21.11.2022 by Anete Ezera
A picture is worth a thousand words. The famous saying couldn’t be more true in the case of visual branding. Logos, color pallets, graphics, and other visual components are powerful communicators and storytellers. All of these elements together create your visual branding identity.
Whether it’s a social media post, a brochure, or an advertisement, visual branding cues help people identify your business and create their assumptions about it. You want your business visuals to speak for themselves, communicating exactly what you want your audience to hear. In this article, you’ll discover how to create a visual identity and the main characteristics of a memorable brand.
What is visual branding?
Visual branding helps communicate your company’s personality via visual elements. It’s an essential part of a well-curated marketing strategy to help you reach and engage your target audience from the get-go.
Your visual branding identity consists of several design elements, like a color pallet, shapes, typography, graphic elements, and more. Your visual identity encompasses your brand’s personality and values, while visual branding communicates it with different design components. Visual branding can also be part of brand storytelling, where you’re using emotion-evoking narrative techniques (including visuals) to establish a connection with your target audience.
The goal of visual branding is to create a close connection between the company and its customers. By using specific colors, shapes, fonts, and other visual elements, the brand creates a unique experience for its customers and strengthens its recognizability.
You can experience visual branding everywhere you go – online and offline. Whether it’s social media, billboard advertisements, product design, or company logos, visual branding is everywhere.
Why is visual branding important?
A study on visual learning revealed that 65% of the general population are visual learners. We learn best through visual aids and form our opinions via visual cues. That’s one more reason why people are drawn to visually focused social media platforms like Instagram and Snapchat.
Another study found that it only takes around 0,05 seconds for someone to form an opinion about a brand. In this incredibly-short amount of time, visual elements like color, font, and logo play a vital role in developing that opinion. That’s why visuals are an essential part of marketing.
To sum it up, visual branding plays several roles:
- It triggers an emotional response from your customers, creating a feel and look of the brand;
- Visual branding helps your customers to learn more about your business and your core values via visual cues;
- It helps to unify your communications across different channels (email newsletters, social media posts, advertisements) with repetitive visual elements.
How to create a visual branding identity?
In visual branding, first impressions are everything. When a customer first encounters your brand, you want them to get a sense of your brand’s personality right away. You want to create a connection and communicate what your business is all about in the first few seconds.
Typography, color, logo, and imagery are the 4 visual branding essentials you need to get right to create a unique and easily recognizable visual identity. Why these four elements? Because typography, color, logo, and imagery are the first characteristics your audience notices.
Create a strong visual brand identity by communicating your brand message clearly and cohesively with the help of your visual branding toolbox.
If you need inspiration for matching color palettes, typography, or imagery, discover Infogram’s template library, which offers a great range of templates for different projects. Explore social media posts, infographics, presentation slides, posters, and many more pre-designed templates, and get inspired to create your own!
Key visual branding characteristics
Typography, color, logo, and imagery are your starting base when creating a solid visual branding identity. Now that you’ve established your essentials, you need to ensure that what you’re creating will stand out from other brands.
When crystallizing your visual brand identity, create your visual elements with the following characteristics in mind.
Meaningful
Bright colors and imagery will attract attention, but you should ask yourself: What do you want to say with it? What’s the message behind your logo or brand photography? What’s the emotion you want to evoke in your audience with the color you use?
Always create with an intention in mind. Visuals are great storytellers – decide what story you want to tell and why. The visual language should mirror your brand’s personality and the message you want to communicate. Colors and fonts trigger different emotions – use those to express the meaning behind your brand.
Simple
While it’s great to have a unique visual identity, you still want it to be easily understood. Don’t overcomplicate your visuals with an extraordinary logo or color palette. Sometimes, less is more, and simple is better than busy.
Ultimately, you want your visuals to stand out but be easy to remember. Think about a successful brand that first pops into your head. Apple, Nike, and Tesla all have simple, clean logos that communicate their company’s message and are easy to recall.
Memorable
If your visuals aren’t memorable, you’ll have trouble making a name for yourself in today’s saturated market.
To make a memorable impact, use color, fonts, and imagery with intention, selecting the right tones and font styles that are noticeable and relate closely to your brand’s identity. Also, incorporate visual cues in your branding materials on social media, advertisements, brochures, websites, and elsewhere to make a memorable impact on whoever interacts with your brand’s content.
On Infogram, you can create social media posts, infographics, dashboards, reports, posters, and other projects with your logo and brand imagery. You can customize the logo inside the project by choosing the option to upload your logo. You can upload .png, .jpg, or .svg files. The logo will appear on the bottom right corner of your projects, like in the example below.
Consistent
It’s obvious but necessary to emphasize – your visual branding should be consistent across all platforms and projects. From product design to social media posts, customers expect to get the same unique brand experience you promised at the start.
To help you stay consistent across all projects, you can set up a logo for all content projects on Infogram. Whether you’re creating a social media post, an infographic, a poster, or something else, you can easily upload and set your logo for all projects. By default, all projects created with our Basic and Pro plans include the Infogram logo at the bottom. With the Business, Team, and Enterprise plans, you can disable Infogram branding and upload your own logo.
Visual branding examples
The theory is great, but we need to see it in practice. Let’s take a look at 5 successful brands with unique and memorable visual identities.
Oatly
In recent years, dairy alternatives have been growing in popularity, and Oatly is one of the food companies leading the way. Oatly is a Swedish company that produces dairy alternative products like milk or yogurt from oats. The oat-based milk packaging stands out with bold fonts and eye-catching illustrations. It’s always easy to spot their products, social media posts, and advertisements that are characterized by thick lines, bold typography, and striking illustrations representing their rebellious and outspoken brand personality.
What can we learn from Oatly: Oatly showcases a consistent brand identity across all platforms and marketing materials. From product design to social media profiles, they’ve stayed consistent with their branding and outspoken nature, which makes them a memorable and competitive brand in today’s market.
Headspace
Looking for ways to wind down? Headspace is one of the leading meditation apps that offer guided lessons and meditations. The simple orange circle logo perfectly mirrors their brand personality and message. Circles are universal symbols of totality and wholeness and are associated with calmness and contentment, and that’s exactly what meditation is all about.
Headspace stands out with its joyful color palette featuring soft bright colors that represent contentment and happiness. Also, their visual brand identity spreads across all social media platforms and advertisements with lovable illustrations and other visual elements.
What we can learn from Headspace: You’ll make a lasting impression if your visuals carry a meaning that’s closely linked to your company and what it does.
Airbnb
Airbnb opened the doors to new travel experiences. With millions of available homestays and experiences to explore, the online marketplace has substantially grown in popularity around the globe. With the Airbnb community rapidly increasing, the company rebranded itself in 2014 to capture the essence of its mission and make people feel like they belong anywhere.
Until the rebranding, Airbnb positioned itself as a simple rental type of service. ‘Belong Anywhere’ became their compass, so they introduced the ‘Belo’ symbol (a heart/drop pin hybrid), which represents a universal feeling of belonging. Also, their color palette changed to warm and inviting colors to reflect their welcoming and cozy essence.
Now their visual identity is all about a nomad lifestyle. Imagery is heavily focused on showcasing people with an active lifestyle, inspiring others to take action and book the holiday or travel experience of their dreams.
What can we learn from Airbnb: Sometimes, you can’t predict how the company’s brand identity will change, but it’s important to align your visual identity when you feel that it’s time for a shift in focus. Airbnb had a rebranding to match its community’s growth and expectations, and it worked out in its favor, helping them grow into the brand they are today.
Patagonia
Patagonia is a great visual branding example because its visual identity has a strong link to its mission. The outdoor clothing retailer values sustainable and conscious living that aims to take care of our planet.
Yvon Chouinard found the company in 1973, and its mission toward more sustainable outdoor clothing was clear from the start. Almost 50 years later, their marketing efforts are still focused on capitalizing on their values of sustainability, leadership, and inclusion.
The brand’s logo is instantly recognizable with the mountainous view. The logo depicts Monte Fitz Roy in the Southern Patagonian Ice Field. Their brand imagery usually illustrates an active lifestyle which goes hand in hand with their products. They also display mesmerizing landscapes, drawing attention to the beauty of our planet.
What can we learn from Patagonia: Consistency in brand values creates a trustworthy brand identity. With the help of visual elements like brand imagery and a distinct color palette, it’s easy to reinforce brand values and make a memorable and lasting impact on customers.
Netflix
We all know and love Netflix. With the bright red logo on a black background, it instantly captures our attention. It’s the simple use of two colors that makes the logo so memorable. In fact, the Global Brand Simplicity Index ranked Netflix as one of the simplest brands.
Netflix didn’t start as the Netflix we know today, but its mission toward a simple yet attractive user experience has stayed the same. According to Netflix, simplicity is the key to a positive user experience.
Their visual branding identity perfectly mirrors what they’re about – simplifying the user journey in finding what they want to watch.
What can we learn from Netflix: Less is more. Simple brands are easy to remember and recognize. However, the simplicity in visual branding isn’t just a coincidence – they strive towards simplicity in all their actions.
Visual branding is a powerful marketing tool. With the help of visual branding, you can evoke certain emotions, create a close connection with your customers, help them learn more about your brand, and unify your communications across all marketing channels. To create a visual branding identity, you must consider 4 essential visual branding tools – color, typography, logo, and imagery. Also, when creating your visuals, think about ways to make them meaningful, simple, memorable, and consistent. And lastly, get inspired by other successful brands and their visual branding to crystallize your own visual identity.
If you’re excited to improve or work out your visual branding identity, explore what Infogram has to offer. Brand and embed your visuals on several channels, and simplify the content creation process with different helpful features. Start your first project now!
Interested in discovering how Infogram can enhance your team’s work? Join a brief Zoom session with our Infogram representative to explore key features, get answers to your questions, and understand how we can assist. It’s quick, informative, and just like a coffee break chat. Schedule your call now!
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