Visual Identity Process

Design

Apr 11

What is a visual identity?

Visual Identity is what your customers see regarding your brand, product, or company. The visual identity is primarily made up of your logo, fonts, and colors. This is not to be confused with a brand. Your brand is so much more than this. Your brand is everything your customers say about you and think about you. Everything effects your overall brand, including the visual identity. The visual identity could be described as the visual point of recognition that identifies your brand.

No matter what you do or how you look, you’re going to have haters. But you’ll also have raving fans! Don’t worry about the haters; let them lay down and pave your way to success while you’re cheered on by the customers that love you.

“Haters only hate things they can’t have and the people they can’t be. It’s just a little thing called jealousy” – Lil Wayne

This graphic explains what is included in an entire brand. We are focusing on the visual expression area in yellow.

What is included in a visual identity package?

The visual identity package is simple. This package includes a logo, a color palette, and font choices.

Wait, I wanted an entire brand, can you do that?

In a way, yes. This is just the visual identity though. And to be clear, there is no easy button when it comes to handing over a miraculously created brand. Brands take decades to build and can often change. We simply help you set up the visual foundation so you can build your brand through things like products, visuals, responses to clients, your clients or customers reactions to your business, how you treat your employees, what social events happen around you and how you react to them, and so much more. Brands are always evolving and sometimes that requires you to come up with some new visuals; that’s where we can help. We hope that we can form a long-term relationship where you trust us to help build out and manage other aspects of your brand as well.

What is our visual identity process?

The first thing we need to do is determine if you really need a visual identity. After that we need to figure out if you can afford a visual identity. We’re practitioners, in addition to producers. We have a special skillset that allows us to offer this unique creative ability. When you come to work with us on a project like this, we assume you value our specialized opinion regarding design.

A couple reasons why you may need to begin a re-brand with an updated visual identity is that your business model has changed or maybe your customers have changed. It’s possible that the product you started selling to your mother’s friends in 1983 isn’t relevant anymore and you’re selling something to your daughter’s friends now. Sometimes the product or service you offer fulfills a use in an entirely different market than you thought it would and you need to regroup and think differently about how you approach the market in visual terms.

Our process boiled down:

Consultation > Interview > Research > Brand Pallet > Develop Logo Options > Flesh out Fonts and Colors > Package and Deliver

Legal

Do I look like a lawyer? Absolutely not! You can’t even see me! Are you a lawyer? It’s possible, but let’s say you’re not either. We can’t offer any type of legal advice, but we can tell you that it would be a great idea to have you or your company, product or services name vetted by an actual attorney. Furthermore, you should have any final logo we provide for you vetted by an attorney as well. We try our best to make sure we’re creating a unique visual identity for you; but sometimes things look similar to the billions of other ideas already out there.

Costs

Rebranding can be as simple as a logo change but often end up being more than that. Sometimes a proper rebrand demands input from more than just research and designers. You may want staff inclusion for buy-in or maybe you would like a rebrand launch event as well. All of these factor in and add costs to your budget. Typical re-brands can cost 10% of your annual marketing budget. If you have a million dollar annual budget, good for you, but that also means that your re-brand cost will be at least a hundred grand. Before you go out and hire your cousin’s neighbor’s stepson’s dog walker’s neighbor’s buddy who ‘does this kinda thing’, consider the fact that an inexperienced individual with fewer resources or processes will likely just want to provide you with a few random logo options with minimal changes and call it a day. Changing your visual identity will echo throughout your organization for years to come.

Consider the greater cost outside of paying a professional for their intellectual work. You’ll need to account for updating company vehicles, business cards, email signatures, letterheads, uniforms, and who knows what else you are into. Things like color in the wrong place can have, difficult to see, implications. Certain colors, and color coverage, can cost a lot and also affect energy efficiency to climate control buildings or vehicles. Getting it right the first time at what seems like a high price is likely the less expensive route than jumping from designer to designer.

What types of questions will we ask?

We want to get to know you, your brand, your vision, and the future you see for your brand. We’ll ask some basic questions to make sure we know what name we’re designing around along with questions about what you say about your company and who your competition is. We are trying to build content for a solid creative brief that will be a road map for the entirety of the visual identity process.

So, why are we so special?

It’s like your mother always told you; you are special! But really, why though in this case? It’s not that everyone should work with us just because of reason X. Compatible clients will work with us because our personal expertise and personal experiences have given us our own unique perspective. Chances are we’ve done enough by now that a client has seen something they like. Clearly they can work with anyone, but hopefully the right clients find us and realize they’re hiring us because of our unique perspective on this globe.

Some clients will not be a great fit for us and that’s ok. The goal is to identify that early and quickly so we can both move forward and preserve our valuable time and dollars. I will add; with our process, and expertise, we do have an edge over a lot of other folks. Moving forward with a visual identity project with someone with less experience may prove to be a costly mistake. Sometimes clients will eventually find us after going through a trove of previous ‘cheaper’ options. This is unfortunate but we also can’t let that hinder/cheapen the investment to work with us.

What is NOT included in a visual identity package?

Font files. Due to licensing we are not able to extend font licensing to any clients. Each organization must be responsible for acquiring the needed font licenses for their own organization. We do include ideal font options to use for your brand. We keep your uses, size, and budget in mind when selecting a font.

So to summarize:

Determine if we’re a good fit for cost, ability, style, etc.
We’ll ask relevant questions to get a better understanding of the current business and future business as well as reason for the brand/re-brand.
Develop a brand palette that gives a 50,000 ft overview of what the brand could be visually.
Discover like kind businesses and their logos/visuals and use this in your presentation.
Develop three different options for logos. What the client wants, what we think works for the brief and client, and something that pushes the client a bit out of their comfort zone but could still work.
Reiterate the final logo.
Once approved, create a visual ID at a glance that shows all variations/orientations of the logo and gives some basic clearance rules, suggested supporting fonts, and color palette that includes: RGB, CMYK, HEX, HSB, and PMS.
Package and deliver all final visual ID materials: Visual ID at a glance in PDF, Logos Native Files, AI and EPS, Logo image files 1-4X Transparent PNG files along with any additional requested formats.