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Branding Series Stage 04 of 04

Brand
Design

How brand personality becomes something people can actually see.

Rohit 6 min read
Recap
Stage 01 — Brand Discovery: Conversations with stakeholders to gather direct inputs. Stage 02 — Research: Primary research with customers and secondary research on competition and industry. Stage 03 — Brand Strategy: Turning insights into purpose, promise, practice, narrative and positioning.
This is the last stage of the series — where everything we’ve explored about the brand finally takes visual shape.
01

Why is it so important?

We arrive at brand personality through conversations with stakeholders and industry and competitive research, while working alongside on brand strategy. All of this becomes raw material to work on the visual identity of the brand.

Visual identity is the face of your brand. The personality we’ve built needs a visual for the audience to relate to.

Brand design also helps in making sure of consistency in communication — colours, imagery, graphics, patterns, icons, everything that is visible to the audience.

02

How do we create a good brand design?

Good brand design follows a sequence — five steps that take a brand from feeling to form.

Step 1
Personality Slider
Step 2
Mood Board
Step 3
Logo Direction
Step 4
Logo Design
Step 5
Brand Usage Book

Step 1 — Personality Slider. I believe this is a good starting point for brand visual identity design. It answers some very important questions that decide how your brand is going to look — is it playful or serious, unconventional or mainstream, approachable or elite? We plot every trait on a slider like this:

Brand personality slider showing seven traits plotted on a spectrum

Every point is checked on the slider, so we know exactly what kind of visual identity we’re creating.

Step 2 — Mood Board. We have a direction now. It’s time to work on a couple of moodboards to arrive at the look and feel. A moodboard is a collage, and it contains font system, colour scheme, indicative photography, and graphics or textures.

Work on as many moodboards as you want, but don’t present more than 3 options to the client — they tend to get confused. Connect every moodboard back to the personality we’ve already worked on.

Step 3 — Logo Direction. Basis the moodboards, we now work on logo direction. Clients may not be able to visualise the logo unit with the moodboards alone, hence it is good to work on logo directions — each moodboard gets one. Now the client is able to see how their logo will look. It’s good to show them some mock-ups so they can visualise it better.

Step 4 — Logo Design. Once the client has taken a decision on one logo direction, it’s time to get into the details — logo construction, golden ratio, typeface clean-up, logo colours, refinement of the logo mark, and the logo suite (primary logo, secondary logo, logo mark, word mark) etc.

Do print the logo in different sizes and on different papers too, to see the output. What we see on screen versus print can be very different.

Step 5 — Brand Usage Book. The brand book is the holy bible. It is important to document each and everything that may come to use when someone is building communication for the brand. One must show examples, so it’s easy for anyone to understand and implement.

A brand isn’t truly built until it’s seen, felt and remembered — that’s exactly what good design does.

Have questions about brand design?
Reach out — I am happy to help you think it through.

rohit@narrative.asia
Let’s give your brand a face worth remembering.