How to Design a Brand Identity System (Not Just a Logo)

Brand building doesn’t just happen overnight. You don’t assemble things, pick some random colours and assign them to your brand. Logo designing does not happen by choosing any symbol or icon you like. Everything has relatability. Every element has a purpose. Be it a logo, your brand colour or typography, every brand component has a meaning.  

Brand building is a comprehensive process that highlights the values, mission and purpose of the brand. Along with this, it includes details of the key competitors and the target audience. Now, to create a brand identity system, you need a set of rules and guidelines that support your brand’s motive and overall goals. You create an entire design system for your brand first before you jump into logo designing, which includes the colour palette, typography, icons, patterns, and logo for your brand. 

A consistent branding process requires repeated use of your brand identity system and all its components so that customers can create a coherent image of the brand in their minds. It is also important to improve recognisability and memorability. Hence, in this blog, we will discuss how a brand can design an identity system that can help them develop compelling branding materials, flyers, brochures, email marketing campaigns, social media marketing campaigns, etc. So let’s dive right into this blog to see how a brand identity system works. 

Let’s Understand What Brand Identity System Entails

The brand system includes the visual and textual elements, which will be applied to the whole brand, so that customers have a memorable image of your business in their minds. The performance marketing companies can help you with the branding process as they have highly skilled strategists and designers who can outline the core elements of your brand identity, which includes primarily three components. Let’s look at the core components of a design system for consistent branding and marketing –

• Verbal Elements: The first component is verbal elements. In this, you define the goal, mission, vision, brand’s voice, taglines, slogans, and messaging guidelines. These verbal elements will remain consistent throughout your branding process. You can use these elements in different ways when it comes to designing compelling marketing campaigns. For example, Nike, a prominent and well-recognised athletic footwear and apparel brand, uses its slogan ‘Just do it’ on different packaging materials, marketing materials, etc. It is an inherent part of their branding process. They have consistent guidelines for verbal elements, which they use across various touchpoints. You will need consistency when communicating the verbal elements of your brand to customers so that it creates recognisability for your brand.

• Visual Elements: The next component is the visual elements. The brand system must have coherent visual elements that include various design assets. In addition, it has the colour palette, logo, imagery, iconography, typography and other assets which will become the face of your brand going forward. These visual elements form a perception in customers’ minds related to your brand. They can memorise these symbols and icons that relate to your brand identity

• Establish Brand Guidelines: The third component in the brand system is establishing brand guidelines. You will need to state the best practices and rules when applying the verbal and visual elements in your products’ packaging, marketing materials, and social media platforms. By establishing a set of rules, you are ensuring that your brand remains cohesive and recognisable, irrespective of where you present it. For example, if customers view the symbol or the icon associated with your brand on social media, even without any additional details or documentation, they will be able to understand what the symbol or imagery means. They can instantly know that the symbols and icons are related to your brand name. For example, when we used to see the blue and white bird logo, everybody would just know that it was the iconic Twitter (now X) symbol. That’s how strong recognisability and memorability become when we establish a consistent and coherent design system for the brand.

To Sum Up

You need a consistent visual identity where you should choose a colour palette that supports the entire personality of your brand and evokes desired emotions in customers. This is why you need a consistent brand identity system before you need a logo. A logo may become the face of your brand at a later stage, but by building the brand from the ground up using consistent typography, colour, palette, brand assets and logo, you will create a clear brand image. To leverage the services of logo designing, branding, packaging design, UI/UX design and much more, you can contact VerveBranding, a leading logo designing company in India.