Let’s get straight to the point – as a brand designer, I hate when people say, “Logos are all about a first impression,” because it’s simply not true. Your branding design as a whole is a customer’s first impression of your brand, and a logo is just a small part of your overall vibe and your overall feel. Let’s get into everything you actually need to know about your branding logo design, so that you’re making the impression that you want in the most impactful way possible.
You Don’t Want a Strong Logo Design, You Want a Strong Brand
While having a strong logo is important, you won’t have your dream clients knocking at your door if you only have a strong logo. A strong logo is just a symptom of having a strong brand – you can’t have one without the other! Think of it as a relationship: everything working together to express your brand voice, your business’s goals, and reach your target market.
Logo Design vs Branding Design
Your branding logo design is one small piece of the puzzle. Your branding design is an overarching theme: a color palette that blends together harmoniously to create a feeling, illustrations that tell a story, and a logo that ties everything together with a pretty little bow. Sure, your logo is, in many cases, the forefront of your brand, but that alone won’t create the story that your brand deserves to tell.
What You Should Focus on In your Branding Design
There are a lot of markets becoming really saturated right now, so it’s really important that you have a branding design that isn’t just strong, but feels like you. People think they just need pretty colors, a cute logo, and maybe some fonts, but they couldn’t be more wrong!
What you need is a curated experience. I personally like to call this the brand world: something that envelops you, that leaves a customer walking away with not just pretty images in their brain, but something that has made an impression on them.
Here are all the elements you need to make that happen:
A Brand Color Palette Rooted in Color Psychology
Your branding design doesn’t need your favorite colors, it needs colors that are cohesive and 4.5:1 ratio compliant, that communicate complex emotions and motivate your dream buyers to BUY from you. Not just something that you love, or something that looks pretty.
If you want more brand color palette tips, check out this blog post all about color psychology.
Fonts that Tell a Story
You don’t need pretty fonts from Creative Market, you need fonts that can tell a story on top of the words in your copy. Your fonts need to flex across all platforms, ensuring cohesiveness and uniqueness, creating an overarching experience with multiple checkpoints.
Personalized Illustrations that Build a World
Stock icons won’t help you out. Instead, your branding design needs personalized illustrations that feel like the reasons behind your brand. Illustrations add layers, emotion, and storytelling to a brand.
For example, check out this brand created for Stang Floral Design, where I created custom ballerina illustrations to both honor the owner’s past as a ballerina (infusing personality and intentionality) and draw parallels to the elegant movement and beautiful softness of flowers through the skirts.
That’s something that takes your brand from generic and sloppily thrown together to elevated and personal, which matters so much more than a thoughtless branding logo design.
And Finally, a Strong Logo
You do need a strong logo (or, rather, a collection of strong logos), but not something that you just threw together (or that AI made, or that you bought online) that lacks meaning. You need a cohesive collection of logos that feel effortless. Placing your logo in a design should be as easy as breathing, and shouldn’t look like you’re just slapping it on a plain white coffee mug from Vistaprint. Your brand deserves better than that.
For example, the before and after of the branding logo design I created for Five Lanterns Studio. I was able to take it from something that felt rushed and disingenuous to something that communicates the brand’s style seamlessly.
Nous Sommes Creative | Brand and Web Designer
The biggest differentiator in your branding and logo design is the person behind the brand. That’s your strength: who you are, the person behind the brand, and the story that led you to where you are now.
As a branding designer, I am a whole hearted believer that if you want to shift into a luxury market, price shopping changes into vibe shopping! High-ticket clients want to work with people they not only can trust to get them results, but who they also enjoy working with. That’s something that makes your branding design more important than ever.
So, let’s elevate your brand from just some elements thrown together to something that creates an experience for your customer, together. No more singular logo that you made on Canva! Your business deserves better than that. You can reach out to me here to create a brand that feels true to you.
