Design your way

Friday, August 16, 2013

Companies are creating their markets through brand building by managing and monitoring the elements of the brand, marketing and delivering the message of the brand communication. In this way they are attracting clients to buy their products and are also creating loyal customers who buy fanatically their products rather than buying from the competition.

The brand is really important due to the fact that it can play an integral role in driving short term revenue gains as well as long term value. Companies that build their brand with their consumers in mind have the best prospects for growth.

As I’ve stated before in branding related articles, the brand is not represented just by the logo. The logo is an important element of the brand expression, but not the whole branding concept; instead, look at the logo as the brand signature, a visual demonstration of the brand in communication.

A brand is a visual combination of name, letters, numbers, shapes, a slogan, colors and a specific typeface. All the elements of a brand, except the name can be changed during the lifetime of a brand. This is how the process of rebranding takes place.

Pressure on the creatives

It is known that in a creative team, designers and copywriters are responsible for working together to develop creative concepts for their clients. All the research that has been carried out by others in a company will be delivered to the creative team to have material for the branding process.

This is quite good because in this way they lay the ground work for the creatives to start building upon. However, this also adds some pressure to the creatives to deliver a great result.

As you might have guessed or known, depending on your experience, the creative team will also need to consider the channels for communicating the brand. Each channel has its own constraints. One example of constraint is the difference between color types in print vs web (CMYK vs RGB). Also, the style of language has to be adapted for different mediums because people are used to reading in a different way from print and online.

Creating corporate identity packages

After finishing an identity package you will notice that there is a certain repetition in the styles of elements involved in the package. This is not a bad thing, don’t think of it that way. It is actually a good thing because they offer repetition that is crucial to a successful campaign.

Having a solid corporate identity package includes the usual business cards, letterhead, envelopes, brochures, presentation folders as well as other materials that could help build a strong brand.

Creating or following a brand guide is important

If you are a newbie designer, going through a brand guide will, of course, be something new to you and you will think that such meticulous instructions were created by a control freak. However, that is exactly how it should be done.

Creating a brand is not something that you do in Photoshop in just a few hours. It is usually done with tons of research that a brand has been built upon and the strict rules that it involves are there to make sure the brand images isn’t altered and stays the way it should be, to deliver the result that it was programmed to deliver.

If, however, you are familiarized with the idea of brand guide and you consider creating one for your clients so they don’t mess around with the product that you’ve delivered after insane amount of hours spent, then you should include a lot of information in your guide and don’t leave any loopholes that can be ‘exploited’.

You should consider the fact that there will be other designers who will work on that particular brand in the future and adding their own creativeness to the brand is not something that you want, especially because some designers don’t have respect for the incredible amount of work put behind creating a brand.

Inspiration

Inspiration is important to designers because they can expand their horizons by looking at the creations that other designers have made for their clients. Seeing a certain technique will help a lot in building your own style using that particular method that you’ve seen a designer use.

I’ve added a few identity packages in the last part of this article for you to see and appreciate what others have done. Hopefully, these will help you enrich your imagination. I’ve made other articles on branding and identity packages that you can see, if you want: Interesting Branding Packages Made By Designers For Their Clients and Creative Identity And Branding Packages You Need To See.