What Is Involved in Creating a Brand Design?
If you use a branding agency to create your brand design, they will begin by gaining an in-depth understanding of your business and industry. It is essential to see your position among competitors to develop a strategy to enhance your standing. Understanding your target audience is also vital to customising your branding to appeal to them.
The research shapes your company’s persona, including defining its core values and ethos. The result will give you a visual identity, tone of voice and style, and guidelines. Much like creating a character in a novel, there are many aspects you need to consider and bring them together to create the final entity.
Logo
Your logo is your unique stamp for your brand. It will allow you to stand out from the competition and sums up everything about your company’s culture, values, and ethos with a single look. A good logo will be memorable, instantly recognisable, and allow its target audience to feel a connection to your brand.
Logo designs vary. Some feature a simple icon, while others display the brand name in a special font. Other logos may feature a pattern or texture. Our logo combines a simple icon with a striking font for a modern and creative vibe. Note that the icon is in yellow, associated with many positive traits that perfectly reflect our company, such as originality, creativity, energy, and warmth.
Designers will combine the psychology of colours and typography with appropriate imagery to create a logo. While the end result may look effortless, we can assure you that a lot of thought, research, creativity, and coffee went into creating the perfect logo for your brand!
Colour
The psychology of colours will be used across your entire brand, not just the logo. Colours appeal to our visual senses, invoke different emotions and responses depending on the colour used, and can even work for colour-blind people. For instance, marketing materials for a wellness brand may use the colour green in the background, which is associated with tranquillity and nature. Or a restaurant might use red in its branding as it is known to stimulate an appetite.
The choices of colours for your brand will depend on what impact you intend to have on your target audience. Do you want them to feel relaxed? Or how about inspired? The colours need to work with the rest of the elements to have the desired effect.
Typography
Typography refers to bringing the written word to life through typeface and font choices, how the words are structured and their appearance. It is possible to create a unique design with a common font by changing the spacing between letters, arranging characters differently, such as on a curve, and through the creative use of colour and patterns.
A different type of psychology applies to typography than to colours, yet it can still invoke certain emotions and responses in the target audience. We’re probably all familiar with Comic Sans MS, which can be seen as a playful and fun font as it was originally targeted at kids. It achieves its purpose by mimicking child-like handwriting. As hated as it is, Comic Sans MS is probably a great choice for a font for a toy store!
We also unknowingly make associations with different typefaces. A typeface refers to the visual design of the letters and characters that create a font, such as a serif font like Times New Roman. A font refers to the variation in size and weight of a typeface, so Times New Roman and Times New Roman Bold are two different fonts. Speaking of Times New Roman, if you regularly read a newspaper that uses this font, you might associate it with being serious, traditional, and official, and it might feel out of place when used for a fun brand.
The typography of your logo and your brand needs to be visually appealing to your target audience – kids are likelier to appreciate Comic Sans MS than Times New Roman. In contrast, it could be the reverse for a much older audience. It also should invoke the desired emotions, such as feeling lighthearted when looking at Comic Sans MS. The psychology of the colours used will also need to be considered in conjunction with the typography.
Imagery
When we talk about imagery, we refer to the images and icons used to represent your brand. Your logo may use an icon, shape or pattern, and your other marketing materials will also use pictures and illustrations, such as a pattern in the background on a brochure or buttons on your website.
The images used need to fit your brand. A picture of a nuclear power plant wouldn’t be on brand for a renewable energy company. However, pictures of healthy athletes doing sports would be a good fit for a business that sells nutritional supplements to fitness fanatics.
Images can also be used to convey emotion; for instance, you might use a photo of a person meditating with an idyllic backdrop on the header of a website for a wellness brand to convey calmness.
Video
Videos can also be a great asset to your brand identity and can be used to create a compelling brand story. Videos tend to be easier to digest than other forms of media, and there is a high preference for videos over text – you only need to spend some time on social media to see how popular videos are!
Does The Hideout Do Brand Design?
Branding is a big part of what we do at The Hideout. As a full-service creative agency, we can turn your bright spark of an idea into a fully-fledged brand and create your supporting marketing materials, including website and packaging design and digital and traditional marketing campaigns.
We don’t like to pigeonhole ourselves to any particular industry, as no two clients or projects are the same. Finding creative solutions for our clients gets us out of bed every morning! If you can’t find what you’re looking for in our services, please have a chat with one of our team to find out how we can create a bespoke solution for you.
