How to Create Successful Visual Identity for Your Brand

When it comes to branding, visual identity is one significant aspect. A successful visual identity design helps improve the perceived quality, value and impression of a brand, heavily influences the purchase decision of consumers for any product or service and reinforces not only brand recognition but also remembrance in the minds of the target audience.

The emphasis on the importance of having a design-centric brand identity took a completely new meaning when the Design Value Index was created to measure the success of businesses back in 2013. The best visual branding practices of some of the most successful and popular companies with publicly traded stock such as Ford, Whirlpool, Stanley Black & Decker, and similar became huge visual brand identity design management inspirations ever since for almost a decade as the design strategies helped earn massive returns over company market capitalizations.

Most businesses quickly started altering their marketing strategies and adopted a brand identity strategy that veered on a design-centric approach like never before. Over the years, a majority of companies, as a result, have been making fairly large investments in designing their visual brand identity to tell their brand story, position themselves in the market to influence consumer decisions, and redefine success.

In this blog, we will learn about visual branding, its advantages, and the visual identity design process in detail.

What is the visual identity of a brand?

The visual aspect of any brand based on well-defined graphics and unique design that companies or organizations create, develop, and establish to communicate their business messages can be termed as a brand’s visual identity. It constitutes all the visual elements that consumers and clients can see about the company and relate to or associate with the business to facilitate emotional connection as well as interaction and engagement.
The key elements of the visual brand identity include:

Brand name
Logo and colour scheme
Imagery styles
Typography
Business cards
Website and social media business pages
Print collaterals such as brochures, banners, flyers, packaging, etc.
Brand voice and advertising

Precisely, the elements that visually represent the personality of a brand in accordance with the business goals and its communication strategy – both the graphic images as well as the perception generated through these visuals that create the first impression on the consumers – together form the visual identity of a brand.

So, how do we define visual identity in design?

In the simplest terms, it is the visual execution of your branding strategy that forms the tangible look and feel of the brand. Your brand’s visual identity design should essentially project your business values, intentions, mission statement, quality of service, capability, reliability, and trustworthiness.

The benefits of having a strong visual identity
A strong consistent visual brand identity provides several competitive advantages

1. Recognition
When you present your audience with consistent and effective visual elements that can be easily and clearly identified as your brand across all marketing channels (website, newsletters, printed materials, social media, etc.), it not only helps in fostering recognition but also awareness for your business.
In fact, your brand’s visual identity can serve as a standalone method to set your brand above the rest. All the channels representing the same visual branding enable your prospects to connect with your brand faster and differentiate your brand from your competitors.

2. Value
Investing in high-quality professional visual brand design comes with its own merits as it instantly provides your audience with the impression that you are a capable, established, and reliable business. Since the audience judges a company and/or service through its visual pieces first, an effective visual brand identity always helps grow your brand’s perceived value.

3. Authority
A well-developed visual identity also helps communicate the passion and commitment of your brand. It’s important that your customers understand the quality of your service when it comes to providing solutions to their needs. Your branding efforts can reassure your prospects that you put great attention to detail and that your company will better value, recognize and respond to their needs than other companies.

4. Smarter Investment
Having an experienced team of branding design experts on board to build your identity design at the early stage of your business helps avoid repeated investments of time, effort, and money in reinventing graphics or rebranding.

However, to draw such benefits, businesses need to successfully develop their brand’s visual identity and maintain it in a proper way. Before sharing essential visual identity tips and strategies from our team, let’s continue to understand other important aspects of visual branding such as the role of signs and symbols in visual brand identity design, the differences between them, and some popular brand examples to draw inspiration.

Why signs and symbols are important in branding?

In design, signs or symbols are a combination of graphic elements that form a storytelling picture.
Humans interpret graphic elements presented in a certain order such as shapes of objects, lines, or patterns of action based on a preconceived notion that springs from their psychological understanding of fundamental concepts. The signs and symbols that you would use in your branding, be it for the logo, website or other collaterals, should be, therefore, developed strategically so that the audience clearly identifies, understands, and memorize the right meaning of the visual communication with regard to your brand.

The signs and symbols can be directly industry-specific that people are already aware of or custom-created to signify the emotions you want to trigger in your viewer’s mind for your brand. For example, a set of signs and symbols of the construction or real estate industry include buildings, homes, roofs, keys, cranes, trees, and excavators. These shapes, whether in familiar or custom-designed forms, can easily get interpreted by their audiences because the visual vocabulary is already established.

Similarly, a set of signs and symbols for some of the popular industries as below include:

E-Commerce industry – bags, shopping cart, essentials, etc.
Education industry – books, school, pen and pencils, graduation cap, etc.
Beauty industry – beauty products, human face, personal care items, and more
Healthcare industry – heart, cardiogram, stethoscope, Red Cross, and lots more depending on the vast variety of fields
Legal industry – representative emblems, the scale of justice, gavel, law suit, etc.

Since these signs and symbols belong to the concepts of the dedicated industry, your target audience can effectively identify, remember, and understand your brand personality as well as connect with your brand, its history and message in the competitive environment.

However, each brand has its own story, unique selling points, and functioning industry as a result of which every brand needs different kind of attention from their consumers to stand out from the competition. This is why choosing a perfect sign or symbol for creating brand identity is not only a challenging task but also a tricky subject.

Always note that signs or symbols help streamline the image, perception, and position of your brand in the market only when they are used correctly. You should seek help from professional brand visual identity designers who can efficiently and appropriately use or incorporate signs and symbols in your branding so that there is no chance of misrepresentation even with creative twists.

Before we dive into finding a quick formula to reach the decision about what works best for the development of your brand’s visual identity, you need to further learn and understand how brand symbols affect the logo of your business.

How signs and symbols impact your brand logo?

There is a common misconception that logo and brand symbol is the same but this is not the case. Signs and symbols are intangible factors that are linked to human perception. On the other hand, a logo is created using signs and symbols that help create associations between a brand and what it represents.
So, the logo is a part of a symbol that provides your brand a packaged visual identity whereas the symbol you choose to use within the logo helps people classify your brand, figure out the brand message and make the decision to engage with it.

Brand Visual Identity: Inspiring Examples

Now that you know the role and importance of signs and symbols in branding, let’s explore how some popular brands have used them to develop their successful brand visual identity design.
1. McDonald’s
The golden arches that form the M for McDonald’s not only reinforce the name of the brand but also gives the brand value. The shape of the arches resembling a rainbow and the colour scheme of red, gold and white that can be found in many royal emblems provides the brand a sense of good fortune, welcome, and delight.

2. Nike
The swoosh of the famous brand Nike that resembles a tick and reflects the tagline “Just do it!” provides a sense of approval, accuracy, movement, and speed which is what the brand concept stands for its athletic shoes. It is so recognizable that people identify it even without the name. This is where the branding meets its goal of creating a memorable and desirable image of the company as the swoosh permanently became an identifiable expression of athletic inspiration.

3. Apple
From the first logo of this brand being replaced by the rainbow-coloured apple with a bite out of it in 1977 to indicate coloured screens and apple machines to the current Apple logo of a black silhouetted apple with a bite out of it on the right side, the symbol continued to represent the excellent graphics ability and simplicity of operation of the brand.

4. Amazon
The popular e-Commerce brand has a typographic based logo with an arrow underneath. The arrow has the shape of a smile and symbolically represents a service that spreads smiles and positivity. But when you notice beyond the apparent simplicity of the design, the arrow starts from the letter ‘a’ and goes till the letter ‘z’ indicating that consumers can get A to Z essentials or almost everything that they need in this online shop.

There are several successful brands out there that have carved memorable visual identity designs for you to take inspiration from. We have selected these few very popular examples from a variety of industries to make it simpler for you to understand and relate to the concepts.

Things to keep in mind when creating the visual identity for your brand

Here are a few important factors that you should consider. Discuss these points with your professional brand visual identity designer who can help you accomplish both your design and business goals.

1. Learn about your audience
First off, analyse the right audience for your product based on age, gender, personality, likes, hobbies, interests, values, lifestyle, income, and how your product can solve their problems. If you don’t find out and segment your audience correctly, it will not only affect your brand strategy but you will miss out on the opportunities of approaching your prospects. It is also necessary to research about your competitors, the products they are offering, their strategy and approach towards solving consumer problems.

2. Determine your brand objectives
Once you segment your target audience, associate your short-term and long-term business objectives, and build a strategy of how you would offer your products and services. Talk to your brand identity designers about why you established your brand, the mission and vision of your brand, short-term and long-term goals, and how your products and services will help your target consumers.

3. Develop your brand personality
This is a significant step when you would chalk out the strategy for your brand visual identity, and you should rely only on efficient professionals for doing this job. Representing your brand, its goals, mission and vision with the right communication is the key to reach out to your target audience. Only appropriate communication amalgamated with the right emotional appeal can help you build your unique brand personality and also help your consumers understand it and connect with it.

4. Tell your brand story
Every brand has a story and you need to pitch your story in a way that appeals to your prospects and gets them to interact with your brand. Discuss it with your designer for further research and choose clear and concise symbols that are most relevant to your brand, its personality and story so that the consumer perception can be shaped exactly the way you want your brand to be perceived. Your efficient and experienced designer will ensure that the symbols chosen and incorporated in your logo and other visual identity elements represent your brand story perfectly.

5. Consider global perspectives
Know that signs, symbols or other visual representations are perceived differently in different social and cultural contexts. When you finalize a brand symbol for your visual brand identity, make sure you examine it from international perspectives depending on the target audience and the locations where you want to create your brand identity, recognition, and run your business. This is especially important for companies that aim for global markets.

6. Communicate a unified message
Your brand’s visual identity should represent a positive, unified message and not conflicting ideas. Signs and symbols can be powerfully combined to create your visual identity but it is possible only when they are used wisely and intentionally. Never overload on signs and symbols in a logo design or use multiple symbols that cause conflicts of interest. The idea is, whatever signs or symbols you use to create your visual identity elements, should coherently express your main brand message well. The target audience should be able to understand your brand, what you do, engage with the brand and include it into their lives.
Remember to keep your design concise but make the perfect symbolic impact. Experienced brand identity designers and graphic designers can help create the right symbolic element for your visual brand identity and execute this job efficiently.

What does a good visual brand identity design process consist of?

The development of a successful visual brand identity design is a step-by-step process. It involves intense participation of both clients and the designers from the very beginning of the project till the launch and beyond for continuous support and optimization. At Leidsens, whether you are looking for an entire brand visual identity design or just a logo, we maintain an elaborate design process for guiding and assisting our clients as below once you get in touch with us to discuss the design project.

1. Project Brief
Before starting with the design process, we discuss the brand profile, its goals, problems, purpose, needs and current requirements. We focus on accurate and relevant information about the product and/or services, the target customers, key competitors, and competitive advantage to get a quick overview. Depending on your needs such as building a visual brand identity for a startup or rebranding and expansion for an established brand, we will discuss the scope, possibilities and timeline for the project. Once we have all the required information, we will go over the proposal and contract.

2. Research and Discovery
After the contract is signed, our designers and the team start complete and detailed research based on your provided creative brief to define your brand strategy and brand voice. Our team analyse the collected data, execute surveys of your provided materials as well as study the branding of competitors, and brainstorm ideas and words that are suitable for your desired brand image, products, and services. Using a mind-mapping process, we explore various concepts taking numerous factors into consideration, and select multiple most suitable concepts to discuss with our client. Before taking the process forward to the next step, our team makes sure that our clients and designers arrive on the same roadmap for the identity design.
3. Drafting and Designing
Next, we start sketching to explore the visual representations of the suitable concepts and compare them until the best ones are selected for further refinement, including the shapes, typography, colour schemes, and logo. The client can check our progress and view the designs as we create, examine, and submit the best two or three different versions of the visual identity design for a variety of contexts such as website, products, signage, brochures, ads, social media, etc.

4. Feedback, Review, and Revisions
Once we submit the sketching of the best concepts of the different visual identity elements for client feedback and review, we follow up with meetings and discuss the visual logic behind each presented concept. We wait for the client to choose the final concept and give further refinement instructions or suggestions. Our designers make the required revisions based on the client’s feedback and move on to the next step after receiving final approval.

5. Final Delivery and Support

Once the client approves the final design, we create the final files in various formats. If the project includes a brand style guide, we provide an organized document that the client can refer to anytime while taking the brand forward. Our team also provides continuous support throughout the launch. Clients can contact us for any issues related to specific file formats, design implementation, optimization, and any other queries or requests subject to the design project.

The Takeaway

Every business is unique and you need to develop the right visual branding designs to create a strong and successful visual brand identity. Remember that it is not enough to build your brand identity unless you have the right strategy in place to strengthen, maintain, and optimize it throughout your brand journey.

At Leidsens, we know what it takes to develop and maintain a performance-driven visual brand identity design that continuously helps you with your marketing goals. Contact our design experts and schedule a consultation to discuss your branding design projects.
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