What is Visual Brand Identity? Importance & How to Build
Visual brand identity is considered a "portrait" that describes the brand through a set of tangible elements. Thanks to that, customers can easily distinguish this brand from other brands. From product packaging to images posted on social networks or website design, everything must be based on a certain principle.
So, what is visual brand identity? Why is it important? And how is it expressed? Let's find out the details through the information below.
What is Visual Brand Identity?
Visual brand identity is a synthesis of visual elements used to represent and differentiate a brand. They include all images, brand colors, logos, and fonts. In other words, visual brand identity is all the details that customers can see and feel with their eyes to help distinguish your brand from other brands.
According to Jared Rosen, Senior Brand Director at Wayfair, “Brand identity is more than just finding the right logo to put on a mug or hang outside a store. It is also about creating a personality that communicates the core values of the brand. Today, brand identity extends to digital platforms and even in conversations with customers.”
Thus, visual brand identity is an aspect of a brand that focuses on the distinctive characteristics that can be imprinted in the minds of customers through a brand identity system or set.
What is the Importance of a Visual Brand Identity?
Visual brand identity is the image of a company that consumers can see, hear, and feel. That is why building an effective identity is extremely important.
Create a Difference
A unique and impressive visual brand identity will create a clear difference between brands.
Color and design style on the website are two main factors that help your brand do this. According to KissMetric's research, the appearance of brand color on the website will increase recognition by 80%, so color is essential in creating a difference.
The second difference is the design style, this factor plays a role in influencing customers' emotions, expressing brand personality, and conveying messages to customers.
For example, the Coca-Cola carbonated soft drink brand's message focuses on evoking a feeling of warmth, comfort, and closeness to customers. So, the website is designed in a simple, concise style with a picture of a group of people chatting happily. The navigation bar above is also designed in a minimalist style.
A unique and impressive visual brand identity will create a clear difference between brands.
Another brand, Coca-Cola's competitor, the Pepsi brand, with the message of sharing moments of youth, targets a group of enthusiastic young customers, so their website design chooses dynamic colors. Creative fonts accurately represent the personality of the target customer group that Pepsi wants to target.
Visual brand identity helps express the brand and give customers a personalized experience.
So, to show the difference in Visual Brand Identity, you need to rely on the foundation of Brand Identity and Brand Guidelines to determine the message to convey, target customers, and standards in the design of the brand. Thereby building visual brand identities that are unique and memorable for the brand.
Connect with Customers
A brand that creates attraction will connect with customers. Visual brand identity helps express the brand and give customers a personalized experience. For example, the logo can be considered the face of the brand. The more characteristic and concise the "face" is, the more empathy and attachment it creates with customers.
Logos, images, designs, etc., are the first elements that customers notice. These are built to target the brand's target customers. Therefore, as soon as they visit the website, customers will feel the suitability of the brand for themselves through the elements of visual brand identity, which helps the brand connect with customers even when they have not learned about your business.
For example, young, dynamic customers will want to find brands that bring them a sense of suitability, such as creativity, color, and strong personality expression.
To be able to connect with your customers, the first thing to do is to identify who your customers are. What is their personality like? What do they expect when they come to your brand? From there, build a suitable Visual Brand Identity to attract and connect with them.
Building Brand Personality
An effective visual brand identity system will help build a business personality by creating a unique image in the minds of target customers. This image conveys stories to evoke positive emotions related to the product.
Accordingly, the brand uses identity-building techniques that are linked to all products and brand activities. For example, the logo of the luxury fashion brand Louis Vuitton has become a timeless symbol. Inspired by ancient Roman fonts, the letter V overlapping the letter L in a handwritten style is a testament to durability and luxury.
Creating Consistency
Consistency is important, especially with visual brand identity. Consistency and unity in brand identity will improve customer experience, helping customers easily recognize the brands they have used before. The more recognizable a brand is, the more it attracts and is trusted by customers.
In addition, with the market being flooded with counterfeit goods, consistency will help your brand gain the trust of customers. Customers also feel more secure when using the product.
Brand consistency is shown through factors such as the main color of the website being consistent with the brand color, the font being consistent for all platforms, the design style in the brand's activities, etc.
The consistency of each brand is shown in the Brand Guidelines, based on the pre-built brand standards. Building a website on those principles will ensure your website is consistent.
Having a solid brand identity system is the foundation for creating consistent messages and communication campaigns. When brand activities closely follow the guidelines of the brand identity, it will create a deep memory in the customer's perception.
What Elements Does a Visual Brand Identity System Include?
After understanding the importance of visual brand identity, the next content in the article will introduce some elements in the visual brand identity set.
Logo
A logo is a symbol that helps identify a brand easily and directly. Combining many elements such as color, shape, characters, and sometimes even a tagline, the overall logo will represent the brand and evoke positive emotions in the viewer. No matter what type of logo you use, it needs to convey the visual brand identity.
Logos also appears everywhere, such as in offices, billboards, websites, emails, and many other media. So, it is often the most well-known in the visual brand identity system.
Choosing the location of the logo on the website to increase brand recognition is a very important factor. You cannot put the logo everywhere on the website. It is not only ineffective but also shows that your brand lacks sophistication in building the website. The positions where you can put the logo to promote effectiveness are the navigation bar, website footer, and in article illustrations. These are the positions where customers interact the most on the website, so brand recognition will be significantly increased when the logo appears in these positions.
A logo usually has 3 roles, as follows: identification, differentiation, and imprinting. This means that it represents the brand in the most objective way, creating a difference from the logos of competitors and helping customers easily remember it.
Most brands choose a logo that contains both the name and the symbol to complement each other. This way of expressing both emphasizes the name and conveys the unique core characteristics of the product. For example, Nike, KFC, and LG. In addition, there are many brands that only use names such as DHL, Netflix or only use symbols such as Apple, Starbucks.
Font
The font is often less noticeable, but it is the key to bringing sophistication to the brand. When designing fonts, businesses should consider a number of issues to make the right choice as follows:
What personality does the business want to convey through the font?
Will a different or easy-to-read font be suitable for the product?
A font that looks modern or traditional?
Is more than one font needed?
Typography
According to Robert Bringhurst, writer, photographer, and author of The Elements of Typographic Style, "Typography is the art of making words visible." Typography - including everything from typeface to kerning size (spacing between characters) - is extremely important in evoking customers' emotions, creating recognition, and expressing the personality of the brand.
Professional typography often has the following characteristics:
Readability
Flexibility
Versatility
Message Conveyance
Brand Colors
Colors can have a strong impact on customers' attitudes and emotions towards the brand. In addition, colors also help customers remember your brand more, so this is a very important factor in visual brand identity.
To be able to promote the effectiveness of visual brand identity, you need to have knowledge of color psychology and the meaning of colors - they will help a lot in the process of creating and building a brand. Choose colors that are suitable for the brand and highly applicable because they will be used for many diverse design purposes.
For example, let's see how successful the brown-gold color in the logo of the global logistics corporation UPS has been. In fact, brown is not a favorite color of many people, but the company decided to use it from the beginning to reflect its luxury and professionalism.
Up to now, the company has turned it into its iconic identity and become a big idea in the marketing campaign: "What can brown do for you?". Brown appears on the uniforms of more than three hundred thousand employees worldwide and the entire UPS transportation system. This uniformity in color has made a strong impression on UPS customers.
Although many brands often use a main color, they also develop a color palette to bring diversity and eye-catching to marketing publications.
Graphic elements
The design style used in the website (advertising and marketing publications) is also an important factor. Graphic design elements that are consistent with your brand development orientation (such as images, symbols, colors, spaces, etc.) will help your brand stand out from competitors, make customers remember more, and help them easily recognize your brand in the market.
Images
There is a saying, "An image is worth a thousand words." Images and videos will make the brand story appear before the eyes of customers. According to research by 3M Corporation, humans process visual data 60,000 times faster than text. So, using images effectively will help customers recognize your brand more quickly through factors such as style, layout, and theme shows.
When choosing images for your website or social media posts, make sure that the content is relevant to the image, the style and layout are consistent. This is key to increasing brand recognition in images.
Here are some essential elements of brand imagery:
Team portraits
Lifestyle images
Product photos/videos
Social media post photos
How to Build a Visual Brand Identity?
A strong visual brand identity creates a cohesive look and represents your brand across all platforms. Here’s a step-by-step guide:
Understand the Brand
To ensure that the identity is consistent with the brand values and conveys the entire brand story, you first need to have a deep understanding of that brand.
What is the brand's mission?
What are the core values of the brand?
Current and future brand personality? Brand positioning (how you make yourself different) differentiate from competitors)
These are questions that need to be answered before forming ideas about visual brand identity. You should think carefully and link them together before starting to design.
Research Customers and Competitors
Building a visual brand identity is about creating a difference and making it unique. Therefore, besides understanding who your competitors are, you need to know how to make your brand stand out in the minds of your target customers.
What is the target audience attracted to? How to approach them? What identities are your competitors using, and are they effective? From there, discover the touch points that help you win in the perception of customers.
Write a Brief about the Brand
When you complete the above steps, you will have the necessary information to start designing. However, the brand identity designer should not start right away. Create a brief that outlines the core directions for the identity system. This ensures that the design team does not get sidetracked during the creative process.
Design the Visual Identity Elements
The identity system is a complex design system. Depending on the characteristics of each product, each business chooses different brand identity components.
For example, for service businesses such as restaurants and airlines, identification through service staff uniforms is essential. Meanwhile, back office departments of software development companies that have little direct interaction with customers often ignore this element to optimize costs.
The elements in the brand identity system all influence each other, and the logo is usually the soul of the brand identity system. Once the logo is created, other components can easily be developed accordingly.
Build Visual Brand Guidelines
The final step in building a visual brand identity is to set standards and guidelines for use in the brand guideline. This is the standard measure for using the brand identity.
Typically, the elements included in the visual brand guideline often play an important role in the identity. A complete guide includes how to use the logo, colors, fonts, and media publication standards.
Notes for Building a Visual Brand Identity
A visual brand identity will reflect the values that the business pursues and is suitable for the target audience. Some aspects to keep in mind when building a visual identity system include:
Distinctiveness: Stand out from competitors and attract the attention of the public.
Memorable: Create a visual and memorable symbol.
Scalable: Can be expanded and developed with the brand.
Flexible: Can be used on many different platforms and applications. Cohesion: Each element can complement each other to form a unified whole
Easy to apply: Easy to use for designing marketing publications.
Conclusion
Customers always process visual information faster than words. That is why leading companies always focus on visual brand identity and the emotional touches it creates. This is a powerful tool to create differentiation as well as positive emotions. Developing a creative visual brand identity will help businesses make a good impression at every touch point.