It takes more than just a name or a logo to express your brand’s identity. To create a powerful impact, all elements of your business, from your branding and website layout, to the visual appeal of the products themselves, should be consistent with the design of your website.
By having a unified, immediately recognizable aesthetic, your brand identity helps you quickly communicate your company’s ideals and values.
But, deciding on your brand identity can be tough, especially if you’re beginning from scratch! That’s why we’re here to provide some ideas to get you started.
To put it simply, brand identity is a collection of visible elements that symbolize a company’s ideals. It’s what enables customers to remember and recognize one brand among dozens of others out there.
But beyond recognition, a good brand identity also helps create trust and loyalty among customers while influencing their opinions of a company.
Brand identity includes, but is not limited to the following:
With that information, coming up with a solid brand identity can seem pretty daunting, especially since there are already so many well-known brands out there. But, you don’t need to have a major share of the market or a vast consumer base like they do to stand out.
Delivering consistent messages across various marketing media already helps portray the values and personality of your brand, which we will dive deeper into in a bit!
Now that you know what brand identity is, let’s take a look at some examples of websites that get an A+ in branding:
Little Wolf has a vibrant, personable visual identity. Just from looking at the website’s whimsically designed wolf and crisp blue-and-white color scheme, you can already tell that they don’t sell just coffee.
The hand-drawn wolf image, which was inspired by its animal-focused name, is used on everything from its merchandise to its cups. This creates a straightforward, recognizable graphic identity.
The beauty company Glossier focuses on making the process of buying cosmetics as simple as possible. So, their identity is effortless and straightforward.
Like their shopping experience, their persona feels friendly and approachable, especially thanks to their use of light colors and unfiltered photographs of people.
This beer company, Rouge Ales, is based in Oregon and is an expert in farm-to-bottle brewing. Their whole visual brand sets them apart from their competitors through the hand-drawn graphics on their packaging. The mantra displayed on their website also shows that their beverages are to die for.
It’s a powerful method to emphasize their brand promise throughout every design element.
Design might come as an afterthought for a lot of charity organizations. Yet, the Parkinson’s Foundation has developed a brand new visual identity that accurately portrays the dynamic, fascinating organization that it is.
You can find that the company’s distinctive logo, a tribute to the neurological condition, looks like a brain inside a head. The vivid colors they chose also convey the emotions of joy and devotion to life that they seek to promote.
Compared to other producers of infant products, January Moon makes stylish teething jewelry with a far more refined brand identity. Naturally, with a focus on modernity, the company adopts a distinctive strategy by utilizing traditional fundamental colors in new and creative ways.
Overall, their brand has a neater, more mature feel thanks to the color choice of moderate gray, combined with the colorful accents and geometric shapes.
Winc is a wine club that delivers wine straight to your home. Because of this, their aesthetic reflects their focus on effortless convenience.
The color scheme that they used is minimal and classy, making it ideal for an exquisite wine club. Their website also has a clean, uncluttered layout with straightforward drawings that are nicely broken up by bright accents, which also help you keep your attention on the goods.
Although yogurt may not be the most exciting product, our team has a serious design obsession with Chobani’s logo.
Their packaging features the logo in a distinctive green color, which is a reflection of their organic, non-GMO ingredients and serves as a backdrop for the fruits to stand out.
If these companies have motivated you to improve your design skills, you’ll be glad to know that there are many ways you can create a more compelling visual identity. To get you started, here are some tips for improving your brand image:
It’s important that your website has only what it absolutely needs. Iif you’re making your website on your website builder, you might be surprised by the wide variety of features and visual elements that you could use. But, keep in mind that an excessive amount of these might do you more harm than good. Presenting your web visitors with so many things to look at will just overwhelm them, and probably make them go somewhere else.
No matter how artistically designed your website is, your web visitors still want information to be presented in a way that is simple to understand. So, maintaining simplicity on your website will make it easier to navigate.
Similarly, your customers do not like to be kept waiting. Your website will load slowly if it has an excessive number of unnecessary plugins, add-ons, or videos. Customers will just quit a website that is taking too long to load, and try to find what they need elsewhere. This hurts the reputation and branding of the website.
So, if you want a website that loads fast, it’s best to avoid unnecessary elements and most importantly, to choose from one of the best web hosts. A great web host will not only optimize your website and make it run at its best, but it also makes your website secure, keeping you safe from those with malicious intent.
Similar to the previous points, the aesthetic components of your website must be internally consistent. For instance, your logo, which serves as a visual representation of your company, is an extremely effective branding tool. Putting your logo in the header, footer, posts, or even on the contact form of your website are some of the ways you can strengthen your branding.
But, visual branding doesn’t stop with your logo. The remainder of your site should follow the same theme and branding. Case in point: if the fonts you choose are cohesive with your brand, it can help you gain more credibility. Is your brand witty? Elegant? Professional and respectable? Finding a font that works for you, helps represent what your company stands for.
Always keep in mind that websites consist of more than just aesthetics and navigational features. What is the purpose of your brand and what is it all about?
This is what About or About Us pages are for. Through these, you can influence how people might see your brand: if you can incorporate your distinct identity into this part of your website, users will be able to relate to you and, as a result, engage with you more easily.
Try to share a story with your audience—your story. Share your beliefs and the things you stand for. Post some images and client testimonials. You can also just list the business values you stay true to.
And, if you want a convenient way of doing just that, you can try utilizing a CMS (Content Management System), which is a great software for making the process of managing and building your website’s content a lot easier.
What are you hoping visitors of your website will do? For you, what is a conversion? A product bought? A scheduled appointment? Submission of a contact form?
Whatever that is, it all goes back to keeping things simple.
Your potential customers must understand what you’re promoting and how it will help them. Try thinking of just one thing, and then direct your customers to a particular course of action. This objective should be reflected in your website branding.
If you provide your customers with too many choices, incentives, or other options, you’ll paralyze them with indecision. And then, in the worst-case scenario, they’ll go somewhere else.
A strong brand identity is an essential part of any organization. People will find it easier to recognize and place their confidence in you if your brand has a distinctive identity, which also helps you to stand out from the crowd.
So, as you take inspiration from what a good brand identity looks like, not only will you be able to attract more people, but you’ll also have the potential to turn those new leads into sales and maybe even loyal customers.
