A brand identity is more than just a logo. It's a visual system that communicates your values, personality, and message across different platforms and channels. But how can you create a brand identity that is versatile enough to adapt to various mediums, such as print, web, social media, and video? Here are some tips to help you design a flexible and consistent brand identity.
Before you start designing, you need to have a clear idea of what your brand stands for, who your target audience is, and what your goals are. A brand strategy is a document that outlines your brand's mission, vision, values, positioning, voice, and tone. It also defines your brand's personality traits, such as friendly, professional, creative, or innovative. A brand strategy will help you align your design decisions with your brand's purpose and identity.
To correctly define a versatile brand that can be used across different channels, the key is to work on its strategy. Starting with the vision, we would proceed with the mission, values, and value proposition, and finish with a business model if possible.
What’s called “strategy” in this article is actually the contents of a brand brief. This is used to help create a creative brief, which should contain the strategy for how the brand will communicate correctly to its audience. In order to build these briefs properly, first a series of brand audits; competition, language, marketing, legal, technology, digital, internal… must be done. A strategy is all about clarity and execution. Where will this be? What is it for? Who is it for? What do they expect? How will it be appropriate and empathetic to the audience?
Determine your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) as a part of your brand strategy. Your USP is what sets your brand apart from the competition and provides a compelling reason for your target audience to choose your brand over others. It should be a key component of your brand strategy, helping to shape your design choices in a way that highlights your unique strengths and benefits.
Your brand elements are the visual components that make up your brand identity, such as your logo, color palette, typography, imagery, icons, and patterns. These elements should reflect your brand strategy and create a distinctive and memorable impression. When choosing your brand elements, consider how they will work across different mediums and sizes. For example, your logo should be scalable and legible in both large and small formats, your color palette should be compatible with different screen resolutions and printing methods, and your typography should be readable and accessible in both digital and print media.
Consider the versatility and adaptability of brand elements in different contexts and platforms. Certain elements, such as icons or graphic elements, can be used in social media, mobile apps, websites, and printed materials, creating a consistent visual connection across all brand touchpoints. Ensure that these elements work well in various formats and sizes while maintaining visual cohesion.
A brand style guide is a document that specifies how to use your brand elements consistently and correctly. It includes rules and guidelines for applying your logo, color palette, typography, imagery, icons, and patterns in different contexts and situations. A brand style guide also covers aspects such as spacing, alignment, hierarchy, contrast, and balance. A brand style guide will help you maintain a coherent and cohesive brand identity across various mediums and ensure that your brand is recognizable and professional.
Include visual and practical examples in the brand style guide to illustrate how to apply brand elements in different scenarios. These examples can help clarify guidelines and ensure that team members or external collaborators understand how to use brand elements consistently. Additionally, provide guidance on handling size and proportion variations in different contexts, ensuring that the brand remains legible and visually appealing in all situations.
Once you have created your brand elements and style guide, you need to test your brand identity in different scenarios and environments. You can use mockups, prototypes, or simulations to see how your brand identity looks and feels in various mediums, such as business cards, flyers, websites, social media posts, videos, or podcasts. Testing your brand identity will help you identify any issues or inconsistencies that need to be fixed or improved. It will also help you evaluate how well your brand identity communicates your brand strategy and resonates with your target audience.
Consider conducting market research or gathering feedback from a test group that represents your target audience. This will provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of your brand identity in different contexts and its ability to resonate with the desired audience. Additionally, evaluate the audience's response to different versions of your brand identity in terms of attractiveness, memorability, and understanding. Based on these insights, you can make refinements to ensure that your brand identity is optimized for success across various media and platforms.
Your brand identity is not a static or fixed entity. It's a dynamic and evolving system that needs to adapt to changing trends, markets, and customer needs. You should regularly review and update your brand identity to keep it relevant and fresh. Updating your brand identity doesn't mean changing it completely or losing its essence. It means refining and enhancing it to reflect your brand's growth and development. You can update your brand identity by introducing new elements, modifying existing ones, or removing outdated ones.
When updating your brand identity, it's crucial to maintain consistency and cohesiveness. Ensure that the revisions do not compromise the brand's recognizable identity or confuse your audience. Be strategic in making changes, assessing how they will impact brand perception and audience engagement. Additionally, clearly communicate brand identity updates to your employees, customers, and partners to ensure a smooth transition and avoid confusion.
One of the best ways to learn how to create a versatile brand identity is to look at how other brands do it. You can find inspiration and examples from brands that have successfully created and maintained a flexible and consistent brand identity across various mediums. You can also learn from brands that have failed or struggled to do so. By analyzing and comparing other brands, you can discover what works and what doesn't, what to do and what to avoid, and how to improve your own brand identity.
All of the points in this article seem to be about creating consistency. But the headline seems to point at how do you create dynamic branding that works in different mediums? In other words? How does a big company be genuine and authentic on different social platforms as opposed to network TV or Cable? This is why branding comes back to story. Because if you really understand the story, how your brand is showing up as the guide in your customers hero journey, then adjusting to suit the medium or the platform becomes natural and easy (once you understand how your audience wants to be reached on a given platform, e.g memes.)