Moving Your Brand to Visual Awesomeness

Part 5 of Build an Awesome Brand Month. See all other articles here: Build an Awesome Brand

Entrepreneurs mostly want to start with a logo when creating a brand. That’s not necessarily wrong, it’s actually logical. Vision dominates all other senses. People are 65% more likely to remember your brand if you show it to them visually, rather than just tell them about it. But jumping to your brand’s visual identity is just slightly out of order.

The mistake, (which we have been correcting during Build an Awesome Brand Month) is building a visual brand identity without a foundation. Your brand foundation is built by first creating a brand promise and personality, then verbalizing your brand differessence™ with a tagline. If you’ve completed those basic branding tasks, you’re ready to move on to the exciting and fun stuff of creating an awesome visual identity

Before the Logo

Start first with choosing your primary colors. In Designing Brand Identity, Alina Wheeler says “Color is used to evoke emotion, express personality, and stimulate brand association.” and that “The ultimate goal is to own a color, a color that facilitates recognition and builds brand equity.” Susan G Komen owns the color pink, Starbucks dominates green, Coca Cola hangs its hat on red. It matters which color you choose because colors have meaning. What color is right for you?

This is where the investment in your brand foundations begin to pay off. Review your brand promise, personality and differessence use them to choose the right color. What do you want people to feel about your brand? Take the key words from your brand foundations and apply them to color. Here are a couple of online tools to help you choose.

A Guide to Choosing Colors for Your Brand
Color Meaning

You’ll want to choose a primary color, and then a secondary, complimentary color. The secondary color may be a basic color, such as black. Your primary brand color will be the color of the symbol or icon in your logo, the secondary color will be assigned to the typography.

Getting Your Logo

You do not have to spend too much money to get a professionally designed logo. $300 will get you a quality, professionally designed logo. I know, because I’ve done seven client logos for that amount or less using the online service: crowdSPRING. I highly recommend using the service, I do not have an affiliate relationship with crowdSPRING. You do have to do a little work to ensure you get the best logo possible, and one that’s right for your business.

A logo is not just about colors and styles. It’s about personality and promise. Give designers a helping hand. Let them know how you want the logo to feel. Tell them your brand personality. Describe your business using metaphors. Before you submit your logo project, read these tips for using crowdSPRING

A Word About Typography

Maybe more important than the symbol in your logo, is the font, or typography. The fonts you use in your logo should convey your brand personality and they should be uncommon. If you can find a font when you open Microsoft Word, don’t use that font. Tell your logo designer that you want fonts not readily available to everyone. At the same time, you must be able to use that font when your logo is created, so make sure you ask your designer how to download the font. You can search for fonts using online services such as MyFonts.com.

Choose two different font families for your logo. A primary font for your logotype, a secondary font for your tagline. Your logotype is your actual business name. For example, in my logo, The Marketing Spot is my logotype and Power to the Small Business is my tagline. Again, both fonts should be not readily available to the public. Also, check your competition to make sure your font is sufficiently different from theirs.

Completing The Visual Brand

As you create your visual identity, create a visual spreadsheet of all your visible brand parts. You goal is to create a consistent and cohesive brand picture. Does your website look like your logo? Does your business card match your website? If your business card and product brochure are sitting on the table next to each other, will they look like they go together? Plan how these brand elements will look as one cohesive visual identity:

• Website
• Business card
• Letterhead
• Signage
• Brochures & Promotional materials
• Packaging
• Advertising
• Uniforms

So how do you want your brand look? With a little bit of work you’ll have an awesome visual brand. Don’t you agree?

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