Branding & Identity: Essential Guidelines For Success

By: Michael Sim, Founder of Graphics.ms

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Overview
Branding is the art of establishing a visual, emotional, rational, and cultural connection that you associate with your service or product. It not only motivates the buyer, but solidifies user loyalty to your company. A well-designed logo is the first and most important step to strengthening the effectiveness of your company’s branding campaign.

It is important to consider your options when choosing a design company. There are many companies out there offering $100 logos, free business cards, and a variety of other promotional offers that do not consider all the crucial elements of what branding really is. These are cookie-cutter companies, reusing graphics, templates, and other mass produced materials that ultimately reflect negatively upon your company. They do not take the time to inform their clients that there are many things to consider when choosing a marketing / advertising solution.

There are several different steps that we take in our branding and identity design:

Research
Market research is essential to successfully identifying all of the elements that will contribute to a successful branding campaign. We have several different variables that we consider when approaching the research of your brand.

Target Audience
Identifying the target audience of your identity will serve to maximize the efficiency of your brand. Major demographic qualities such as race, age, income, disabilities, mobility, educational level, home ownership, employment status, and even location are considered in the full identification of your target audience.

Competition
Your company can only become as successful as your best competition. We will identify and target your competition through a comprehensive analysis of your target audience. We will present you with our picks of website and designs that are successful in your market both graphically and functionally.

We also encourage our clients to take a preliminary step before coming to us to design your site. If you know of any companies who’s sites or designs effectively achieve any element that you would like us to draw influence or inspiration from, whether it is relevant or not to your market, feel free to bring them to the table. We will not copy or plagiarize any designs whatsoever. We can, however, translate our client’s ideas, and the reference materials that are provided into a truly unique and beautiful final product.

Image
No website or design is complete without some form of graphic application. Image choice in graphic design is essential to achieving a system of message-to-user communication that clearly represents your services or products to your client base. We have an extensive amount of resources that we use on a daily basis for this specific purpose. Based on our market research, we will choose a collection of images and designs that will be used solely on your project. This material will be custom-tailored to effectively brand and advertise your company’s presence in print and on the internet.

Color
Color selection for the design of your company’s identity plays an important role in the success of your branding campaign. In the world of advertising and design, color strategy ties directly into buying trends and directly affect the end user on a subconscious level. Effectively setting the standard regarding which colors, shades, and hues represent your image, is essential to a successful brand.  When working on a corporate identity or branding campaign, we will always provide you with several different color combinations that most effectively represent your company.

Typography
The selection of typography that will be used for your project is an important element that contributes to the effectiveness and marketability of your brand. Typography is often an underappreciated art that should be considered to maximize the effectiveness of the message you are trying to send. It is the second most important form of communication next to the image; and when they work together, the magic of branding comes to life.

Layout
If you’ve ever read a newspaper or a magazine, you already know the importance of a good layout. A well designed layout helps to organize and arrange information in order to maximize readability and communication of a message.

Many websites online today lack a defined layout, or at least one that considers all of the elements that contribute to the ease of user navigation and readability. Many of those sites are “collage” based, a random arrangement of image, information, and adveritisements that is extremely difficult to navigate.

Our designers are well versed in the art of layout design. We will work with you to develop a strategy of navigation and information architecture to maximize retention and minimize bounce rates. It is our goal to keep a visitor on your site or engaged in your marketing piece for as long as possible. This is the most efficient and profitable tactic to selling your services or product. A combination of quality graphics, typography, and layouts are the three crucial elements that will form the foundation of your design, and likewise your company.

Genre
Design genres are important to consider for a variety of reasons. There are many different trends in the world of design, and it is important to know which is best for your company. Our designers have a wide range of experience in advertising and marketing. Words like Modern, Post Modern, Corporate, Traditional, Minimalist, Surrealist, Contemporary and Web 2.0 are words that we use every day to describe different genres of design. We will design with the best genre possible to achieve maximum impact with your brand.

Website Function
It is one thing to have impressive graphics, layouts, color selection and typography. However, it means nothing if your website doesn’t function properly or efficiently.

Our developers and designers use only the most up-to date technologies when constructing websites. We use current security features to ensure a safe website not only for your company, but your clients as well. Whether your site requires PHP, CSS, HTML, Perl, CGI, DHTML, Javascript, SQL, Flash, or any other languages of web design, we will be sure to choose the one that best fits the needs of your company.