How to Create a Brand Identity (Step by Step)

Back to blog

Collaborative Post
• 29.06.22
• Blog, Branding

*By completing this form you are signing up to receive my emails and can unsubscribe at any time. Your privacy will be respected.

Designing a brand identity for your business is a fun and creative process, but the pressure to create a design that both represents the values of your business and has commercial appeal can feel like a tall order.
Following a structured action plan will help you avoid brain drain and keep your ideas moving forward. But before we dig in, let’s define the difference (and relationship) between a brand and an identity.

What is a Brand?

Seth Godin has a great definition of brand: “A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.”

A logo, packaging, typography, and personality all represent a brand, customer service, price, product quality, and corporate responsibility, but a brand is a bit more intangible. It’s emotional, visual, historical, and human. It’s an experience separating different products and services in a world where quality is often comparable or the same.

What is Brand Identity?

Brand identity is the face of a brand. As discussed in the previous section, a brand is an emotional and even philosophical concept, while brand identity is the visual component of a brand that represents those ideals.

Brand identity includes:

Logos
Typography
Colours
Packaging
Website
Messaging

Brand identity complements and reinforces the existing reputation of a brand. Brand identity attracts new customers to a brand while making existing customers feel at home.

It’s vital that brand identity be consistent. Because it’s representing and reinforcing the emotions of a brand, the message portrayed by brand identity components needs to be clear, and it needs to be the same no matter where it’s displayed.

Now that we understand the difference between a brand and brand identity, here are seven (7) steps to create a unique and memorable brand.

Image Source: Wix

How to Build a Brand Identity

Step 1: Establish your business goals and personality

When creating a new brand identity design, it’s vital to consider your business’s goals and your brand’s personality. These two factors should determine the overall direction of your identity.

Your brand identity should work to support your business’s overall goals. Virtually every company has a key goal around earning revenue (even non-profits need to do this), but beyond that, what else does your brand want to achieve?

Check out this statement from Apple:
“Apple’s 100,000 employees are dedicated to making the best products on earth and leaving the world better than we found it.”

Your brand identity should also reflect your company’s personality. Defining that personality can be done in a few ways, but one of the most effective is simply asking key stakeholders to list words they associate with your brand. From there, you can see what key themes emerge to form your brand image.

Step 2: Research your audience, value proposition, and competition.

While your brand identity needs to work for your business goals, the only way it can do that is to also work for your potential customers. If your brand doesn’t appeal to them, they’ll turn to your competitors.

Take time to research your target audience before you start designing. Talk to current and potential customers about what they’re looking for in a brand that sells similar products or services. Pay attention to their language when describing those brands and see where they align with your brand’s existing values. That gives you insight into where your brand’s potential competitive strengths lie.

For beginners to market research, there is a wealth of content online to help.

Step 3: Design the logo and branding

Although the logo is not the entirety of the brand identity, it’s a vital element in the branding process — it’s the most recognizable part of your brand. It’s on everything from your website to your business cards to your online ads.

Go for a simple look to increase your chances of having a memorable logo that encourages a strong emotional response. Take a look at the logos of the world’s top 3 brands (according to Interbrand):

They’re simple and instantly recognizable. Even Coca-Cola’s logo, the most complex of the three, is just a straight line of text in a single font, with no graphical elements surrounding it.

When a logo is simple, it becomes an open canvas that customers can fill with positive experiences they have with the brand. Also, the simpler the logo, the easier it is to scale between mediums such as digital advertising and the more traditional print advertising such as flyers or brochures.

The final thing to consider when designing a brand logo is the places it could be displayed. A logo must be flexible enough to look great on a giant billboard or as a tiny social media icon. Simplicity is helpful here as well.

Step 4: Choose a colour palette

A lot of colour psychology is intuitive, like blue expressing calm and red and yellow expressing passion and energy. Emotions can be adjusted depending on the tint or shade of a colour you use. A lighter tint of blue conveys tranquillity, while a darker shade of blue often conveys trust, an effect many banks use in their colour schemes.

Brands should have only 1-4 primary colours, but you can also select secondary ones to be used alongside your primary ones in some of your materials. Selecting a few additional colours helps your brand stay exciting but still on-brand.

Colour is arguably the most important part of any brand identity or design. Your brand colour scheme heavily influences the impression a customer gets from your brand and is generally the first thing they notice.

Step 5: Typography

Fonts are powerful. The most famous fonts are recognizable even when taken out of context. You’ll want a single primary typeface to lead your brand design, which should work well with your logo and colour palette. It should also, like your logo and colour palette, be simple.

Consider the mood, readability, formality, and adaptability of typefaces to pick the right one. Then decide whether you’ll create your typographic hierarchy with a single typeface or if you’ll combine two or more fonts.

Image Source: Raquib Ahmed

If you decide to combine typefaces, you’ll want to make sure that your font combinations work well together and both support your brand’s mood and image. Be sure that the style of your fonts matches the style of other visual elements you choose to incorporate into your brand logo, website, and beyond.

Step 6: Create supporting graphics

Since we live in a multimedia world, the final step in creating a brand identity is an extended visual language with supporting graphics, design assets, icons and photographs.

Photography – Photos are a great way to connect with your audience, which means you want them to stand out from your competitors. Determine the style of any photography used for the brand, whether it’s product photos, photos for advertisements, or social media content.
Illustration – Not every brand uses illustrations—but if you determine that it’s the right choice for your brand identity, you’ll want to create an illustration system that’s unique to the brand. Consider the style, mood, colour palette, and content of illustrations.
Icons – Icons are commonly used in digital interfaces like websites, mobile apps, and software. If you’re designing icons as a part of a brand, pick an icon style that reinforces the brand’s mood and values. Just like your logo design, avoid overcomplicating your brand icons. Keep them as simple as possible, especially in smaller sizes.

Step 7: Create a Brand Guidelines document

Your brand’s identity should be clearly spelt out in a set of brand guidelines—also known as a brand style guide, brand book or brand manual. A brand style guide is a document that describes a company’s visual identity so it can be applied cohesively.

Image Source: Jahid Hasan

A brand style guide not only includes the visual elements laid out above but also how each of these elements should be used, individually or together.

Your brand style guide should include:

The brand colour palette, including the exact colour codes for each brand colour.
The typefaces used, along with how each one should be used.
How to use the logo, wordmark and brandmark, including the minimum size, acceptable colours, and any necessary padding around it.
Other guidelines for how to use photos, illustrations, icons, and data visualizations, as needed.

Consistency is key for establishing a solid brand identity, and a brand style guide helps ensure consistency. These brand guidelines should be easily accessible for anyone who might create designs for your brand and anyone who might use your brand’s logos.

Next Steps

As you can see, branding is a complex process. Each step should be well-thought based on the target audience’s needs and business goals.

Now is the time to consider reviewing your brand and either tweaking elements of the existing identity (changing simple elements like colour can significantly impact how a brand performs) or creating a new identity from scratch. Return to the market research stage and see if there’s anything you could have missed. Could you be more thorough with your industry research? Could you seek more outside advice about your logo designs?