Whether you’re launching a new business, refreshing your brand or taking it in a new direction, it helps to start with the basics. This guide covers what a brand is, what a brand identity is and what it includes, and how I approach the design work.
What a brand is
A brand is everything people associate with a business, a product or a person. It isn’t a single thing you can hold. It’s a combined impression, made up of:
- the brand name
- the brand identity
- the products or services
- the brand image, or how the public sees it
A brand lives in the minds of everyone who comes across it: customers, staff, partners and the media. That’s worth keeping in mind before any design work starts. A designer can create the identity, but the wider brand is earned over time, through how the business behaves, the service it gives and the trust it builds.
Where branding comes from
Branding seems to be about as old as recorded history. In Mesopotamia, more than 5,000 years ago, people carved small stone cylinder seals and rolled them across wet clay to seal jars and sign for goods. Ancient Egyptian tomb paintings show cattle being branded.
The word itself comes from Old English, where a brand was a fire, a torch or a piece of burning wood. By the 1500s, it also meant a mark burned in with a hot iron, often on a cask to show who made what was inside. In the 1800s, it came to mean a particular make of goods.
That’s when modern branding took shape. Companies began packaging their goods to set them apart from their competitors, and the law began to protect their marks. The first trade mark registered in the UK, on 1 January 1876, was the red triangle of the Bass brewery. Here we see the origins of brand identity design as we know it.
What a brand identity is
A brand identity is the visual and verbal expression of a brand. It’s how the brand looks and how it speaks, and it shapes how customers see it. You’ll also hear it called a corporate identity or a visual identity. Depending on the brand, it can reach further, to how the brand sounds, or even how a product feels in the hand.
At its centre are the logo, the colour palette and the typography. Around them sit the things that make a brand recognisable from one piece of work to the next: its style, its tone of voice and the way it puts layouts together. Together, they keep the brand feeling like itself everywhere it appears.
What a brand identity includes
At the start, don’t design more than you need. I always try to keep the core identity as light as possible. You’ll add to it as the brand grows, and simplicity is worth protecting early on.
Every brand identity needs at least three things:
- logo variants for different sizes and formats
- a colour palette
- typography styles
From there, the identity grows with what the brand needs to make and how it communicates. A fuller system might include:
- principles that say what the brand stands for in practice and set the boundaries for future decisions
- a design system, with colour, type and reusable components
- graphic, illustration, icon and photography styles
- guidelines that explain how it all works together
- templates for the formats the brand uses most, such as presentations, documents, email and social posts
- voice and writing guidance, so the brand sounds like itself as well as looking like itself
- creative recipes, repeatable starting points for slides, imagery, social posts and email
How far to go depends on the brand. A sole trader and a company with dozens of people making its comms need very different systems. Good brands also keep developing. They’re revised as the strategy shifts, customers respond and the business grows, so the identity should be built to change with them.
How I design a brand identity
Every brand starts from a different place, so the process changes with it. These are the stages I tailor to each project.
Starting point
Before designing anything, I work out what the brand actually needs.
For a new business, that means getting to know the idea: who it’s for, what it offers and where it’s heading, so the identity is built for it from the start.
For an existing brand, sometimes the identity is sound and it’s the way it’s applied that needs work. Sometimes the message isn’t clear. And sometimes the foundations no longer fit where the business is going. The answer decides how much needs to change: a new identity, a refresh, consolidating what’s already there or clearer principles.
Discovery
This covers the brand’s goals, its audience and competitors, its personality, and how it relates to any other brands in the business. Mood boards help us agree a direction before the design work starts.
Naming
Clients often come with a name, or an idea for one, and we’ll usually refine it together. If they’re looking for ideas, we work through options. Either way, it’s worth interrogating the name. It also needs checking, so the business can own it everywhere it needs to, from domains and app names to a registered company or trade mark.
Identity
Logo concepts and revisions, then the final artwork with its colour and type specifications.
The system
The colour palette, typography, graphic styles, core messaging and tone of voice, and the principles that hold them together.
Guidelines and templates
Style guidelines, and templates for the key touchpoints, such as stationery, email, presentations and documents.
Setting it up for use
A brand identity is used by a lot of people: designers, marketing teams, suppliers and the AI tools they work with. The last stage is making sure everything is easy for them to find and use well. I’ve written more about that in I built BrandChief to make brands work in AI tools.
What makes a brand identity strong
A strong brand identity has to work for everyone who meets it and everyone who has to apply it: customers, staff, suppliers and the media. It should be:
- memorable and distinct, so it stands out
- scalable, so it can grow with the business
- flexible, so it works in every format, on screen and in print
- consistent, so each element works with the next
- easy to use, so anyone applying it can get it right
Looking good on paper isn’t enough. The real test is how an identity holds up in daily use, and the best ones are refined as they meet that test.
Where brand strategy fits
Brand identity design goes better with a sense of the brand strategy. The strategy sets out how, where, when and to whom the brand expresses itself. It gives the identity its goals, shows which touchpoints matter most and guides the marketing that follows. The identity is how that strategy looks and sounds.