Creating a brand identity for your business is essential. It helps customers connect with your company and recognize your products or services. Your brand identity also gives you an opportunity to set yourself apart from other businesses in your industry. With the right logo, website, and collateral, you can give customers a sense of who you are and what you stand for. However, creating a great brand identity isn’t easy. There are many factors to consider when coming up with designs that express the soul of your business. The right colors, fonts, and images will help customers see – and remember – who you are as an organization. Creating a good design is like putting together a puzzle; it requires careful thought about not just the end result, but also the individual pieces themselves. Here are some tips to help you create better designs for your business:
Have a Strategy Before You Start
Before you jump into designing any sort of branding for your business, you should have a strategy in place. What are the core values of your business? How do you want your customers to feel when they interact with your brand? What colors and fonts are you drawn to? What imagery inspires you? Before you ever pick up a paintbrush or open up a design program, make sure you know what you want your designs to achieve. A strategic design process will make it easier for your customers to connect with you, and it will make the design process much more manageable for you, too. When it comes time to create designs, you want to know exactly what you want your options to look like and why. Having a clear vision for what you want your design to be is the first step to creating the best branding possible.
Be Aware of Color Meaning
When choosing colors for your designs, make sure you know their significance. For example, red is often associated with excitement and urgency, so it’s not the best color to use if you want your customers to feel relaxed or calm. Blue, on the other hand, is often associated with trust and security, making it a better choice if you want to appeal to a more conservative customer base. Not sure which colors are best for your designs? There are various tools that can help you select the right colors for your brand. Color Wheel Pro, for example, can help you select the right colors based on their proximity to one another on the color wheel, while Adobe’s Color Picker tool is another handy resource. Keep in mind, though, that although these tools can be helpful, they don’t guarantee that your design will be a success.
Establish a Brand Vocabulary
Creating a brand vocabulary is all about creating a consistent design style for your business. For example, if your company uses bold, bright colors in all its marketing materials, it’s a good idea to use those same colors in its website design and social media content. Doing so will help your customers recognize your brand, no matter where they interact with it. When building a brand vocabulary, you want to focus on the following: – Font – What font do you want to use? What style of font is right for your customers? What emotions do you want your font to convey? – Colors – What brand colors do you want to use? Are there certain colors you want to avoid? How many colors do you want to use? – Imagery – What types of imagery do you want to incorporate into your design? What positions do you want your brand to take?
Make People Feel Something
When creating your designs, try to make your customers feel something – whether that’s nostalgia, excitement, or confidence. Your customers want to feel something when they interact with your brand, whether it’s an emotional response or a sense of understanding. Your designs should make it easy for customers to connect with your company and understand what you do. By tapping into emotions, your designs will be more memorable. They’ll stand out among the sea of other logos and designs. And they’ll be more effective at helping you connect with your customers and convert leads into paying customers. While it’s important to create designs that make customers feel something, you also want to be careful not to make your brand too heavily reliant on emotion. While emotions are great for branding, they can be fickle. What excites customers today might bore them tomorrow, making it important for you to be consistent with your designs over time as well.
Stay True to Your Brand’s Voice
As you’re designing your logo, website, and other branding materials, it’s important to stay true to your brand’s voice. For example, if your brand has a casual, laid-back vibe, it’s important to reflect that in your design. Similarly, if your brand is more professional, you should make sure your design reflects that too. What does it mean to stay true to your brand’s voice? It means being consistent with the core values of your brand, using the same type of wording and voice you use in your marketing materials, and overall staying away from anything tacky or unprofessional. Keep in mind that brand voice is different from the tone of voice. While brand voice reflects your company’s core values, tone of voice is about the specific words you use and how you use them. While brand voice is something you want to be consistent with, the tone of voice changes depending on your target audience.
Wrapping Up
Design is often one of the first impressions customers have of your company, so it’s important to make it a good one. The best way to do that is to come up with a strategy before you start designing and then stick to it throughout the design process. Keep in mind that design isn’t just about creating pretty images. It’s about making those images connect with customers and helping you stand out from the competition. To do that, you want to make sure you take the time to consider not just what you want your designs to look like, but how they make customers feel.
