Your brand design is a core element of your overall brand and your visual identity is an important tool you can use to influence your audience's perception of your brand. Is your brand authoritative, heroic, irreverent, masculine, playful, intelligent or creative? Nothing answers that question quicker than your visual identity. When a prospective client visits your website, your colour and image choices, fonts and the mood of your design tells them exactly how to feel about your brand. That's why brand design is so important. It influences your audience into defining your brand in a certain way. If your visual identity does not match your brand positioning and values, it will disappoint, confuse and alienate your audience.
A logo is a mark and/or icon that encapsulates the essence and values of your organisation - but it can't do this alone. Effective logos are supported by a comprehensive brand visual identity. A brand identity, also known as a look and feel, generally includes elements such as fonts, colour palettes (primary and secondary), secondary design devices, an image or photographic style, icon and infographic styles and more. It is this toolkit, or suite of elements, that truly ensures the consistent representation of an organisation's brand with every execution. If you have a strong corporate identity, your brand will be immediately recognisable even if you place your hand over the logo.
A brand's visual identity is the sum total of everything your audience can see when they look at your brand. Together, all of these visual elements tell a story, and that story can reaffirm your essence and values - or take away from them.
For more information, download our Guide to Brand Identity.
Your logo and visual identity is the public expression of your brand. It is your unique identity and its role is to communicate your brand essence. Strong logo creation begins well before a design studio gets involved. A successful logo is underpinned by your brand positioning: your essence, your values, your tone of voice. The research and insights that form the foundation of your brand positioning come to life visually via your logo.
Having a timeless logo ensures longevity. A timeless logo will stand strong over the decades. By ensuring your logo is timeless, you're future-proofing your brand and the recognition and awareness you will build via investment in your brand. As an example, Commonwealth Bank's logo has essentially remained the same since 1989. Choosing classic colours and fonts will enable your branding to remain relevant over the long term.
When a logo is simple, it is easily recognisable - and a logo should identify a company at first glance. A simple logo is generally more memorable. Simple, memorable logos are important, especially in today's environment where consumers are surrounded by brands all day, every day. Consider outdoor advertising, where people might only get a quick glance at a billboard as they drive past on the freeway. And don't be afraid of white space - white space lets your brand breathe. Think of the Coca Cola logo - simple, classic and distinctive.
Be sure to conduct a thorough review of the competitive landscape to ensure your branding stands out amongst the crowd. Show the proposed logo to a selection of people to get their thoughts and ensure your brand can't be easily confused with other brands - including those outside your category.
An effective logo needs to balance versatility and adaptability with integrity. Over time, you'll need to use your logo across many different applications. Does it work on web - PCs, tablets, mobiles? Does it work when it's very small? What about engraved, like on pens, or stitched, like on uniforms? How does it sit alongside other logos, like in a sponsorship situation? Will you use the icon as a stand-alone device, or will your company name always be locked to your icon? A versatile logo is more likely to be used accurately. A logo that is inflexible will undoubtedly be compromised by designers or employees who require a different style or layout to suit their immediate needs.
The development of a strong visual language across a comprehensive look and feel will give your brand the correct mix of consistency and flexibility. It will allow your advertising and collateral to consistently align with your brand, while reducing reliance on any single element and allowing enough flexibility to build distinction between different pieces of communication.
Finally, an effective logo will be appropriately designed to both communicate your brand essence, and conform to the personality and professionalism of your brand. A fun and youthful B2C logo and identity would be entirely inappropriate if it were pitched for a corporate and more serious financial services brand. An appropriate logo is designed in a manner that creates sense and meaning around your company and what it stands for. This can be conveyed through the logo icon, typography, colours and other secondary design devices.
To design a great brand logo and visual identity, designers need to understand your brand - its history, its values and what it stands for. That's why our designers get involved at the strategy development stage - to enable a seamless translation of your brand strategy to your brand design. Our designers will use your brand positioning as inspiration for developing a logo that represents the essence of your organisation. The logo itself will form the foundation for a supporting look and feel - or visual language - that facilitates consistent communication of your brand across all media. Our designers use visual language to tell your brand's story, including photography and imagery, fonts and colours and secondary design devices that simultaneously encapsulate the fundamentals of your brand while differentiating you from your competitors.
BrandMatters can create a new logo and visual identity for you, evolve your current logo or refine and build out your current look and feel.
Our experienced in-house design team will ensure your brand identity is rolled out consistently across every visual touch point. Depending on your needs, we can design entirely new collateral for your newly created or relaunched brand, use your existing brand guidelines to develop aligned collateral, or simply make minor changes to your existing designs.
We can help you with stationery and templates, business cards, brochures, annual reports, print advertising, signage, packaging and more.
Our designers have a real passion for digital design, and keenly follow new thinking and developments in the field. They understand the criticality of your digital design reflecting your brand's personality - and the practicalities of user experience. They also understand the huge impact that the digital world now has on driving business, and the crucial role that digital design plays.
You can talk to us about website design, banners, electronic direct mail (eDM), PowerPoint and other Microsoft templates, digital advertising, app iconography and design and more.
Strong, enduring brands are built and strengthened over time through consistent application. A professionally developed set of brand guidelines introduces and explains your brand, explains the logo and its rationale, and spells out the way your brand's logo and visual identity must be used in order to maintain its integrity. Brand guidelines, also sometimes called a brand style guide, generally include sections on logo specifications, primary and secondary colour palettes, design devices, fonts, photographic or image style, iconography and usage examples across different types of collateral.
The BrandMatters design team are experts in developing brand guidelines. We can create them from scratch for your new brand, or if you're not happy with your current brand guidelines we can refine or build them out for you.
Communication plays an important role in building a strong, enduring brand. Any communication coming from your brand needs to be clear, single-minded, consistent, and reflect your brand's personality.
Using your approved brand story, brand tone of voice, elevator statement and key messages, BrandMatters can craft compelling, appropriate copy for your website and/or any other digital or printed collateral your brand needs.