Your business has been chugging along smoothly. You’ve DIY’ed your brand identity and you’re pretty pleased with the outcome, but at this stage in the game you’re starting to feel like the look and feel of your business isn’t keeping pace with the business itself. It’s time to level up, but how? And what?
Here’s my recommendation in order for the top 3 brand elements you should splurge on to keep your business looking polished.
Logo. This is the first and arguably the most important visual component of your business as it will announce your presence before nary a word has been spoken. A well-designed logo will evoke the mood of your brand while engaging and exciting your audience. If you don’t believe me that a good logo is of tantamount importance, just take a look at this. Remember when The Gap went all in on a logo redesign? They paid a rumored 100 million to Laird + Partners for said logo and reverted back to the old one within a week amid a global uproar. Sigh.
Brand guide. A branding guide is essentially an instruction manual for spinning the story of your brand. At it’s essence it defines the visual language of a brand (typefaces, colors, textures, imagery, icon styles, and photography guidelines) and at its most thorough it digs into the how and why as well as the who and where (strategy, vision, mission, purpose, values, and audience) of the brand’s identity. When you have a reference on hand to keep you brand’s identity on track it makes it a lot easier to understand and revisit who your brand is and how you connect. It also save a lot of work when hiring designers if you can show them a roadmap.
Website. Yes! You can build yourself a website. There are so many user friendly web building apps out there these days and if this is your jam, go forth and build says I. But if your time is very precious to you, I highly suggest going to the pros. Websites can be such a major pain in the patoot! Take it from one who knows. Of all the design work I’ve done (packaging, presentations, visual merchandising, photoshoots, logos, editorial, videos, infographics, books) websites are by far the wildest card. I think it’s because there are so many layers, from interactivity, animation, time and space, colors, sound, formats (mobile, tablets, desktops) not to mention keeping up with SEO; that unplanned snags invariably pop up and waylay the best of plans. So if you like keeping your sanity and don’t enjoy cursing at the screen hours after everyone else has gone to sleep, let this be the permission you need to hire a designer to build your website.
There’s obviously so so much more to branding than these three elements. There was a lot of editing to distill this list! But don’t worry, I saved the other elements for a later post. We can talk about branding all day over here. And we will!