Brand Identity & Guidelines

What’s the real meaning of brand identity and brand guidelines and also share How to make a perfect brand identity for a company.

What is Brand Identity?

Many Designers as well as companies confuse this term and will today tell you what really a brand identity is!

So let’s Discuss all these terms in simple language

Brand

Simply, It is the value of your company in your customer’s perception in terms of anything. Mostly it can be built through trust, the value you provide, emotions, and many more factors.

Branding

It simply means the effort you put to make a brand visible to your customer it can be done through design, marketing, giving emotional touches, and good service. To make recall value and true perception to your customers.

Brand Identity & Guidelines

It is the record of all fixed predefined elements that helps in being consistent in terms of value and design. It includes logo, color choice, Typography, shapes, website, packaging pretty much everything that can reflect the brand image. Nowadays Design systems are made for websites and apps separately.

Creating brand identity and Guidelines

I will go step by step on creating the whole brand identity perfectly in this section in as simple language as I can so let’s take a deeper look into it.

Understand the Business Value

You have to understand the business values of your client or If you are the owner of your own company and follow that rules also convenience your customer about your values through design is the first step for making a brand identity.

Understand the target audience

Whether it is marketing or design understanding the target audience is the most necessary part before starting anything else. If you follow my blog I have told you about this topic many times.

Design Guidelines

Now it is time to start designing but before designing there is one more step. You have to set some guidelines in terms of colors, typography, shapes, or even spacing.

Typography

You have to choose the perfect typography for a particular brand understanding company values and target audience.

Some designers also determine its text color, sizes, and weight for particular use cases too. Nowadays design systems have been made for such work mainly.

Learn More about typography choices.

Color

This is the most important component of branding and you have to choose it wisely after understanding the values and target audience

It is recommended to have primary colors, secondary, and background colors you can add as many as you can but fewer are preferred. Also, have dark version colors too nowadays.

Here is an article all about color.

Shapes/patterns

Many companies nowadays also demand specific style and art direction on illustration and shape. The best example would be google as they use flat illustrations and similar patterns.

Other things

There can be special brand guidelines other than this like spacing, margins, animation style, and much more but it is very rare and done by big brands and agencies with high ticket services.

Design assets

Now it’s time to discuss all main design assets that can be present in brand identity documents.

• Logos
• Print design
• website basic layouts
• packaging design
• Stationary
• Animations

There can be digital Ads too but every company demands different things and they are templates to visualize, not real info design except logos.

Mockups and presentations

You have to make perfect mockups to showcase your designs and also it makes it easier to understand for future designers the message and design you want to convey.

Most big agencies make custom mockups and sometimes also do photoshoots and many efforts are put but for a small budget, you can use free mockups or generators like Placeit.

Benefits of brand identity and guidelines

There are many benefits of having a clear and powerful brand identity and its benefits are usually long term and are interlinked:

Design consistency

It helps in being consistent with your design work and also creates a unique value on your customer’s mind as well as a new designer for years to come.

Saves time and cost

It reduces choice which helps in saving time on deciding different colors and fonts every time that the reason I being an individual has created a small brand guide that helps me to use the same color and font again and again forever also for my employers in future.

Conclusion

Lastly, I ask you which is your favorite brand and what did you learn from this blog let me know in the comments.

Finally, I would say branding and creating a brand identity is a skill to master and learn over time there are no shortcuts like AI-generated brand identities.

And some FAQ about brand identity design