieve it. Your content of the strategy together with your brand identity can help a lot for you in communicating the ways how you will achieve your goals. And to set up a success for yourself, it is necessary to complete the strategy and knowing your brand voice, brand’s core values, brand messaging architecture (known as value prop, your positioning, brand stories, and tagline), and of course involve your visual design which will work in a tandem that included those elements.
Try to Understand What a Brand Identity Is and How to Make it Greats
The choosing of a color palette and a logo are not able to build a brand identity. And while you are designing a brand identity, you have to make a visual language that is comprehensive and could be used on the whole which starts from website to packaging. Here are the lists for a basic brand identity such as colors, logo, design system, typography, illustration, photography, data visualization iconography, web design, interactive elements, video, and motion. When you are ready to design your brand identity, then you need to follow these tips to make sure that your brand identity is: memorable, distinct, cohesive, easy to apply, salable and flexible. Therefore, make sure that these elements are not missing because of course, it will challenge the brand team in their job.
Do a Research
When starting your branding project, of course, you want to build this from the zero up to the core of your brand. Furthermore, it means that you need to do research before executing the design of your product. Well, maybe this is a hard stage, but it is necessary to do in order to build the foundation in the visual language that will stand. And the goal of this stage is that you should collect as much information that you get such as who is a competitor? Where will your brand stand? And who are you communicating with? And here are the points that you should highlight in this stage, such as creating personas, identify your competition, and the last is take a look at your existing brand. After that, when you already finished with a comprehensive deep understanding of the brand that you will make, then you can move into the stage of designing the product.
Establish Your Identity
For this moment, you already have a lot of information which consists of the customer feedback, your competitive analysis, brief, and brand audit survey. And from this stage, you should pour your creativity in changing the text-based information above and then start to convert this into visual concepts. And the challenging thing is to find out how to communicate and increase those sentiments which by means of visuals. These elements are including logo, colors, typography, design system, photography, illustration, etc. And it belongs to the steps to build an influential brand identity.
Establish Your Brand Style Guide
A brand style guide is a rescuer in the matter of brand identity design which is used incorrectly or never use. And a brand style guide is involved, examples and use cases, easy-to-follow guidelines in each section of your brand identity. Besides that, it involves the practical detail, such as the information which will be needed to assist your designer to build the brand identity more successful. And once the brand style guide is completed, you have to make sure that these guidelines are spread to the team, and sore this in a safe place and in a basis regular update.
Building a brand identity is a necessary thing, which needs consistency in the use of color, images, type, and language, but of course, it is a challenging thing to do. That is why you need to follow the steps to build an influential brand identity.