While your logo and the other visual elements that you use to promote your business are key parts of strong branding, your brand identity needs to go deeper. Your brand identity is about the message you convey to your customers. You need to communicate your products or services in a way that makes people want to interact with your brand.
Once you have established your business’s values and mission, you can begin to come up with creative ways to visually depict your brand. Developing a strong brand identity doesn’t have to be all hard work though. You can have fun along the way.
1. Create a Meaningful Logo
Your logo should sum up your brand identity, so it’s one of the most important elements of your branding.
You need a good business logo because it will often be the first point of contact that prospective customers have with your company, so you need to ensure your logo is memorable, engaging, and sums up what your products or services are all about.
Your logo should also be simple and appropriate for the target audience. You need to consider how your logo will look on different products and in different sizes too.
It’s a good idea to look at famous brands to see how professionals use imagery, colors, and messaging in their logos.
If suitable for your brand, logos can be a lot of fun. For instance, when you use an online photo editing tool, you can do things like turn pictures into comic book art to make your imagery engaging and stand out from the competition.
2. Use a Unique Color Palette
You need to carefully consider the colors you use in your logo and then use the same color palette across all of your branding. It’s a good idea to go with a unique color palette, but you also need to ensure you use the right colors to convey the messaging of your brand.
For instance, cool colors like blue and green are suitable for the healthcare, insurance, and environmental industries, while warm colors like red and yellow are more suitable for trendy products, such as energy drinks or online casinos.
Limit the colors you use to two or three and try combining different colors to see what works well and which colors best represent your brand identity.
3. Choose an Appropriate Typeface
Don’t overlook the fact that fonts are images. Choosing the right typeface for your brand is just as important as the logo that you design and the colors you select.
Different typefaces can convey different meanings. For example, if you sell luxury products, you’ll want to go with an elegant font whereas if you sell items that are targeted to a young audience, you’ll want to consider trendy and modern typefaces.
Compare different typefaces, or even create your own font, to make sure you choose the right one for your brand identity. Also, ensure the typeface you select looks good in the colors you’re considering using.
4. Ensure All of Your Imagery Is Consistent
One of the key elements of strong branding is consistency. So, when designing your logo, choosing a color palette, and selecting a typeface, you need to make sure that it all works together well.
You also need to use consistent graphics and imagery in your branding. Whether it’s social media ads, website photos, or email newsletters, your visual elements, just like the colors and fonts you use, need to be consistent across all of your channels.
For example, you might choose to be edgy and use black and white photographs across all of your promotional channels or you could use the same filter for all of the images you use to give them a uniform feel that matches your brand.
