How can you use visual communication to create a consistent brand image for internal communications?

1 Why is visual communication important for internal communications?

Visual communication is an effective tool for engaging, informing, and inspiring your internal audience, such as employees, managers, and stakeholders. It can capture attention and increase retention of key messages, simplify complex or abstract concepts and data, enhance your tone and voice to convey your personality, foster collaboration and feedback among teams and departments, and reinforce your brand identity and culture across all touchpoints.

2 What are the elements of visual communication?

Visual communication is composed of multiple components that work together to generate meaning, emotion, and impact. Images, such as photos, illustrations, icons, and emojis, can represent a topic or message. Videos, like clips, animations, and gifs, can demonstrate a story or process. Colors can evoke feelings and associations. Fonts can express personality or hierarchy. The layout of visual elements is important for balance or contrast. And shapes can form boundaries, patterns, or symbols. All these elements are integral to visual communication.

3 How to align your visual communication with your brand image?

Your brand image is the perception that your internal audience has of your organization, based on values, mission, vision, culture, and personality. To create a consistent brand image for internal communications, you must align visual communication with brand guidelines. These are rules and standards that define your brand identity. To ensure coherence across all channels and platforms, you should define brand guidelines if there are none already. This document should include the brand name, logo, colors, fonts, tone, voice, and style for visual communication. Additionally, use logo, colors, fonts, and other elements in visual communication such as images, videos, graphs and charts. This helps reinforce brand recognition and association among the internal audience. You may have to adapt your brand guidelines to suit the context or purpose of visual communication. However, make sure you still follow the general principles and values of your brand identity.

4 How to choose the right visual communication for your message?

When creating or selecting visual communication, it is important to ask yourself some questions in order to ensure that the message, goal, and audience are suitable for your needs and expectations. Consider what the main message or idea is that you want to communicate, as well as the goal or objective you want to achieve. Identify who your target audience is and what their preferences, needs, and challenges are. Additionally, think about the best format, channel, and platform for your visual communication. Last but not least, consider how you can measure the effectiveness and impact of your visual communication.

5 How to create engaging and impactful visual communication?

Creating engaging and impactful visual communication is not only about following brand guidelines and selecting the right visuals for your message. It also involves applying design principles and best practices to make your visuals more attractive, clear, and memorable. To do this, you should consider using contrast, hierarchy, and alignment to create visual order; white space, grids, and margins to create balance; colors, fonts, and shapes to evoke emotion; images, videos, and icons to create relevance; graphs, charts, and infographics to make the content simpler; and captions, labels, and callouts to provide context.

6 How to improve your visual communication skills?

Visual communication is a skill that can be developed and improved over time. Whether you are just starting out or have advanced knowledge, there are always ways to enhance your visual communication skills. To do so, you can learn from the experts by following and studying the work of professional visual communicators, such as graphic designers, illustrators, photographers, and videographers. Additionally, you can practice and experiment with your own visual communication projects, such as newsletters, presentations, reports, and posters. Utilizing tools, apps, or software can help you design, edit, and share your visual communication. Finally, seeking feedback and improvement is essential; ask for feedback from colleagues or peers on your visual communication. You can also measure the results of your visual communication with analytics, surveys, or polls to improve upon your mistakes.

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?