How to Elevate Your Brand Identity Design With These 4 Components
Tom Brinker
This post was originally published in May 2019 and has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.
In this over-saturated market, your branding helps you stand out and stay top-of-mind for your prospects. In this chapter, we will go over how to make an impactful brand identity design.
We will also go over:
- Why is brand identity important?
- 4 brand identity components
- Look & Feel
- Logo
- Colors
- Fonts
B2B Marketing Strategy Framework: The Ultimate Guide to Business Branding
Learn how to build a strong brand experience with our downloadable guide.
Why is brand identity important?
Brand identity is important because it transforms your brand into a memorable and relatable one that resonates with your audience. Depending on your color choices, logo, and other design choices, you can affect how your audience perceives your company and company offerings.
Keep in mind that — like every other aspect of running a business — you can always make updates or even change major aspects of your brand identity. We’ll even explore how our branding has changed over the past 16+ years.
Even if you’re a B2B company, you still need a well-thought-out brand design. After all, you are appealing to human decision-makers — not the business entity as a whole.
So what should you think about when you start your brand identity design process?
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4 Core Brand Identity Components
From our experience, you need to establish these four core brand identity components before rolling out any new marketing assets:
- Look & Feel
- Logo
- Colors
- Fonts
If you don’t know where to begin, start by exploring your competitors within your industry. Make a note of what you like and dislike about each organization’s branding. From there, you can start ideating on how your company can visually stand out from the competition.
1. Look & Feel
Start by asking yourself:
- What message and feeling do I want people to get when they interact with our brand?
For example, you might want to convey a feeling of genuine care if you’re a nonprofit, strength if you’re a cybersecurity company, or even luxury if you sell high-end tech products.
When we conceptualized our design, we wanted to convey a feeling of authority and reliability. Our goal is to come across as professional without being too cold.
Keep in mind that developing a memorable brand requires a base understanding of:
- How to establish a direction for your brand
- Basic graphic design principles
- Which colors and elements work well together to represent your brand personality
- What kind of variants will be needed for different usages (for example, digital vs. print)
2. Logo
What do Apple, McDonald’s, and Nike have in common? They all have recognizable logos.
A striking logo should be legible — even on a relatively small screen. It should not use too many colors at once and convey your look and feel from the icon alone.
Take our three logo ideations as an example. Over time, we opted for a more simple design with a brighter color scheme. No matter the style or form your logo takes, you should aim for a modern design that helps you stand out.
3. Colors
How you choose your brand colors will ultimately depend on how you want to define your brand personality. That said, choosing the right brand colors can increase brand recognition by up to 80%.
We recommend choosing no more than three main colors to use in all your marketing materials. These colors need to have sufficient contrast between them for legibility — which means you’ll need some additional auxiliary colors specifically for text. To check the level of contrast, we recommend running your hex color code through WebAIM: Contrast Checker.
Some interesting facts to consider about brand colors:
- The color blue appears in 39% of logos for Fortune 500 companies, which implies a higher level of effectiveness and sense of credibility for tech branding.
- The color black is said to represent traits like “luxury” and “formality” in branding.
- Perceptions of colors are not universal and can vary from culture to culture. You may need to tailor your branding depending on where your buyers are located.
4. Fonts
Obviously, you need to choose a legible font when defining your brand identity. However, you can still be creative with your font choice. Select a font style that matches the look and feel you’re going for with your brand, but remember that it should not distract or detract from what you are writing to your prospects and buyers.
In the world of fonts, you can choose between serif (fonts with longer strokes at the top or bottom of the letter) or sans-serif (fonts with a more balanced stroke style).
Studies show that serif fonts are more legible on print documents because the longer strokes help guide the eye across the page. Typically, serif fonts are used to evoke a more traditional and educated feel — which is why many universities and law firms opt for a serif typeface.
On the other hand, sans-serif fonts tend to be more legible on digital screens. These fonts’ clean and rounded look tends to be easier for the eyes. Corporations that utilize sans-serif fonts tend to showcase their modernity and cutting-edge technology — such as tech firms and video game creators.
After you compile all four of your brand identity components, make sure you record it in a brand guideline document. If you need an example, feel free to explore our own brand guidelines.
B2B Marketing Strategy Framework: The Ultimate Guide to Business Branding
Learn how to build a strong brand experience with our downloadable guide.
Perfecting your logo design and branding
Establishing your brand identity design early on helps you remain memorable for your prospects and buyers. Make sure you formalize your current branding before creating any new marketing campaigns — then create a sharable brand guideline handbook.
As a reminder, the four brand identity components are:
- Look & Feel
- Logo
- Colors
- Fonts
Trusting someone to design your brand identity can be daunting. Many business leaders opt to hire an outsourced visual designer, as these designers are trained to create impactful branding across multiple industries. Visit our Graphic Design Branding page to learn more about EBQ’s design process.
