Brand Identity Series, Part 4: Visual Strategy
Say your brand strategy is solid and clear. You’ve eliminated doubt about what your brand is and isn’t.
Congratulations!
Now what?
Now it’s time to get creative and bring the elements from your Brand Profile to life for your internal and external audiences through a cohesive Written and Visual Brand Strategy. Because both elements derive from the same source material, they can be created and developed on parallel tracks.
Crafting your visual identity
Your Visual Brand Strategy encompasses the graphical and visual expression of your brand. When most people think of a brand, it’s the visual side – your logo or wordmark, your color palette and typography, your photography and graphical elements – that often comes to mind first.
Developing a brand’s visual expression to match the larger, overarching brand strategy requires understanding how humans perceive color, shape, texture, motion, contrast, depth and patterns and how those perceptions fuel emotions and human connection. By thoughtfully and creatively melding visual expression with human psychology, designers and artists can create visual shorthand for your brand. Done well, this allows your customers and audiences to quickly grasp key things about your brand’s purpose, products and people with little more than a glance.
Maximize your brand’s impact
Positioning plays an important role in developing a practical, effective Visual Brand Strategy and it’s necessary to take the time to review your competitors and their identities. For additional inspiration and insight, it can also be worthwhile to explore relevant visual branding precedents in fields both related and unrelated to your own.
It’s critical to demonstrate how your Visual Brand Strategy plays out across various media and audience touchpoints. Taking the time to think about how your visual brand identity will look across print, screen and environment ensures your brand leaves just the right impression no matter where audiences see it. Including these demonstrations as part of your formal brand guidelines or style guide helps encourage the consistency and uniformity that builds long-term loyalty and brand equity.
Evolve over time
While many elements of a Visual Brand Strategy may achieve a sense of being timeless or ageless, it’s common for the visual expression of a brand to evolve over time. Building a process that considers changing consumer sentiments and trends is key to keeping your Visual Brand Strategy relevant for the long haul.
To see how Visual Brand Strategy works in harmony with its written counterpart to bring a brand to life.