Brand Redesign: How to Refresh Your Brand for a Stronger Presence [Step-by-Step Guide]
David Miedzianowski
In 2025, the Commerce Institute estimated that over 4.5 million new businesses were started — a 56.7% increase since just five years earlier. With such an oversaturated market, companies must find creative ways to stay competitive. Our brand redesign guide can help you decide whether you should undergo a brand redesign.
Our 7 steps to a successful brand redesign include:
- Establish why you want a brand redesign
- Create a mood board
- Develop mockups of branded assets
- Finalize the brand book with the new branding guide
- Craft a creative brief
- Develop a redesign timeline
- Roll out your new assets
Before we dive into our redesign steps, it is important to take a deeper look at what a brand redesign versus a brand refresh is.
B2B Marketing Strategy Framework: The Ultimate Guide to Business Branding
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Brand Refresh vs. Brand Redesign: What’s the Difference?
A brand refresh involves adjusting small design elements of your overall brand, such as changing up a color or font, without changing your core identity.
Brand redesign, on the other hand, is creating a brand experience from the ground up to better align with current goals and audiences.
EBQ Tip
We often see business leaders undergo a mix of brand refresh and brand
As you continue working through your brand redesign process, a skilled graphic designer will help you identify aspects of the brand that resonate with your audience and elements you are willing to consider changing.
How to Redesign a Brand in 7 Steps
Before you get started, we highly recommend hiring an expert graphic design team that specializes in creating a multitude of branded marketing materials. Even undergoing a simple brand refresh will be a time-consuming process, so an experienced team of professionals will enable you to significantly shorten the redesign timeframe.
1. Establish why you want a brand redesign
“Start by asking yourself, ‘Why do I want new branding?’ Is it because I saw something on a billboard that inspired me? Or is it because I ran into a landing page that felt like it could use a refresh?” said Tom Brinker, VP of Marketing.
Your goal at this stage is to understand what sparked the desire for a rebranding. Is your brand out of date? Are you targeting new verticals? Or have competitors outpaced your messaging? Knowing the ‘why’ keeps your redesign grounded in business goals, not just aesthetics.
Business leaders often find that rebranding helps them reflect on their journey thus far and update their branding based on what they have learned. From there, your graphic designer should be able to ask some preliminary questions to guide the conceptualization step.
A few of the questions our graphic designers ask are:
- How would you like your clients to perceive you?
- Do your current marketing assets accurately reflect your brand values?
- What kind of colors are you drawn to?
- What kind of fonts do you want to use?
EBQ Tip
When considering which fonts to use, make sure to utilize a Google Font for the body of your text. These are free fonts that are legible on all kinds of media, including digital landing pages and physical sales collaterals.
2. Create a mood board
A mood board is a visual document that combines curated images and language to help stakeholders understand the emotional tone and creative direction of a rebrand. Your graphic designers are in charge of creating this board, which determines how you want your brand to be perceived and what design elements they are drawn to.
Your graphic designers should:
- Showcase serif and sans-serif typographies as examples
- Utilize multiple stock images of various themes
- Identify different iconography, shapes, and graphical elements
- Label with emotions (For instance, you can use “serious,” “playful,” or even “hopeful”)
EBQ Tip
We find that giving stakeholders a binary “yes” or “no” option reduces decision fatigue, which can accelerate your brand redesign process.
3. Develop mockups of branded assets
Mockups are a visual preview of how your branded assets would look on a static page. By developing a few mockups, you can inform your final branding guidelines based on your stakeholders’ preferences.
But first, you need to identify what the most important marketing assets are to your stakeholders. You can then share these identified assets with your graphic designers, who will then present you with a few mockup options for each material.
These are a few of the most common marketing assets to create mockups for:
- Home Page
- Services Page
- Sales Collaterals
- Business Cards
EBQ Tip
Keep in mind that there may be several rounds of presenting mockups to stakeholders. We recommend your graphic designers present no more than three asset mockups at a time to reduce choice paralysis.
4. Finalize the brand book with the new branding guide
A brand book is a detailed playbook that outlines how to create branded assets at scale. A few basic components include:
- Company values
- Brand personality
- Brand voice
- Logo colors (with HTML color codes)
- Typography (font size and color)
EBQ Tip
5. Craft a creative brief
A creative brief is a one-page document that summarizes how your marketing team should portray your brand. Unlike a brand book, it should also include your buyer personas and competitors to outline how to communicate with your target audience.
A well-defined creative brief should also have:
- Brand objectives
- Target audience
- Brand voice
- Key stakeholders and responsibilities
In the future, your creative brief should serve as a reference for content creation and graphic design.
6. Develop a redesign timeline
Congratulations! At this point, your stakeholders have approved the redesign direction and a few mockups. Now, it’s time to figure out how to roll out the rebranding project to ensure every marketing material matches your new brand guidelines.
Take an inventory of your library of assets and determine how long it takes to develop each type of asset. With this timeline, you can proactively manage expectations while allowing your graphic designers time to rebrand your assets.
From there, create a design timeline that outlines the following elements:
- Final delivery milestones to indicate when the full redesign will be completed
- Target due dates for each deliverable
- Assigned team members and their responsibilities
- Review and approval checkpoints
- Dependencies or blockers
7. Roll out your new assets
Now, the real work begins. Your graphic designer, web developer, and copywriters are hard at work ensuring that the updated brand voice and guidelines are properly reflected on each asset.
Here are some final best practices to take into consideration:
- Do not update your site during peak traffic hours
- Utilize a project management software to keep track of real-time progress
- Do not trash old assets, as they can inform the success of your redesign
- Save new assets in a centralized location for better distribution
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EBQ: Brand rebranding done right
Your B2B brand is more than just a logo and color palette; it is a way to help your brand stand out by creating a memorable experience for your prospects and customers.
B2B Marketing Strategy Framework: The Ultimate Guide to Business Branding
Learn how to create a strategy that generates, qualifies, and converts marketing leads and increases sales.
By hiring a team of accomplished graphic designers, you create new branded assets with your updated look and feel that foster a positive brand experience for your customers. From sales collaterals to landing pages, our graphic designers are masters at blending design best practices with industry standards to drive a strong brand presence from the start.
About the Author:
David is a Revenue Cycle Consultant at EBQ who leverages his experience as a former VP of Sales to align sales and marketing teams for measurable results. With expertise in B2B digital marketing and demand generation, he helps businesses optimize strategies for long-term success.