The Designer’s Guide to Branding

Posted: November 3, 2011 | Author: Richard Baird | Filed under: Design Survival | Tags: advice, branding, colours, design, freelance, guidance, guidelines, help, logo, stationary, strategy, tips, typography |4 Comments »

A continually updated list of tips provided by seasoned and international industry experts to help new designers develop effective brands.

Contributors:

            

1. Your logo is not your brand

It is important to remember that your logo is not your brand, nor is it your identity. Logo design, identity design and branding all have different roles, that together, form a perceived image for a business or product. Below is a short summary of each of these broad roles, with a link to read more about each one.

Read more:         What is brand?        |        What is identity?        |        What is a logo?

Provided by @justcreative

2. Strategy

Before starting any branding project it’s important to spend time looking at the company’s propositions and working out how best to communicate these. If a brand is made up of a number of complex propositions don’t compound everything into a single logo-mark. Spread these across multiple touch points, this might be through stationary, packaging, on-line communication or environmental design. By planning how you will implement the brand and the most effective routes it will aid you in pricing and final execution.

Provided by @richbaird

3. Consistency

Make sure that each of the brand components (typography, colour, tone of voice, photography, layout) are unified under a consistent concept and visual style. Carefully consider how the brand is presented beyond the key identity.

If you are a new freelancer working on small jobs this my only extend to stationary but it’s a good opportunity to establish a corporate typeface, layout style and material choices for future collaterals.

Provided by @designsurvival

4. Brand personality

Talk to the client and make sure you really understand their brand personality before you tackle their visual identity. They’re the ones that live and breathe their brand, and asking them lots of questions and picking their brains upfront will save you a lot of time and post client review headaches.

Provided by @BradleyRogerson

5. Brand guidelines

If you’re new to freelancing or rely on small jobs brand guidelines might seem like unnecessary work but they are a very useful tool to guarantee your solution is utilised as it was intended. This might simply be an A4 sheet of do’s and don’ts but offering this as part of a project fee will show a potential client you have a greater understanding and experience of the brand world.

A single and more comprehensive four page identity guideline template is available on Graham Smith’s website.

Provided by @bpandopinion

6. Understand your client

Understand your client inside-out i.e. complete all due diligence/research brilliantly before starting any creative work. A strong and descriptive (ideally one page) brief will help too, you may even need to establish this yourself. Try and keep all correspondence with your client clear and precise and avoid piecemeal communication. (i.e. don’t be afraid to ask questions but try to these all at once). Demystify the brand design process where you can so they can understand your position and this way they appreciate your workload and talent!

Always make things easy and very positive experience for your client.

Provided by @curvecorp

7. Corporate colours

When it comes to effective branding colour really is key. Colours affect people’s state of mind psychologically whether you like it or not! As a designer you have to research and really consider who your target audience is and how the chosen colours will relate to them.

Personally I have seen some pretty average looking logos (especially in rural Australia), however the ‘brand’ is still often memorable to me because of a unique colour combination. I always try to work with only two – three colours as a base and work from there.

Provided by @designabot

8. Brand patterns

When creating brand assets try to avoid simply creating patterns from the logo-mark, this is quick solution but doesn’t fully utilise a tool that can communicate further brand propositions. Look at the propositions that the logo doesn’t characterise and use the pattern to express these.

I combined the three symbols I created for Jabberworx as a pattern on the stationary to represent the union of the three propositions and the wider gaming community through a repeating beehive structure.

Provided by @richbaird

9. Experience the product or service you’re designing for

If possible, visit your client’s location and take a lot of pictures of the environment, product or service. Reference these for inspiration while designing.

Provided by @tadfry

10. Keep it manageable

When your developing a brand identity and related assets consider the end-user and their experience and abilities to execute the brand. If you’re designing for a small business with a limited print budget consider producing stamps and stickers as a brand tool that can easily be applied to off-the-shelf boxes.

Provided by @designsurvival

11. Consider the brand’s custodians

Establish the full picture for the brand so you know every type of media it will go on and create guidelines in case it gets passed on – this way it’s less likely to get violated by other designers or indeed non-designers, so your branding result remains consistent.

Provided by @curvecorp

12. Flexibility

Keep your brand strategy clear and simple, refer back to it as you develop each asset and make sure you’re on-brand.

Limit your typefaces to a maximum of 2 if possible and consider establishing a corporate typeface for literature.

Try to avoid overused generic stock imagery and consider how each works in communicating brand values, make sure that the composition, colours and content remain consistent even if sourced from multiple photographers.

Always try to think ahead and envisage each asset in their individual forms and as a complete experience. Evaluate their functionality within the architecture of the brand and whether they justify their place.

Create logo variations that allow it to be easily placed within a variety of situations ie. Left Aligned, Right Aligned and Central.

Provided by @anilamrit

13. Brand design doesn’t need to begin the logo

Always consider the bigger picture, brand design doesn’t always need to begin with the logo. Look at the most appropriate ways of communicating the propositions, this might be with photography, patterns (check out this project), developing packaging or a retail environment. This will often lead to a better understanding of how to distil the brand experience down into a simple logo.

Provided by @richbaird

14. Negative space

It can be said that effective design happens between the blank parts. It’s easy to over-design things (perhaps for the sake of making it look like you spent a lot of time on it), but the real beauty in is the white space. If you’re designing a brand mark, the deck of a snowboard or an interstate billboard, think simply. That’s where the impact is.

Provided by @parlory

15. Brand planning

Effective branding projects rely on a creative brief to keep everyone focused as a project progresses. Include sections for a situation analysis, objectives, target markets, budget and resources, time frame, point person, known parameters, approval structure, stake-holders and metrics for assessing results.

Provided by @brandnatter

16. Understanding the brand’s audience

Research who the brand is trying to reach. Not just demographically (gender, age, location, income), but also psychographically (interests, activities, opinions).

Create a user persona that includes a name, job, fashion choices, etc. and try to align the brand with this user persona always asking the question “would the brand resonate with user persona X?”

Find areas of common ground and overlap between the brand and the target audience’s aspirations, and highlight them wherever possible. Visually, verbally, texturally, etc.

By referring back to this research you can stay on track to make an impact with who you are trying to reach.

Provided by @IanVadas

17. Communicating brand values

Designers typically think about branding visually. But look what happens when you broaden your design methodology using the other senses.

For example, if a brand is Loud, Quiet, Discordant or Melodic, what might that look like iconographically? If it could be tasted, what typography would suggest Spicy, Bitter-Sweet, or Salty? Or, what would the colour ways for a Pungent, Musky or Citrus identity look like?

Good designers make such decisions almost intuitively. Being deliberate about it in this way can open up a flood of creative inspiration & make ideation that much more fun.

Provided by @copywrighting

Contribute!

If you are a designer and have any advice you would like to add, please submit your contribution here or as a comment at the bottom of this post (remember to include your Twitter, Dribbble or Forrst ID so I can credit each tip).

---