7 Rules for Effective Branding Design: An Actionable Guide
Effective branding is an art and a particular science you can only comprehend with time. To create a successful visual brand design, you must form a strategy out of which it can be born. Social studies show that most people, having chosen a brand that meets their needs, will trust it for a long time. Therefore, it is necessary to take a responsible approach to creating and promoting the brand.
The primary purpose of branding is to create an exciting and memorable image, whether it is a product, company, or person, and to develop communication with customers. Here, you can find some viable tips for building a recognizable brand.
1. Style Development
Many startups wish to understand fully: What is branding design? It is an instrument that can show people the idea, how it looks, tastes, feels and sounds.
Your brand captures the type of business you have. The word “Concept” is the key here. It encompasses a selection of colors for the logo and fonts, creative fonts, a powerful moto, and the business itself as a central figure of the picture. Stick to the trade, service, or product itself to add coloring, and you will see a fuller picture.
However, some experts notice that bringing up a human persona to the forefront will make the company’s image more attractive. So, to develop a style, you can start telling a story of that person and pinpoint the stand-out features and most interesting moments.
2. Get Acquainted with Your Perfect Customer
When you are done with descriptions of your business, its philosophy, and main idea, it is time to answer: Who is your customer? Describe your perfect client, not only visually but also their likes and dislikes, principles, favorite places, work, home, and other lifestyle components.
3. Know Your Opponents
Start collecting information about businesses that work in the same field as you. Check out customer reviews, analyze the logo’s coloring, and read the company’s philosophy. You can even monitor their social network pages to see if they stick to their strategy, support their tone of voice, and maintain active communication with their followers.
But remember that performing such research is purely to assist you in your future development. Moreover, it aims to compare various, at least 10, competitors of the same category or close to it.
4. The Importance of a Logo
The extraordinary move here would be to hire a team of professionals who can rely on your brief and auditory analysis so that they can create an original logo. First, however, if your budget is modest, start by thinking about the main principles of your trade.
Create a small list of pinpoints:
- Benefits of your brand over others.
- Brainstorm and write down the brand design ideas that come to mind when you think about the brand.
- Think through the slogan. It must be conveying, inspiring and concise.
The logo is integral to the revenue branding strategy, though it is not everything.
5. Minimalism Is Always Trendy
Observe famous brands and their logos, networks, and websites. There are many examples among them who do not try to squeeze many ideas and images into one thing.
For example, look at Nike or Apple. They created logos and style per their messages but did not make them obvious. However, the name of the company and its visual image should correspond and send a clear, energetic message, and your brand will look more aesthetic and memorable.
6. Develop Your Guidelines
Maintain integrity in everything you do. Guidelines will help you. This is a technical document of an open type intended for designers, printers, and advertisers. It contains a detailed description of corporate identity elements, like logo, fonts, colors, style-forming parts, and formulated rules for their use. The main creation principles are:
- The rules should be flexible enough not to reduce the designer’s creative inspiration but clear enough so that the brand remains recognizable;
- Make a Toolkit to assist designers in their work. It can be just one page with a general concept for your brand, which includes identity, colors, typographic elements, images, and other visuals;
- Showing is better than telling. Keep the text concise and clear to understand.
7. Visualization
When creating a visual brand design, think about other elements of your business. For example, besides the perfectly memorable logo, it needs to have the same fonts and coloring on each available web resource so that customers will know you from the beginning.
To Sum Up
Many brands use real people to promote themselves, but what if the company itself became a persona? It’s a pretty cool concept that the younger generation likes. However, it is even better if you have an ambassador who is widely famous among your customers. It is a person who will advertise your brand visually and communicate its values.
