Well it might not be too important for everyone, but if you look around for long enough you will begin to notice ‘branding’ everywhere.
Identity essentially is who you are, and who you are is at heart what you are selling to your customers – your values, your personality, what makes you unique and different from the rest – and attractive to the right people. The most important thing is being true to yourself, because people will buy into the message you put out there, and it’s extremely hard to maintain that if it isn’t the truth, and you lose that integrity.
We see obvious branding all over the place – most famous brands such as Nike, CocaCola, Costa, Cadburys – the list goes on – but branding and identity is much more subliminal, and it’s effects are much more influential than we think. As a race we humans are very visual people, we have pictures in our heads much more than we realise – our brains are constantly taking photos, of memories, of the shopping list, of where you put your keys, faces, feelings, views and places. We hold those in our heads and make connections with our emotions, functions and thoughts. So in turn when something has a clear identity, it will stick in our minds, and then make connections with all the other thoughts we have flying around, and if it’s strong enough it will stick. By strong, I mean memorable, associative, and identifiable.
So when we come down to designing a logo, it is ridiculously important that that gets the right message across. The logo, and overall branding, has many functions – most importantly it is your ‘badge’ – it’s the thing people see first and should remember and associate with you. It reflects the personality of you, your product or service. This is done using visual languages that we have learnt over the years, sometimes without realising. Typography is hugely important – using a serif font will give the impression of seriousness, importance, professionalism, experience. Using a geometric sans serif font suggests a contemporary feel, modern, clean. If you use something sketchy it suggests a rustic, hand-made, organic feel, if you use something that looks like felt tip it reflects a loose, childlike, creative feel. Look around, see what brands use what fonts and soon you will see similarities. Colours are also important, especially if your brand is going to follow through to a lot of physical content (a restaurant, retail establishment, signage) – even a website will have an overriding colour theme that will effect the audience’s experience of it.
So when it comes to our first discussions around your logo, your brand, I will ask these questions –
- What are you selling
- What is your message
- Who are you / what is the personality of the product
- What is your ‘tone of voice’ – quirky, serious, corporate, masculine/feminine
- What do you like in terms of colours and styles
More often that not I can get answers to these questions just from a simple conversation, 10 minutes and I’m pretty good and working out who you are and what you need. From there we can work at making you something that will stand out from the rest, reflect your personality or the personality of your product or service, and be something you are proud to use to represent you.
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