How to Design Your Brand Identity
Craft your visual identity covering logo, visual identity system and brand guidelines.
By Adam Charlton · Last updated 23/12/2024
Posted in Resources, Branding 101
Brand design is the process of visualising your brand. Your brand identity includes your logo, combination mark or logotype, colour palette, typography system, grid and touchpoint structure. It also includes the visual presentation, both on and offline. Digital touchpoints include your website, digital product, social media profiles and posts. Offline touchpoints cover printed and physical items such as packaging, merchandise, shop front, signage, out-of-home advertising, and uniforms. The platforms where your brand communicates can be endless.
There are three core parts of the visual identity design process: visual metaphors; logo design; and visual identity system.
Visual metaphors
The visual phase begins with digesting the brand strategy, focusing on considering the core values, personality and mission in particular. In reference to these attributes, you can start to collect visual references.
References can initially include everything, that you think relates to the strategic focus points. We like to think of these as ‘visual metaphors’ because this is where we first start turning words into related visuals. These visuals can be anything, from logos and visuals from other brands to visuals such as artwork, book covers, posters, gifs, architecture, technology, even historical icons. Through this process, we’re trying to build an abstract, visual world around the brand.
You can then start moodboarding these references into particular categories, observing correlations, annotatingn topics, concepts, ideas, that crop up. This is a natural and flowing process, you can let your mind wander and make links by wandering down rabbit holes.
We can then get a little more specific, narrowing into images of things we can start to sketch from, including icons, graphics, colours, typefaces, and photographic styles.
Logo design
Using the refined moodboard from the visual metaphors, you can start to sketch, physically or digitally with vector tools like Adobe Illustrator, Figma. It is usually easier to start scribbling freeform, as we’re not as precious or precise. Sketching allows space for happy accidents and lets the mind wander.
Ultimately, we want to iterate the logo into a precise vector form so it can be easily used to create brand touchpoints. We usually quite early start turning sketches into vectors, as we can quickly start to balance form, whitespace, and iterate the concepts precisely. The process becomes more and more critical and detailed. Our workflow here usually creates hundreds of evolutions of each concept, we change something, and copy it over to directly compare to the previous version and then choose the best, and then how to further revise.
We distil the concept into a critical form, that most closely perfectly balances meaning (in context to the brand strategy), aesthetic form (its beauty, uniqueness) and function (its simplicity, criticalness).
Learn more in our deep dive post, how to design your logo.
Visual identity system
The visual identity system is the sum of the brand elements and how these elements are structured. Brand elements include logomark, logotype, colour, typography, layout styles, iconography, illustrations, and photographic treatment.
We first consider colour and typography, building out from the chosen logo colourway into a complementary palette of 4-6 colours. We consider the chosen font for the logotype.
Font choice is aided by open-source platforms such as Google Fonts, or subscription-based services like Adobe Fonts, or at the top end, font foundries such as (some of my favourites) Klim, Colophon, Good Type and OH no Type Company.
In the next post, we dive into how you can Strengthen & Grow Your Brand for long-term success.
About the author —
Adam is the co-founder of Attend The Way, a Brighton-based branding agency. Adam helps build brands for companies at every growth stage, from startups to industry leaders. Adam has consulted and built brands for some of the world’s most recognised companies.
