In our last blog, we outlined what a bold business was, but in this piece, we’re going to break down how we design brands for bold businesses.
Often ‘visual identity’ and ‘brand design’ get used interchangeably, but that is a gross oversimplification that leads to confusion.
Your brand design includes your visual identity but your visual identity does not equal your brand. Very much a rectangle/square sort of situation.
We’ve broken a brand design project into four specific steps.
And each of these steps can be expanded and condensed depending on the project's needs.
Let’s talk through each of these steps and what we’re thinking through when it comes to bold businesses.
Research & Discovery
This is our chance to become outside experts on your business and industry. The goal is to understand the landscape at large and where your unique business fits in and where it could stand out. At this stage we are conducting user interviews with your team, customers, and users. We want to know what people think of your business and more specifically how they feel when they think about your brand.
We are looking for themes and trends.
Is everyone saying the same thing? Are there contradictions within or between the groups? Are the responses inline with the explicit goal or vision of the company? Why, why, and why?
Once we understand where you’re currently standing with all relevant parties, and we understand the product and emotional landscape of the industry, we couple that with the overall company goals, and we dive into possible positionings and brand directions.
Once we have a general direction for the brand positioning, we dive into building your visual identity.
Building your visual identity
We use the research and insights we’ve gathered to understand who your various audiences are and how we want them to feel when they think about your brand.
And for a bold business, we want to get as specific and granular as possible. We are looking for contradictory feelings that allow us to build nuance into your brand. You’re not just another workout brand that is clean and powerful. You're powerful and playful. You’re clean and chaotic. These tensions give us unique spaces to play, and offer opportunities to take a stance or at least stand out.
This is how designing for bold businesses is different. We’re not looking to industry leaders to see how they are moving and shaking or following any set of expectations. We are looking to artists and creatives, architects and musicians, coffee shops and industrial designers – we are looking for design inspiration that makes us feel something.
At this step we create your core brand assets.
Logo system
Fonts
Colors
Characters or mascots
Icons
Core illustrations
Brand patterns
Photography style guide
And on and on. These are the foundation of your visual identity.
Once we have the foundation of your visual identity set, we start the next step which is implementing it.
Implementation
The key to all good branding is consistency.
And this means that once we have your visual identity designed, we use it as our framework to build the rest of your brand. From your website to social media to packaging and store design. Your visual identity acts as a guide for how to design everything else.
This is because consistency and repetition builds trust. Most of your customers are going to interact with your brand multiple times before they actually give you a penny. And it is your job to set an expectation for what they are signing up for before they actually buy from you.
This means creating a customer experience that feels consistent and cohesive from start to finish. This means from the very first ad to the final thank you note in their package, the customer experience is just that, an experience.
Operations
Step 4 is the least obvious part of brand design and it is where a bold business stands apart. Because as we outlined above, your brand is more than just your visual identity.
It is ultimately how your users, customers, and employees feel about your business. And while a cool logo and fun colors are great (we obviously love these) it is nothing compared to how your business operates.
So this is the final step. Using your brand to inform your business decisions at the operational level.
Some of this is obvious. If a core brand tenet is environmentalism, you must make sure your packaging is environmentally friendly. Reduce the amount of packaging you need, use things such as QR codes to decrease print materials. But that’s the start.
For a bold business, this could mean only offering a digital magazine instead of printing an annual catalog. Or donating a percentage of profits to sustainable organizations. It could also mean decreasing the number of in-person meetings to cut back on the need of your employees to drive into work or fly to conferences. It could mean openly supporting legislation or candidates that are going to fight climate change.
It is in these kinds of steps, the steps that go beyond vanity metrics and beyond expectations, that are truly bold.
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About The Author
Olivia Wisden is the Founder + CEO of TwoLips Creative. She has worked with dozens of brands over the years ranging from city initiatives to product launches and beyond. When she’s not fan-girling over the design team’s illustrations she can probably be found reading a novel or exploring her new home of Chicago.