How can you design and test brand identity elements like logos, colors, and fonts?

1 Define your brand strategy

Before you start designing anything, you need to have a clear and consistent brand strategy that guides your decisions. Your brand strategy should include your vision, mission, values, positioning, personality, and value proposition. These elements help you define who you are, what you do, why you do it, how you do it, and who you do it for. They also help you align your brand identity with your business goals and customer needs.

2 Explore your visual identity options

Once you have your brand strategy, you can start exploring different options for your visual identity. You can use tools like mood boards, color palettes, typography, icons, and shapes to express your brand personality and tone. You can also look for inspiration from other brands, trends, and best practices in your industry and niche. You can sketch, draft, or prototype different logo concepts, color schemes, and font choices that reflect your brand strategy and appeal to your target audience.

3 Test your visual identity with feedback

Once you have some visual identity options, you should seek feedback from your stakeholders, customers, and potential users. You can use surveys, interviews, focus groups, or online platforms to gather feedback on your logo, colors, and fonts. For example, you can ask questions such as what emotions or associations do these elements evoke? How do they fit with your expectations of the brand? How do they compare to the competitors' brand identity? Are they memorable, distinctive, and recognizable? How consistent and coherent are these elements across different media and channels? Gathering this type of feedback will help ensure that your brand identity is successful.

4 Refine your visual identity based on feedback

Based on the feedback you receive, you can refine your visual identity to make it more effective and engaging. You can make adjustments to your logo, colors, and fonts to improve their clarity, readability, contrast, harmony, and balance. You can also make sure your visual identity aligns with your brand strategy and communicates your value proposition and differentiation. You can test your refined visual identity again with feedback to validate your changes and ensure they meet your objectives.

5 Create your brand guidelines

Once you have your final visual identity, you need to create brand guidelines that document how to use it consistently and correctly. These should include your brand strategy and story, logo variations, sizes, clear space, color palette, codes, typography, fonts, sizes, styles hierarchy, iconography, imagery, graphic elements, tone, voice, messaging and examples of applications across different media and channels. Brand guidelines help maintain your identity and ensure it is applied consistently and coherently by your team and partners.

6 Monitor and update your brand identity

Your brand identity is not a static or fixed thing. It evolves and adapts to changing market conditions, customer preferences, and business goals. You need to monitor and update your brand identity regularly to keep it relevant and fresh. You can use metrics like brand awareness, recognition, recall, loyalty, satisfaction, advocacy, and equity to measure the performance and impact of your brand identity. You can also use feedback, research, and analysis to identify opportunities and challenges for your brand identity. You can then make changes or improvements to your logo, colors, fonts, or other elements to keep your brand identity aligned with your brand strategy and customer needs.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?