How To Translate Brand Values Into Brilliant Design

As you emerge into the industry spotlight, what will you look like? Do your characteristics shimmer plainly in the full body of your brand? Are typefaces and colour tones spread, with verve and innovation, across the key representations of your business?

These are questions that every business must crack in order to carve and claim a niche in the market. Your brand values, having driven your will to succeed, must cross over into promotional design. Without a clear translation, no-one has a sense of what you’re all about, and why you matter…

Profiling your brand

Every brand should have a personality. Imagine it as a living, breathing figure, one who gets 10 seconds to make an impression before bowing out to someone else in the room. What is it wearing? How does it speak? If you can surmise it in a couple of words – ‘kooky and outrageous’, say, or ‘plain-talking and professional’ – then you have a tonal foundation to work with.

Profiling techniques can guide your visuals in a number of ways. For instance, a healthy living brand could opt for a simple, spacious layout, emphasising the ‘back to nature’ message. Conversely, an events company might showcase lots of photographs, showing that it can foster real connections between those who attend every year.

Colouring inside the lines

Hopefully, your brand has a story it can draw and expand on. Yet more primal, subconscious impressions can be gained from your use of colour, which will proliferate your design plan. It points us towards emotional responses; the psychology of colour is incredibly powerful.

When sourcing the right colour for your brand, it’s good to run through the physical and conceptual implications of the tonal spectrum. Blue stands for safety, but it can also relate to water, or the sky. Red, however, may double for passion, flames, heat or a sense of purpose.

Mix the emotional/practical sides of your venture into a single, visual directive. A delivery service may opt for a yellow or orange logo, but could also look at symbolising their speed, in which case one half of the design might fade into a lighter tone, as if it’s vanishing.

Font to fit your language

Lastly, our manner of speaking directs how those words are digested. In printed materials, font heightens or diminishes the intended tone of our language, and it’s another crucial step to the final shape of your brand.

Comic Sans, for example, is generally reviled for its looped, childish lexicon. It wouldn’t have half the impact of, say, a slim tagline in Avenir for an accounting business. A bookseller, meanwhile, might prefer a classical typescript such as Trattatello for connoting wisdom, art, and a love of hand-picked literature.

However your brand may be forming itself, these suggestions are just a light oiling of your mental gears before a print marketing campaign gets underway. Now is as good a time as ever to rethink your branding outlines: if those visuals are lacklustre, and false to your creed, why should anyone remember you?

Our experts at Indigo Print can nudge your brand values in the right direction. Contact us to bounce some concepts off our designers, and see where the conversation takes you…