Brand Design: The Process of Creating a Visual Identity

What is brand design?

“Brand design” refers to establishing the form and modes of use for logos and graphic brand symbols. The result of this design is known as a “graphic mark” or, colloquially, a “logo.” These types of designs are used to identify companies, organizations, products, and services.

Brand design is also known as “brand image design,” “branding design,” “corporate identity design,” or simply “identity design.”

What is the history of brand design?

From Greece and Rome to Egypt and China, marks were used to identify ownership of goods and animals. These marks were simple, distinctive symbols applied through branding, carving, or painting. While these examples did not resemble modern logos, they laid the foundation for identifying ownership.

With the rise of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, companies began using marks to differentiate themselves and stand out in an increasingly competitive market.

The 20th century marked a milestone in the history of brand design. Brands began to identify specific needs, which led to the development of brand design as a specialty. Thus, brands whose marks were originally designed by their owners began to manage their graphic identification with the help of specialized graphic designers.

Today, brand design plays a central role in building brand identification.

What is brand design really for?

Does brand design serve to communicate or suggest the value proposition of an organization or product? If you ask a branding agency, most will tell you yes. Whether out of ignorance, conviction, or because saying so helps them win more contracts or increase their fees, it is absolutely false that a logo's design can convey an idea as complex as a value proposition.

Does brand design help save money? Yes, brand design, when done correctly, can radically affect the return on investment in communication and all actions that contribute to building a company's corporate image. Brand design can be a critical factor in corporate branding. When well-selected and managed, a simple drawing can acquire enormous economic value.

Sometimes, the graphic problem may be secondary, and the pressing need is to manage the relationships between the organization's different brands through the appropriate brand architecture.

How much is a brand design worth?

It must be clear that a logo, a graphic mark, has no intrinsic value until the public recognizes it as an identifier for a specific brand. Only after this happens can the mark fulfill its functions and provide significant value to the organization or product.

For that to happen, the graphic mark must inevitably go through an establishment process, which can be either organic or supported by advertising campaigns. The simple act of signing all the brand's messages and actions over time builds the brand and establishes the logos, so that when the public sees them, they know who is speaking to them.

This is how the graphic mark (the logo) acquires real, tangible value. Depending on the degree of market penetration achieved by the brand, a logo can acquire not only symbolic value but also economic value. This happens because a well-known logo from a well-established brand in a sector acts as a symbol of trust for launching new products and as a symbol of assurance to back new ventures and even new brands.

What does a brand represent through its design?

Insofar as a brand never identifies an individual but rather a group of individuals, the logo (the graphic mark) can be understood as the face of the brand—what people recognize and remember about the organization or product. It could be said, then, that brand design provides organizations with the face they do not have.

Some organizations have little or practically no need for a graphic mark, while for others, contact with the public depends fundamentally on these identifying signs. In that sense, the contribution of brand design is not the same for all organizations.

What is the function of a graphic identifier?

It is generally believed that the primary function of a graphic mark is to make the company stand out from its competitors and differentiate itself in the market. This belief is not entirely false, as this function is indeed required in many cases, especially for commercial brands targeting mass audiences. But many brands do not need to differentiate themselves through their design. For most, the basic differentiation provided by the brand name is sufficient.

Designing a brand is not necessarily about creating an attractive and distinctive image, but about ensuring that the logo adapts efficiently to the different uses, situations, and functions that each brand requires.

What graphic elements make up brands?

A graphic mark is built from the combination of verbal and non-verbal elements. Primarily, it involves the logotype (the typographic representation of the name) and, in many cases, a graphic symbol or isotype. To these can be added other resources such as backgrounds or graphic accessories, the choice of which depends on the identification needs of each case.

For a detailed analysis of the creation process, components, and methodology, consult our complete guide on how to design a logo.

What types of marks are designed?

The strategic combination of graphic elements gives rise to different types of logos. The classification developed by Norberto Chaves, Raúl Belluccia, and Luciano Cassisi distinguishes structures such as the pure logotype, the logotype with a symbol, with a background, or with an accessory, among others. Each type offers different capabilities, and its selection is one of the most critical decisions in the design process.

Norberto Chaves has written a masterful article on brand typology called Typological Thinking.

What are good examples of brand designs?

Those who are not experts in brand design often want to see good brand designs, usually to “copy” them in a good sense, to “emulate” them. But the truth is that a good mark for one organization could be completely counterproductive for another.

We could say that Apple's mark is very good, but that same bitten apple would hardly be useful, for example, to a company called Coca-Cola, which sells soft drinks, or to a supplier of heavy equipment for the shipping industry.

Therefore, the usefulness of recognizing good marks is quite relative. However, it is possible to value some marks for their quality and the suitability of their capabilities to their owners' needs. Let's look at two cases, one that is very good and another that is not so good:

• HSBC's symbol offers a style that is very appropriate for the bank's profile. It is very versatile, very striking, and offers very long-lasting relevance. It is also very easy to remember, easy to reproduce, easy to scale down, and very unique... All capabilities that are very beneficial for a bank with this profile.
• Google's logotype is not bad, but the brand would have certainly benefited from having a symbol with the same capabilities as HSBC's. In fact, they tried to create a symbol with a capital letter G painted in four colors. With that many colors, that symbol can never match the versatility of HSBC's. And the achromatic version of the same G lacks any uniqueness.

A good brand design is not necessarily the one that is most legible, recognizable at very small sizes, most attention-grabbing, easiest to remember, most distinctive, unexpected, or ingenious. The best design for a brand will be the one that best identifies the organization or product it represents, and for that, the brand designer must focus on providing the capabilities that each brand needs, which can be very varied.

To learn how to spot good brand designs, we suggest you see our page on the analysis of famous brands.

How does brand design influence a company's success?

Many people mistakenly believe that the success of brands like Apple, Coca-Cola, Google, and Nike is related to the design of their marks. The fantasy is that since these well-known logos express the values and content of these brands, this strong ability to communicate them would have helped them achieve their high market positioning.

However, what we all know about these companies we did not learn through some hypothetical enchantment we experienced when observing their graphic brand signs, but through the management, communication, and consistent delivery of value that these organizations have been carrying out over the years.

Everything these companies have said and done, they have signed with these logos. They have used them as a “face.” That is why, when we see their logos, we evoke what we know about these companies; just as when we recognize a person's face, we evoke what we know about them.

Having made that clarification, it is worth saying that not just any mark will do for any company, as we saw in the previous section. While it is true that any logo idea can serve as an identifier for any company, not every one will do so with the same effectiveness. Therefore, identificatory effectiveness is the only verifiable argument to support the real contribution that an appropriate graphic mark can offer a company.

This effectiveness translates solely into saving money: an effective and appropriate brand design helps the organization save money over time.

And the opposite is also true: an inadequate and ineffective brand design ends up being costly in the long run, either due to a decrease in the performance of the brand's communications and actions from signing them poorly, or because at some point it will force significant changes and modifications, with the consequent loss of accumulated brand value.

In conclusion, it makes no sense to start designing or redesigning without a clear graphic mark strategy that responds to the specific profile and needs of the organization or product.