Branding 101: Creating the Visual Identity for Your Business
The Power of Visual Identity
Each of the design choices you make that website visitors, social media followers, and customers can see will impact how they approach your brand. Are you a fun-loving company that caters to a younger crowd? Do you create high-tech products that solve serious global problems? Are you a successful entrepreneur who’s reshaping the way we talk to one another? When done right, our brand visuals convey our brand’s personality, values, and mission without having to use any words. Think about your favorite clothing brand. What do you picture? Let’s use Athleta as an example. The logo is probably the first visual element that comes to my mind: The grey radial shape is one I’m very familiar with. It’s on their website, their social media, and it’s usually imprinted somewhere on their clothing. The second thing I think about when I think of Athleta is its physical imagery: Rather than include images of the clothing on its own, there’s often someone wearing Athleta clothes while hiking along a trail, walking on a beach, or working out in a studio. There’s so much that just these two visual elements tell us about this brand:- Athleta targets active female consumers; we see this in its images and CTAs. The fine touches and shape of the logo may suggest this as well.
- Athleta creates understated but highly functional clothing; we see this in the product photos as well as in the brand’s use of neutral colors and fonts across its designs.
- Athleta’s mission is to help customers have a healthier and more balanced life; we see this in its product photos, but we also get a sense of this from the simple symmetric structure of the logo.
How to Create a Visual Identity for Your Brand
Let’s walk through each of the elements you need to pull together to create your visual identity:The Color Palette
Like with everything else in business, you’re here to give your audience something they need, so they have to be at the forefront of your decisions — including which colors you put into your brand’s palette. So, where do you start in choosing a color palette for your site and other marketing channels? Let’s take a systematic approach. 1. Choose a Primary Color Go to the Canva color meanings and symbolism tool. Have a look through the colors and find one that feels good to you. Open up the page and read more about what the color means: You’ll find the following on each page:- A brief history on the color;
- How it’s been used by people over the years;
- What it’s symbolized over the years and around the world;
- How to use the psychology of the color to affect people (i.e. your audience);
- Alternate shades and colors if this particular one doesn’t send the right signals;
- Colors that pair nicely with this one.
Typography
The design and pairing of your fonts can greatly impact the way people respond to your brand and the words you’ve written about it. So, the goal with typography is to make your words easy to read while also giving hints about your company’s personality and style. 1. Understand Font Styles Figure out what style of font goes best with your brand identity. This is the simplest way to categorize fonts:- Sans serif: These are simple fonts without any “feet” (lines at the ends of letters).
- Serif: These are more traditional-looking fonts (the kinds you see in literature and newspapers) with feet.
- Script: These are cursive and curly fonts that mimic handwriting.
- Display: These are fonts designed specifically to appear in logos, hero images, and advertising because of their large, bold styling.
- Monospaced: These are fonts with characters that comprise the same amount of horizontal space, often resembling typewritten text.
- A font for your header text. It needs to look good in big sizes, be easy to read, and easy to identify from other text when scanning through a page or document.
- A font for your body text. It needs to look good in small sizes (16 pixels and up) and be highly legible.
- Optional: A font for your logo and hero images. It wouldn’t stray too far from the style of your headers, but if you need something a bit more decorative or unique, you can use a different font family for this.
Imagery
We can use this as a blanket category for any visual content you might use in your branding:- Photos
- Videos
- Illustrations
- Icons
- Backgrounds
- Textures
- Animations or GIFs
Logo
Your logo is the last of the visual elements you’ll need to invest some time in. The good news is that you’ve already done most of the legwork:- You’ve defined your brand’s identity.
- You’ve given your business a name.
- You’ve selected the main visual components that will represent your brand: colors, fonts, and images.
Wrapping Up
In the next post in this three-part series, we’re going to look at the next step: Getting your business online. We’ll take everything you’ve done so far in coming up with a business name, brand identity, and now visual identity, and put it towards your website and the marketing channels that are best for your business.Suzanne Scacca
Suzanne Scacca is a freelance writer by day, specializing in web design, marketing, and technology topics. By night, she writes about, well, pretty much the same thing, only those stories are set under strange and sometimes horrific circumstances.
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