What is visual branding, and why is it important for your business?
Branding is not just a logo, a typeface, or a colour palette; those are elements of your brand, yes, they are important ones, but they are just the surface.
As a designer I had many business owners come to me and say: “I just need a logo”, and from a their perspective that makes sense, a logo feels like a tangible starting point, once you have it, your business feel more real and “serious”, but here is the deal, without strategy, a logo is just decoration.
Your business brand is not how it looks; it’s how it presents itself, how it behaves, communicates, and connects with its target audience.
Visual branding is the visible part of your whole strategy. If it’s well structured, it is the most powerful tool a business can invest in. Besides looking good, it shapes how customers should feel about your business.
Let’s explore how you can utilise visual branding as a strategic tool to improve your business and reach your goals.
More than a logo
Many businesses reduce a brand to a logo, but your brand is much more than that. Expanding to a design system will increase your value and positioning, allowing you to have consistency across all touchpoints.
Visual branding is strategic because:
- The digital world moves fast, and people judge your business in a matter of seconds. If you want to attract new customers, you should make an impression fast.
- A cohesive and well-defined design identity reinforces your story across marketing, packaging, digital, and physical spaces.
- On an internal structure level, it aligns employees and teams around a consistent/coherent visual language, and they all feel like a part of a whole.
- It makes your brand appear professional and valuable, which directly translates to profit.
Basic elements of visual branding
To build the perception of your brand, you will need a set of components. These are the basic building blocks that will bring your strategy to life:
Logo and Brandmark
It’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think of branding, the core component of your visual identity and the anchor for all the other visual elements. It should reflect who you are.
A logo can be composed of:
- Complete logo: composed of the company name and symbol
- Wordmark: stylised text with the name or initials of a company
- Logomark: the symbol that represents the company
Typography
Typography is a useful tool to convey personality; it can be friendly and approachable, serious, precise, modern, elegant (and many other adjectives). Used consistently in all media ensures professionalism, cohesion, and recognition.
Color Palette
Strong brands carefully select colour palettes to trigger emotions. Picking a suitable colour palette is not just a matter of taste. When deciding on a colour palette, there are many aspects you should take into consideration besides the emotions you want to trigger when a customer comes in contact with your brand.
Some of the things you should consider are:
- Does your palette feature colours that, when combined, allow for legibility for people with impaired vision (you can test your color palette towards WCAG standards)
- Is your palette suitable for both digital and print
- Colour psychology and colour harmony
Imagery
Photography, illustrations, and other imagery should communicate your tone without the need for words, and it should align with your brand values.
Not every picture is suitable for every brand, so when structuring your visual identity, try thinking about your brand as a person. Sit down and really think, imagine what they look like? What do they like to wear? What does their room look like? Their gallery? Social media feed? Do they have a pet? Are they funny? This exercise will help you pick an imagery direction that really fits your brand.
Graphic elements
Graphic elements like patterns, icons, shapes, and textures are the connective tissue that keep your identity together. Your brand could use soft curves and organic shapes as graphic elements, or maybe sharp corners and lines, or even complex decorative forms?
Whatever aligns best with your brand should be implemented in all graphic elements. The devil is in the details, and even though it might seem like overkill to structure all graphic elements towards a unified identity, this is what differentiates a premium brand from a regular one.
Advanced elements of visual branding
To take your branding to the next level, there are design tools that enhance recognition and give your presence that extra wow factor. We are living in an era where the market is oversaturated with products and services, and making good strategic choices will bring your design strategy to the next level.
Motion and Interaction Design
In digital spaces, you have the possibility to use movement and motion as an additional device to convey personality. Some examples of motion and interaction design in your brand strategy may include: animated logos, micro interactions on a website like button hovers, or the use of animated characters in brand storytelling (like, for example, the Duolingo owl). The possibilities are endless, and they should be taken advantage of.
Iconography and Illustration Style
Custom icons and illustrations are an amazing instrument if done well. Studies show that our ability to stay focused on long, boring blocks of text is decreasing at an alarming rate (kudos to you if you managed to read everything written in this blog post to this point), and one of your main goals as a company should be to communicate to your target audience.
This is where iconography and illustration come to play. Using this tool in a smart way will allows you to deliver information in a more digestible manner. If an icon is clear, there is no need for extensive explanation, and getting your information from a cute owl is more fun than reading it on a plain white background.
Packaging Design
Packaging applies mainly to companies that sell physical products, and for those brands, packaging is a critical touchpoint. Your packaging design caters towards a specific target audience, conveys quality, values and tells the general brand story.
Some digital companies also use packaging design for their merchandise or for so-called “digital unboxings”
Environmental and Physical Design
If your company extend into physical spaces like stores, shops, or even office spaces, environmental design is a facet that should be taken into consideration. Signage is equally important as interior design to achieve cohesion.
Common risks in visual branding
Jumping straight to design
The first thing you should do when thinking strategically about design is to define your brand purpose, vision, and personality.
Some (but not all) questions you must answer before starting to design are:
- What problem are you solving for your customer? – Of course, to sell a product, but to make something better, easier, or more enjoyable for people.
- How do you define success for your brand? – Creating value that goes beyond function, like offering experiences, not just transactions
- Who is your target audience? – It may be people who share our values, have the problem you solve, or aspire to the lifestyle you represent.
- Where do you reach them? – Social media, pop-ups…
- What other brands or experiences influence them? – It may be authentic experiences, ethical sourcing or brands with a story.
- What are the main visual trends in your industry? Should we align with or break away from them? – It may be something like expressive, retro and nostalgic visuals, and you might want to either stay in that lane or go in a completely different direction
- If our brand was a person, how would we describe them? – Maybe a young outdoorsy person. They are friendly but professional, and have a capsule wardrobe of high-quality items that they cherish. They are not following trends but want to be authentic to themselves.
- Are there physical or digital constraints that will influence our design choices? – You might need need a design that renders consistently across devices (desktop, tablet, mobile). Sometimes users often experience our brand on slow connections so you need to be careful about using complex animations.
- Is our company mainly digital or does it have physical products/ a physical space? – Mainly digital brands should focus more on the logomark rather than the tipography. Physical spaces may need additional assets as par of their enviromental design.
Check what your competition is doing, what aspects you like about their design strategy, and what are some that you don’t?
Inconsistency Across Touchpoints
A touchpoint is any place, physical or digital, where someone comes in contact with your brand.
This is a recurring theme throughout this blog post, but it’s key to really take into consideration the importance of consistency all around. Visual strategy isn’t just about having great assets; it’s about how consistently those assets show up everywhere your brand exists. Your website, packaging, social media posts, emails, ads, store signage, uniforms – even your invoice template or presentation deck should be unified.
When your visuals look mismatched, colours are different, typography is not unified, the imagery is wrong, or generally the tone feels off, it creates confusion, and instead of building recognition, your brand feels unprofessional.
If a customer can’t recognise, or even remember, your brand identity, it weakens recognition and dilutes your message.
Weak integration of visuals with experience
Your brand visual identity is tied to your product; its purpose is to enhance and express the experience people have with your business. When the visuals and the experience don’t match, the brand feels inauthentic. With your design strategy, you are setting expectations that should be met when the customer uses the product. If the expectations are not met, it weakens trust and undermines everything you are trying to achieve.
So if you are selling chocolate and the visual identity of your product is premium, the chocolate should also be high quality and taste amazing.
How Business Owners Can Approach Visual Branding
- Start with a Visual Strategy: Before picking logos, colours, typography, etc., ask yourself the right questions.
- Translate your core idea into visuals: Trust your designer for this step; their mission is to translate your brand essence into tangible assets.
- Ensure cohesion: Implement the elements of your identity across all touchpoints.
Visual branding is strategic, not decorative.
Think about your brand design strategy as a story your brand tells without the need for words. Every colour, font, image, and shape is a message you are sending to your desired public.
Having a well-structured visual branding is not just about looking good; it’s a strategic tool that communicates personality, builds trust, and drives growth.
From a business standpoint, the right visual branding it’s a long-term investment that connects you to your customer to your product. From a marketing standpoint, your visual branding strategy converts customers to advocates for your brand.
So start thinking strategically about your visuals, align them with your values, be consistent across every touchpoint, and let design work as your ally.
