Now, more than ever, a strong, solid brand identity is essential to a business’ success. Brand identity is what makes your business recognizable among the hordes of other businesses in the market. It is how your business communicates with the world and includes logos, packaging, typography, and brand colors.
If you want your business to thrive, you need to build a brand identity that broadcasts your business’ culture and values, has cohesive visual components and targets the right audience.
But how do you design your brand identity? Here are six key steps:
Determine Your Target Market
Before you tackle your brand’s visuals, you must first establish your audience for it. Your target market will determine a lot of factors of your graphic design, in Salt Lake City and elsewhere. To define your target market, you must first understand their demographics and psychographics.
The demographics are data like gender, age, location, and education level. Psychographics are their attitudes, lifestyles, aspirations, political views, choices, and belief systems, among others. Once you have this data, you can pinpoint your target audience.
Refine Your Value Proposition
You cannot design your brand identity without first defining your business’ unique value. In this step, you should write down exactly what you’re selling, how you stand out from the competition, and your target customer base. You should be able to come up with a one or two sentence statement that expresses exactly what your brand is about.
You should also consider your brand’s values and views on relevant issues since 62% of consumers want companies to take a stand, according to a survey by Accenture. Identifying and communicating your business’ values will set your business apart.
Choose Your Colors
Once you have your target audience and your value proposition, you can now start designing your business’ visuals. The first step to doing that is to choose your brand’s colors. These hues will appear everywhere, so make sure you choose them well. Remember that, according to color psychology, colors have meanings and associations – so you may want to choose a color that will suit your target market.
Design Your Logo
Your logo is the heart of your brand identity. Designing it is the culmination of the previous three steps. A good logo will use your brand’s colors, reflect your business’ values, and address your target audience all at once.
Select the Right Fonts
Though not as instantly recognizable as colors and logos, choosing your brand’s fonts is still an important step. When you get the right fonts, you develop a cohesive design that melds with every other aspect of your brand identity.
There are three main fonts that you should choose: one for your logo, a secondary font, and the font that you’re going to use for your copy. Make sure that your fonts don’t clash and that they are easy to read.
Create a Style Guide
A brand style guide is important since it provides detailed guidelines for each element of your brand’s identity. For example, if you have a restaurant, your style guide will include specifics on the layout of the menu, as well as the fonts for the main dishes and dish descriptions, and so on. Your brand’s style guide is the repository for all your visuals.
A solid brand identity is one of the most valuable investments you can make for your business. It can truly take your business to the next level.
