Your company’s visual brand is a crucial element to its success. It’s comparable to the outfit you would want your business to wear, to show potential customers exactly what they can expect from it. In essence, it’s a visual way of showing people who your brand is.
Although boiling down the key elements of your business into a successful visual identity can be tricky, especially if you don’t have any design experience. That is why I’ve created an expert guide on how to create a successful visual brand below.
Know who your brand is
You cannot create a successful visual identity for your brand if you do not first have a very clear idea of what your brand does (its mission), who your brand is (its personality, who it serves (target customers) and how it does business (its values).
All these elements are crucial to the creation of your visual brand, because these are the things that it will need to convey. To that end, you have to be able to give real, concrete answers to these questions before you can begin the process; otherwise, the end result will be off, and then you will have wasted all that time, effort and money for nothing.
Understand the visual trends in your sector
Once you have a clear idea of who your brand is, you need to take a look at what other companies working in your industry are doing with their visual brands. It’s important not to copy here, as you will want your visual brands to be unique and set you apart from your competition. However, it’s worth noting that there are some particular conventions in certain industries, such as using Blue in Finance, green in Real Estate, black in Education, and red in Air Travel.
Knowing about these conventions can help ensure that your brand’s identity both fits in with industry norms and that it can be crafted to make you stand out.
Create a moodboard and mock-ups
Once you have a good grasp of the visual trends in your sector, it is time to create a mood board. This means collecting lots of visual ideas and images in one place to get an idea of what your final choices may be.
Start with any ideas and then refine as you go, add logo inspirations, brand mockups, fonts, and colours so you can get a good sense of how things will work together. You can even add designs from tools like this AI business card maker, which allows you to get a reasonable idea of what a card using some of your inspirations would look like. It’ll even mock up a logo for you. Also, for ease of use, it’s often a smart idea to use an online moodboard tool like Pinterest or Millanote.
Get a logo designed
After collecting the basics on your mood board, it’s time to refine your choices. You can also use it as an inspiration for one of the most important elements of the visual design process, your final logo design.
The final logo design is a task often best left to professional graphic designers. This is because they have all the experience and expertise to create the most effective design. Many complicated elements also go into making a logo, from ensuring it’s a vector image to making sure the color profiles are right for both RGB and CMYK, and that it’s optimised for all the different platforms you’ll want to use it on.
Choose your other visual elements, including colour palettes and typography
After your logo has been created, you can choose the other visual elements to go with it, including colours and typography. It’s important to remember that there are graphic design rules that need to be put to play here. Once such a rule is that picking only three colours can work effectively for a brand identity if you use them in the 60%, 30% and 10 % proportions.
Additionally, when it comes to typography, choosing a single font family and getting variety by using different versions is nearly always better than spending ages trying to match up two or more different fonts!
Distill all this information into a brand style guide
Lastly, once you have done all of these tasks, or have a professional design to do them for you, you will need to create a brand style guide. This is a document that holds all this information, so when you, your employees, other designers or anyone else does work that involves your visual identity, they will have a clear guide on what to stick to, ensuring consistency across different people and time.
This article may contain affiliate links, which means we may earn a commission if you purchase through these links. This comes at no additional cost to you and helps support the operations of The We Spot—thank you for your support! The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The We Spot, its owners, employees, sponsors, or affiliates. This content is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, medical, or therapeutic advice. Readers should consult a qualified professional before making any decisions based on the information provided.
