Typography is very valuable. It adds differentiation from competitors and it's central not just to the logo, but any corporate communication element including visiting cards.
Color is important, and it tend to focus on a corporate color. But it always accompanied by a range of secondary colors that reinforce the brand identity, and bring the brand to life. Some motivational maps for segmentation also discuss the role that different colors have an emotion.
Yellow is mostly associated with happiness and conviviality.
Red with passion,
Orange with transgression,
Blue security, and so on.
A good way to establish a strong brand vocabulary, and brand system is through layout. This ensures flexibility, consistency, and coherence for a brand.
Through photography and illustrations, consumers learn about the brand essence in a context. It is fundamental that all photos are treated equally, and illustrations build on the brand environment to ensure consistency with the brand's DNA.
The tone of voice is the way the brand expresses itself verbally. We devoted time to brand of the person, and looked into brand personality detail. The tone of voice is how brand personality is brought to life. Is it formal or informal, is it joking or serious, and so on.
Sometimes brands are recognized by unique sounds, for example, a jingle. Sounds grant awareness, and show recognition, and strengthen brand identity. I will always remember the first time I went into the Coca-Cola offices. As you open the door to the office, it's like opening a bottle you get that same hissing sound, and just feel fantastic. Keeping tabs on all these different touch points is of paramount importance. There will be many places in which your brand is going to show up. So you must ensure that the brand shows up in the most consistent way possible across all the elements that can form its emotional space. As a rule of thumb, kudos if you're able to answer these three questions when talking about brand identity.
Does the brand look like a coherent system, or are any of them inconsistent with each other? For example, we have blue colors that suggest serenity with a font that looks aggressive while we communicate with heavy metal in a disorderly way.
Does it cover all these different elements or have we forgotten about one or more of them? And
Do they communicate what the company or product is about? Is it reflective of the brands DNA?
Keep on track, coherence is the secret to sustainable brand promise. If after evaluation you find something is not coherent or covered, then go back. Iterate, keep on track, because a good brand identity is one where all these elements work together to make your brand strong.
Different elements that compose a logo, I wanted to introduce very briefly some aspects of logo design that are very important, categories of logos and values.
Other logos go for the abstract, and are iconic, and symbolic by nature. Think Nike swoosh, Shell's shell, Apple's apple or star in Mercedes.
A good logo should protect those values that are most relevant to the target audience, and that should always aim to maintain three fundamental pillars.
Logos should be salient and visible. They must make the brand show a strong personality.
They must also be very effective at reflecting its values and positioning.
A logo is all about the identity of the brand. Also, they must be very easy to recognize and be ascribable to the brand, and seductive enough to generate attraction.
This will increase awareness. In order to keep with the above, a logo must be:
.One, simple and very easily described.
.Two, memorable and unique.
.Three, timeless for it will need to stand the test of time even if it can evolve.
.Four, it must be versatile, which means scalable and effective without color. Brand designers always start with a logo in black and white.
Delving deeper into three key aspects; typography, colors and symbols.
But the logo is central to the brand identity system, and requires that we spend some time going over all the different elements that you need to take into account when designing a logo, that encompasses the necessary meaning for a brand and fully leverages its brand essence.
Typography, color, and symbol.
Typography, as discussed in the last session, is critical for a brand because it not only communicates a branch strengths. It also helps increase a branch memorability.
Typeface, font, and type family often get used interchangeably, but the terms have very distinct meanings. In the interest of time, when we talk about typography in this session, we will be talking about typeface, the overarching style of a group of fonts. Like say Arial or Helvetica.
Why is typography so important then? Fundamentally, because it sets the mood. Typefaces create emotion, they enhance themes, they spark interest and add personality and they also conveyed trust. Getting it right is the difference between having an audience that engages with your message or completely misses out on what is being said.
But typography also conveys meaning and whatever typeface you choose, it has to have both a creative and a commercial meaning that speaks about the brand purpose.
Typography is also important because it helps change perceptions about a brand and indeed is one of the main elements of brand changes as it attempts to evolve and reposition in reaction to market and consumer changes.
Essentially, there are three different categories of typefaces; script, serif and sans serif.
Script fonts typically appear with join letters and are often looked as they're handwritten or calligraphic in nature, like a signature.
Script fonts are fluid and emotional and create a very personal mood.
Good examples of script fonts include Coca-Cola, Ford, Johnson and Johnson, Kellogg's, Budweiser, and social media brands like Pinterest or Instagram.
Serif font are denoted by small feet at the bottom of individual characters.
This makes them easier for the human eye to read and tend to refer to formal, established brands that are also classical and elegant like IBM or Tiffany & Co, Giorgio Armani or Vogue, even Zara.
Sans serif fonts lack the feet at the bottom of the individual characters. They're typically blocky in nature, and work to put across clean, minimal, friendly, modern, sometimes even innovative values. Google for example, changed from serif to sans serif in its redesign.
Classic logos in sans serif include Facebook, Adidas, Microsoft or Nike amongst others.
In the next session, we will be looking at the other elements of logo type creation. Basically symbol creation, and colors.
Selecting a color palette is one of the most impactful choices you can make while developing your brand aesthetic generally. Choosing the right logo colors can highlight your business strengths and help grow your brand. As you might guess, the wrong combination have the exactly the reverse effect.
Color is used to evoke emotion and express personality. It stimulates brand association and accelerates differentiation.
When talking about branding, you need to know that in the sequence of visual perception, the brain reads color after it read it as a shape and before it reads content. This basically means that the order in which a potential customer is going to decode what your brand is saying, the fact that it is
Blue will be understood first as a brand that is strong, dependable, and trustworthy, a brand that prides itself on its professionalism and its reliability and its sturdiness. This is before the brand even says what it stands for. Guess who's playing the blue game? Volvo, Dell, Intel, Oral-B, Olio. Choosing a color for a new identity requires a good understanding of color theory, a clear vision of how the brand needs to be perceived and differentiated and a big ability to master consistency and meaning over a broad range of media, and colors will change in different media.
While some colors are used to unify an identity, other colors will be used functionally to clarify brand architecture, so differentiating products or business lines. Some key points to remember.
Use color to facilitate recognition and build brand equity. Colors have different connotations and different cultures, and you need to be careful of this.
About 60% of our decision to buy products will be based on color, so you need to be very careful. In one of your readings, you will find a full guide to the meanings of the different colors.
As a quick reminder, yellow is used for optimism. It transmits clarity and warmth. It is used by convivial brands like Ikea, McDonald's or IMDb.
Orange is the color for challengers. It is fun and cheerful and exudes confidence. Think Santa, or Nickelodeon, or my favorite, Harley-Davidson.
Red is the color of excitement, passion, and boldness. It is the color most associated to daring and pioneer brands like CNN or The Rolling Stone on Lego or Nintendo.
Blue we said is the color of trustworthy, dependable, strong brands like Volvo.
Green is associated with peace and it's used by brands who focus on growth, be it personal growth or otherwise, or health like Tropicana or Starbucks or the petroleum brand VP.
Black is a balance and control. This is Honda, New York Times, Nike, even Apple. Once you've sussed out the right typography and the right color, you need to summarize your logo type into a symbol.
Symbols are powerful elements of a brand identity system that extend beyond the logo. They are a way to create a visual shorthand to connect and engage with customers, very much in line with icons for apps in your iPhone. Their job is to connect with the consumer and convey meaning in the shortest possible time.
Behind each symbol, there is always a meaning.
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