Branding Top Tips

Branding & Wayfinding

Top Tips Copyright © 2019. By Design JD LTD. All rights reserved.

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Branding Top Tips!

Contents 1. Research 2. Focus on your target market 3. Analyze your competition 4. Be authentic 5. Design for the long-term 6. Prioritise simplicity 7. Think about different applications 8. Make it memorable

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Research.

Research is an important aspect of discovering the character traits of the brand, the values, the positioning, and the tone that the brand wishes to convey.

It helps in guiding what type of logo to design, the style, the colours, and the variations. Once the design language and the right visual vocabulary is set, the brand takes shape.

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Focus on your target market.

A highly-focused visual directed at the target audience will connect better. The message, channel, and tone should all be based on traits of the audience. This helps in capturing the right audience and maximising the brand value.

Focus on who you’re attracting, not your own personal style or taste. Take yourself out of the design.

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Analyse your competition.

A lot of detail, research, and effort goes into logo design, and every single one of your competitors. This is quite important as it lets you stand out and remain coherent at the same time.

Are there any common fonts or colors? Is everyone trying to give off a similar impression, and if so, what is it? Businesses will pour tens of thousands of pounds into a design, and still end up with a logo that doesn’t represent themselves or their industry well.

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Be authentic.

Your logo should be capable of reflecting the values of your company, product, or service. You are the brand, you are the source of the authenticity, and the logo’s job is delivering those qualities.

The logo is not what makes the company; in many ways, the company makes the logo.

The Nike logo is nothing more than a checkmark it is not successful unless it’s connected to the quality, stories, and marketing of Nike.

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Design for the long-term.

A logo should be designed with longevity and future use in mind.

It should be created as a vector file for scalability, be legible even at a very small size, and use Pantone colors for consistency and to aid easy reproduction.

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Prioritise simplicity.

The designer behind the famed Twitter bird icon once said his core rule for logo design is ‘Only do one trick.’ I love this focused approach, as it forces you to prioritise simplicity and not over-design.

Some of the smartest businesses these days are those with the simplest solution to a solving a problem, and this philosophy carries through to the branding.

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Think about different applications.

The most important thing to remember when designing a logo is to remember that digital is not print – just because a logo looks great on your website doesn’t mean that it will look good on your business cards, letterhead, wearables, and promotional products.

The best thing you can do when designing your new logo is to make a list of all the various uses of the logo and the medias before the branding process. Talk to a printer and an experienced promotional products vendor to be sure that your new logo will work in all situations.

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Making it unique.

As your company starts to grow, your brand will become one of the most valuable elements of your business. You have to create a story from the beginning that you can scale, and that your first few clients still remember for what the brand represents and conveys.

There are of course many more components to a brand, but making it impactful and unique is by far the most important thing.

It is what that identifies you as a business and keeps you relevant!

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Copyright Š 2019 Design JD Ltd. All rights reserved.