Branded design assets solidify your company’s presence in the minds of potential clients and customers. When people see things like logos, web design, and social media publication materials, they will make associations between your business and its values. Real-world items like your packaging, business cards, and company uniforms further drive this message home.

When you make a unique design, you give life to your brand. This, in turn, makes your business memorable for people who interact with it. Having an understanding of graphic design will help you develop an identity that sticks. Key elements to consider are typography, colour, and form. Before you start using an identity across packaging or your website, you must know how to utilise design to articulate your brand’s personality.

Typography

This refers to the typeface you choose for your materials, something that will have a definite impact on how the brand is perceived. For example, serif fonts evoke feelings of integrity and tradition. In contrast, sans serif, “without serif,” has a smooth and continuous look, giving the text a more modern feel.

Meanwhile, a script font appears more like longhand or cursive handwriting. This produces a luxurious feel since a script is often associated with the customise of gifts and hand written messages.

When intended for online use, typography can take on additional elements like outlines, shadowing, hover effects, and others. Fonts designed specifically for viewing online are called display fonts. Using a display font is a good way of ensuring great legibility across devices.

Colour

Like font, people assign meaning to different colours. Using colours for personality is a shortcut to peoples’ emotions. Choose red for materials when you are evoking youth, excitement, and noise in your branding. Food companies also prefer red, as it reportedly makes people hungry.

For brands that want to appear friendly and unique, orange is a good choice. It is used less frequently compared to red, so using it will likely make your logo stand out. If you want to lean into happiness, fun, and accessibility, yellow might be a consideration.

Green in popular culture connotes nature or money. Though it can be used for other reasons, companies choose green when they want to associate their brands with these two things. Blue is an extremely popular choice as it associates the brand with stability and trustworthiness. To make people think of luxury, you can go for purple, as it is the colour of royalty.

Brown is not often used in branding, but this can help your business stand out. It connotes roughness or masculinity, which could work well depending on the brand’s vision. For smoothness, modernity, and sophistication, you can use black. It is also used to evoke power and luxury.

Form

Shapes can also impact how people see your brand. Round edges are soft, and make people think of warmth and caring. On the one hand, round shapes call upon femininity and can be used to promote community and positive emotions. They are also used in situations where the design or layout is intended to be calming.

Straight-edged shapes like squares and triangles, on the other hand, mean efficiency. They make people think of strength and industriousness. Too much of it, though, can alienate your brand from the audience. Vertical lines and straight-edged shapes are alike in that they are used to depict strength and reliability.

Conclusion

How a message appears is just as important as the message itself. Online and in the real world, your brand personality is shaped by your use of graphic design – let it be to your advantage!

If you’d like to explore your brand, get in touch with us today. Whether it’s graphic design, presentation design or web design, we’ve got you covered!

‍