Are you struggling to create a distinct brand now that you’ve formed your new business? This is actually a good thing, as not enough businesses focus on forming distinct brand identities. Once you do, you’ll find that you’re ahead of the pack when it comes to differentiating yourself from your competitors.
However, the design process can be overwhelming if you don’t know what to expect. You may also be considering whether or not a professional is necessary instead of the DIY approach.
With this in mind, read on to learn all about what the branding design looks like in action!
Identifying Your Business Goals
The first step to any effective branding design is to identify your business goals and brand personality as soon as possible. Without these two factors, it will be significantly harder to create a brand that’s consistent, cohesive, and that attracts your target audience.
If you’re just starting out, your business goal is most likely to increase your brand recognition in your target area. However, your brand personality is the persona you want to project to your audience in order to build rapport and trust.
For instance, if you find that your target audience is mainly college-aged students, your brand personality will be significantly different than a business that mainly works with 40-year-old professionals.
During this phase, your designer should also be asking you plenty of questions in order to get a comprehensive understanding of your business.
Researching the Market
Once you have well-defined goals and a brand personality, it’s time to do market research. This step is necessary because you want a good idea of what your competitors are doing and how you can differentiate yourself. Without the market research, you may end up making design decisions that your competitors have already done.
This means that you won’t be able to differentiate yourself effectively, and the businesses that already have an established base of customers will continue to get all the leads.
If you’re wondering whether hiring a creative design agency is worth it, this is one step that may require extra help. Design agencies are well-practiced at studying the markets and design choices of competitors. With this knowledge, they’re able to make design decisions that are consistent with your brand but also help you stand out to your audience.
Ideation
With a good understanding both of your business and your competitors, your design agency can begin designing and creating your brand logo. At this point, several design elements are mocked up in order to get your feedback without putting a lot of time into the design. You may review:
- Logos
- Typography
- Mascots
- Illustration styles
- Color palettes
- And more
During this time, it’s important to give your open and honest feedback to the designers so that you can work together to create your vision. Good designers will also be able to explain why they chose the colors and designs that they did.
For instance, you may want purple and gold in your logo, but if your main competitor also uses those colors, your design team may try to steer the color palette in a different direction.
Depending on your feedback, your designer will redo and develop new designs based on your direction. It’s important to remember that this process can’t go on forever, as you typically agree with a designer in the contract how many iterations of a design they can create until it’s time to make a final decision.
Corporate Branding
Once the main elements of your brand are chosen, such as the logo, color palette, and typography, you can also choose to have our designer help you with other aspects of your brand. As a business, you’ll also use items such as:
- Business cards
- Letterheads
- Envelopes
- Vehicle branding
- T-shirts
- Are more
You can choose to have your designer help you with the design of these items as well. The reason this is beneficial is that the design of business cards and letterheads is going to be vastly different than the one on your website. While you are using the same colors, typography, and logo, they need to be sized and spaced correctly.
Business cards also require more design choices, such as the thickness of the card, vertical vs horizontal, using negative space, and additional illustrations. By working with a full-service design agency, you can take care of all these elements at the same time so that you won’t have to design them piecemeal later on.
Creating a Style Guide
Depending on your contract with the design team, your deliverables in the form of digital files will be sent to you either before or after you pay. However, many design agencies also include a style guide that helps tie everything together.
A style guide tells any future designer for your business exactly what colors, fonts, and design choices are used. It also provides an explanation for each design choice and how it benefits the business. For instance, you may find in your style guide that there are commendations for photographs to use.
If your target audience is young professionals, the style guide might provide examples of photographs to use that are bright and youthful-looking. There may be a recommendation to avoid using stock photography that features stale office backgrounds.
Overall, the style guide helps every visual element of your brand stay consistent. Without it, over the years your business may start using a mix of colors, fonts, and imagery that don’t match the original vision.
Branding Design: Creating a Unique Identity
Branding design is all about putting several consistent visual styles together in order to create an unforgettable, unique brand persona. By working with a design agency, they’ll help you make your vision tangible by making design decisions based on extensive market research, business goals, and your target audience.
If you’re not sure where to start first, we recommend spending a few hours to identify who your target audience is and the brand personality you want to convey. This should help you relate with your audience on a more intimate level and hone your design decisions going forward.
Ready for more tips on how to get your business off the ground? Keep reading the blog for more tips and strategies.
