What’s a Brand?

Brand is one of the most valuable assets of a company and is used to represent it to the market. It can range from physical products to the experience of a client with the brand.

There are two kinds of elements that compose a brand:

• Tangible elements
  The product itself; the look, price, quality and packaging, for example
• Intangible elements
  Everything related to the experience and relationship between customer and brand.

In this article, we’ll talk about intangible elements importance for your brand.

Naming

Defining a name for your business is a process of many uncertainties and questions. It’s possible to choose any name you want, but not every name will bring the same results. You have to pay attention to small details of a naming process.

Some of them are listed below:

• Your brand must relate well with your clients.
  You must research about them, their language, lifestyle, main activities, jobs and hobbies.
• It must be easy to remember.
  Your product shouldn’t be named Triploid Proserpina. You can name it that way, but I guarantee that your branding process will be harder.
• If you want to be global, the pronunciation should be similar in most languages, being English the most important of them.
  Brand names that can be spoken with small differences in most languages are usually more accepted by international customers.
• You must find a domain available for it
  You don’t want to be a company whose website is 32-characters long. Always search for domain availability before choosing your name.
• Don’t forget about social media profile availability
  Since we’re in 2015 — if you read this after 2015, please forgive me for any mistake — social media is the new thing. You must have a social presence and is always better to avoid having profiles like @yourcompany-1 or @yourcompanyofficial.

Take this process as the most important one, as you don’t want to change it later. It’ll demand a lot of work to teach old customers that your name has changed, and you’ll eventually lose a small percentage of clients in this process.

A brand’s visual identity is their voice across time, but their name must be eternal.

Visual Identity

If you have gone into the Deep Black Forest of naming, and you’ve survived, congratulations! Let’s talk about your visual identity now.

Differently from your name, your visual identity will probably change across the years. The world is in constant change and to create a good relationship with your clients, you must evolve with them.
A good exception is that sometimes your brand can have a retro approach, so your communication will be the only thing that will change. We’ll talk about that later.

The visual identity of your brand is how your clients will perceive it.

Logo

The first thing we think when we talk about visual identity is Logo Design. I chose to go a little deep into this section, but it will be good for you, I promise.

I will teach you a really basic nomenclature of logo styles, so you'll be able to communicate better with your designer, how you would like your company to be seen.

Logos can be basically classified as Combination Logo or Logotype.

Combination Logo

Almost every brand has a combination logo, that is a combination of a logomark/lettermark and a logotype/typeface.

Logomarks are symbols created to represent a brand. Most of the times that you have a combination logo, the logomark is used more commonly than the actual typeface. They can range from abstract silhouettes to animal representations.

Logotypes

Typographic logos can be Lettermarks or Wordmarks.

• Lettermark is a logo consisted of letters, usually initials, that look like a symbol. Most of the times, they are similar to what we know as Monograms.

• Wordmark is logo consisted of a word written in a specific type. It can be an already designed typeface, a custom typeface created for you or even a lettering.

Typography vs Typeface vs Font vs Lettering

Typography is a technique of arranging type to make written language readable and appealing. It involves selecting typefaces, point size, line length, line spacing (leading), letter-spacing (tracking), and adjusting space within letters pairs (kerning).

Typeface (also known as font family) is a set of one or more fonts each composed of glyphs that share common design features.
Ex: Arial, Garamond, Comic Sans.

Font is a particular size, weight and style of a typeface. Each font of a typeface has a specific weight, style, condensation, width, slant, italicisation, ornamentation, and designer or foundry.
Ex: Helvetica, 14pt, bold

Lettering is the creation and drawing of custom letters.
Lettering logos are a combination of unique letters that can create a unique feeling for your brand. Every typeface starts as a lettering, but not every lettering is a typeface. Designing a good typeface can take from months to years, so it takes a much bigger amount of time than creating a lettering. If you hire someone to create a lettering for you, you won’t be able to use the same letters to type something in your text editor, for example.

Wait! It’s almost over

Now that you’ve learned a lot about Typography, let’s finish our talk about visual identity.

After you have a logo, you should request a brand guideline or style guide, that will be responsible for giving a common voice to everything you create and share.

The colours, the shape of your logo and your typography must be used to create consistency of your brand across all medias(ads, social media, website,…). The objective of your branding is to be able to be recognised without even showing your logo.

A small reminder:
Logo Design and Brand Guidelines are two different things.

Logos are included inside a branding project, but a brand guide isn't included in a Logo Design project.

What is Branding after all?

Branding is the process of creating a relationship between a product and the customer. This connection is an emotional perception of the brand by the consumer and is what differentiates you from the competition. It helps build loyalty among customers.

It’s both visual and communicational, and the biggest secret of branding can be found in this article’s title:

Brand-ing. It isn’t something that you do once, it’s a work always in progress.