Brand design is more than visuals — it’s an experience.
This is the most misunderstood concept about brand design.
Clients don’t get it; designers don’t get it.
To do proper justice to this topic, I’ll talk about it in this article, and we’ll go over why brand design is beyond design.
For most designers, they think brand design is all about pushing out brand identities. What they’re really doing is pushing out visual identities.
For most business owners, they think it’s all about the logos, colors, and fonts.
The most misunderstood aspect of brand identity design is that it goes beyond visual elements like logos and colors.
Many people still think of branding as solely the graphic design aspects.
Brand identity design is the combination of a different creative fields. This goes further to imply that “just design is really not enough.”
If you have a shity product, with great design, you’ll go nowhere.
If you have a great product with shitty design, you’ll succeed.
If you have a great product, and you want an upgrade, a boost to help your brand stand out, do great design.
In essence, a brand identity encompasses much more:
- It includes the brand’s purpose, values, and positioning.
- It shapes the overall customer experience and perception of the brand.
- Maintaining a consistent brand identity across all touchpoints is critical.
As Faiza Yousuf states, “Branding is often misunderstood because people tend to narrow it down to its visual elements, like logos and design.”
In reality, brand identity design is about creating a cohesive, well connected, ecosystem of visual, written, and experimental elements that bring a brand’s purpose and personality to life. Hence the combination of different creative fields.
It’s about how a business/brand wants to be perceived by its audience.
So while logos, colors, and graphic design are important constituents of brand identity design, it is really about defining and consistently expressing a brand’s essence across every interaction.
Overlooking this bigger picture is the most common misunderstanding about brand identity design and I hope I have given you some clarity.
Here’s what my brand design process looks like.
