How creatives can streamline the branding process to design an effective, professional brand identity ASAP.
Creating a compelling brand identity doesn’t have to be a months-long process. If you’re setting up a new business or have a tight client deadline to meet, you need to have a brand-building strategy on hand that’s both efficient and effective.
Here I’ll share a quick five-step strategy for creating a complete brand identity that looks professional and stylish. Read on to discover tips for designing an effective logo, plus how to introduce color, fonts, and marketing concepts. You’ll also learn how to present your shiny new brand using simple and striking mockups.
What Do I Need to Create a Brand Identity?
Branding refers to the visual identity of a business, company, or individual. A business’ brand identity can help it to stand out in the market and make the brand instantly recognizable and memorable for customers.
A brand identity usually includes a logo or brandmark, variations of the logo (such as icons), a color palette, and typography (print and web fonts, as well as guidance on how those fonts should be used). It can also extend to visual rules about how photography, illustration, and graphics should be presented on the business’ website and across print materials, such as stationery, signage, and packaging.
A Quick-Start Strategy for Building a Brand Identity
In this article, we’ll look at how graphic designers and marketers, as well as creatives looking to design their own brand identity, can streamline the branding process, creating an effective and professional identity in a short space of time.
The five steps for building a brand identity include working on:
- A Moodboard: Begin by creating a moodboard for your brand. Compile inspirational examples taken from photography, packaging design, brand design, and the visual identities of competitor brands.
- The Logo: As the anchor of your brand identity, start the design process with drafting logo designs and refining a favored design. Consider how the logo could team with marketing visuals on a broader level. How will it work alongside photography or illustrations for editorial ads or social media?
- The Color Palette: Introduce color into your logo design and marketing visuals. Experiment with a wide variety of palettes until you feel you’ve struck the right tone for the industry and the brand itself.
- Type: Experiment with font pairings alongside your logo and marketing visuals. Consider the impact of different type styles on websites and apps, and how this will translate to print media, such as stationery and packaging.
- Mockups: Now that you have the core elements of your brand prepared, create mockups that demonstrate how the brand identity would look “in action.” These could include mockups of packaging, signage, website layouts, social media posts, or stationery items.
Optional Additional Steps:
Graphics and Photography: Your logo design and/or marketing visuals might already have given you some ideas for how additional graphics (such as icons or illustrations) or photography might fit into your brand identity. If not, it’s worth considering how images should appear on the brand’s digital and print media.
We’ll use the example of a pet grooming parlor, Scruffs, to put this five-step process into practice. Scruffs is a new business in need of a complete brand identity, ready for the parlor’s opening weekend only a few days away. Aside from the brand name, the business is lacking all the vital elements of a workable brand identity, so we’ve got some work to do!
1. Moodboard
First up, we need to collate our inspiration and ideas, and there’s no better way to do this than with an old-fashioned moodboard.
Whether you prefer the ease of a quick Pinterest board or use Photoshop or InDesign to group your images together, the goal of this exercise is to identify the visual elements you feel consistently drawn to. Whether it’s a particular color palette, type design, or photography style, a moodboard can help you to formalize your ideas and give your brand project a clear direction from the outset.
Combine images you’re drawn to from other creative fields—such as photography, illustration, or film—with examples of brand identities, packaging designs, and stationery designs that catch your eye. Also be sure to consider the branding styles used by competitors within the same industry—these will give you a good sense of whether your own brand ideas will fit well within the sector.
2. Logo
You might already have some ideas about color, type, or photography from your moodboard, but resist the urge to disappear down the design rabbit hole. A strong logo is the cornerstone of any brand identity, and will make an appearance on everything, from signage to business cards.
When I’m creating a brand identity, I always begin with drafting logo designs. Often, a logo design can lead almost naturally to other elements of your brand identity, informing the typography and stylistic personality of your website or business cards, for example.
Whether you prefer to draft logo designs by hand or favor digital sketching in Illustrator, aim to fill a large canvas with plenty of quickly-constructed styles, working rapidly as you go. Try a variety of pictographic icons and type-based logos—perhaps some of these will work well together in the final brand identity.
After your initial sketching, identify the designs that have the most visual impact, and continue to refine these. Eventually you’ll have a design that’s approaching the final desired result. Once you have refined your logo design, make sure to convert it into vector (EPS) format on Adobe Illustrator or Affinity Designer. For hand-sketched designs, scan or photograph your drawing before tracing over the image on-screen.
To make sure your logo design is going to be a strong foundation for the rest of the brand identity, try pairing the design with imagery—such as stock photography—to mimic how marketing visuals would look and see how everything gels together.
3. Color
While a logo is the foundation of a brand identity, color defines a brand’s personality. Able to transform the mood and feel of a brand instantly, the right color palette can help a business to feel suited to the chosen market. It can also make customers feel more receptive and positive towards the brand.
Brand identities usually use one or two principle colors, which are used in the logo design and other commonly used media and marketing materials, plus a secondary palette which complements these principle hues, for use across backgrounds, text, and photography.
Experiment with different color combinations on your logo design, as well as coloring the background of the page. This will help you get a good sense of which colors work well together, which clash, and which make the logo appear more legible. In this example for Scruffs, I was initially drawn to orange and yellow, to give a cheerful, 70s-inspired feel to the retro-style logo. However I soon realized that red, pink, and white not only look more impactful, but feel more contemporary.
To test your color choices further, experiment with adding your color combinations to the rough marketing visual(s) you put together earlier. You might find that your color choice brings the visual to life! If not, it’s back to the color drawing board.
Once you’ve decided on your favored colors, pull these together into a palette and use the Swatches panel in Adobe or Affinity software to identify the HEX, RGB, and CMYK values of each color. You can also save the palette as an ASE file from InDesign, Illustrator, or Photoshop. Simply highlight the swatches in the Swatches panel and choose Save Swatches from the panel’s main menu.
4. Type
It’s likely you’ll use text in almost all of your brand communications. And, with consumers more font-aware than ever before, giving due consideration to the choice of fonts for your brand identity is extremely important.
Most brands will use two fonts in their brand identity—one for headlines and one for body type. A third font is sometimes used, but be warned that a well-executed type trio can be a tricky balancing act.
In the Scruffs brand identity, I opted for a headline font that mimicked the style of the logo, helping to draw the logo and headline communications together. Because the headline font, GT Super Display, is a curvy, retro type-style, I experimented with body text fonts that would act as a foil. A simple, slightly rounded sans serif like Europa still retains the same open, slightly retro feel of the headline font, but is also exceptionally clear to read when set at a small size.
Put together a few examples of your type choices in action. This will help you to assess if the font pairing works well together in a variety of contexts or colors, and will also help you to define rules about how the type should be set. For example, it might be that headlines should always have a leading of x points or that body text should always be aligned left and justified.
5. Mockups
With all the core elements of your brand now in place, the final step is to create some cool mockup images that will make you feel exceptionally proud of the identity you’ve created. Mockups are also helpful for assessing how the brand elements will look in real-time, and help communicate your ideas clearly with teammates or clients.
Mockups don’t have to be difficult to achieve. Many sites offer ready-made mockup templates that allow you to drop your logo and colors into a Photoshop file. Or, you can add your designs to stock photos, such as in the store front example below.
Create mockups for a few items that would be likely to feature the brand identity. In the case of Scruffs, the parlor signage and business cards will be highly visible elements of the branding. However, for your own brand design, you may also want to consider mocking-up visuals for landing pages, social media posts, email headers, packaging, or T-shirts.
Time to Press the Launch Button
In five simple steps, you’ve created a brand identity that’s ready to share with the world! From creating a high-impact logo to formalizing color, typography, and marketing imagery, this quick and simple process gives you the essential building blocks of a brand that you can start using straightaway.
Of course, brand identities become more mature and professional as they evolve and develop over time. You can create a more comprehensive brand identity by carefully considering how your brand designs will work across a wide range of scenarios and media formats—from apps to letterheads—as well as thinking about how to introduce additional elements, such as graphic icons and photography styles.
For more guidance on brand design, and how creatives can build their own beautiful brand identities, check out these additional tips and tutorials:
Top image by contributor EtiAmmos.
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