Creating A Design Language For Your Brand
Effectively defining your brand design language.
Coming from a background of design, I already had several experiences with creating and iterating website designs. However, due to the nature of my work at the time being client-based with individual short-period projects, one design would be completed and then it would be onto the next without too much consideration for future-proofing. Creating a design language is similar to creating a new website design with the key difference being that a design language should set the foundations for how all design should be communicated by the brand. On the other hand, a website design only focuses on communicating the brand in the context of a singular site. The difference in complexity can be compared to building a paper aeroplane vs building a commercial jet.
Okay, that may have been an over-exaggeration there, however, it did surprise me when I realised how vastly different creating a new design language could be and the considerations I had to make along the way.
When it comes to design I am completely self-taught and from a young age, I’ve had a keen eye for design. Recently I joined a new product role, the company in question had an amazing product, it was just hidden below some rough noughties era user interface which has been made with little regard for design pattern or brand. This in itself isn’t a criticism, I actually respect them for it — validate your product first, make it look pretty second.
It was overwhelmingly clear to me that a complete rebrand was in order, which for anyone who has done design before can attest to the difficulties of. Creating a functional interface is easy, but creating an interface that considers the brand, its users, and its purpose, all whilst keeping up with modern UI & UX trends? That’s the difficult shit. So let’s roll back to day 1 of product redesign. Here are the key things I considered first.
Know Your User
It seems obvious I know, but it’s a point that I’ve seen so many companies miss when creating their new brand. You’re not designing a brand for you, you’re designing it for your customers. If you have a brand focused on selling into the middle-aged women market, chances are creating a brand which looks like it’s marketed at teenage boys who overindulge in energy drinks and PC gaming probably won’t lead to many sales — not the ones you want anyway.
Luckily there’s one surprisingly easy and clever technique which can help you overcome this allowing you to read exactly what your customers want… talk to them. It seems like common sense but it’s probably one of the most valuable things you can do. By asking some key questions you can gain a lot of insight, some examples include:
- What’s your favourite brand and why?
- What makes you trust a brand?
- What does our current branding say to you?
- What brands can you think of that you don’t like? why?
- And more…
Knowing your customer is the most important thing to know as a business.
Colour
Selecting your primary brand colour will form the basis of all other colour you use in your brand and product. It will affect how people feel when they see your brand and how they classify you as a brand. Colour psychology is a whole subject in itself, luckily; Toptal wrote a nice post about it. At my company, we choose to go with the colour blue as a primary due to it’s trustful, safe characteristics — something desirable when dealing with big sales data.
Once you’ve selected your primary colour, have a play around with finding colours that complement that colour well, the aim here is to build out a pallet of colours that can be used throughout your brand — aim for around 3–6 colours that complement each other. There’s a bunch of useful apps out there to help you do this; my personal preference is for colours.
The colours you choose will be the main colours used throughout your entire brand. Every piece of product or material you produce should use these colours to communicate your brand and message. A brand is built upon consistency, you want people to think of you when they see that colour — so make sure it speaks volumes about the company you are.
Typography
Following colour, typography is another core way to communicate your brand consistently across your products. Arguably, alongside your logo and colour, typography can be one of the most important aspects of how you communicate your brand. Take a website like Medium, for example, the majority of the user experience is spent immersed in the text which is styled using Mediums typography. Would you want to read as much Medium content if they just used the standard Arial font (the correct answer is no). Obviously, there’s more that goes into making Medium a pull, but never the less, typography plays a big part in their messaging.
Finding the right font can be hard though. Where on earth should you start? Serif, Sans-Serif, does anybody ever remember the difference between those two anyway? To get off to a good start I’d recommend this guide to help you match your message to a front subset.
Document It
You don’t have a brand if nobody uses it. Why invest so much time, money and effort into creating a killer brand to woo the world if you don’t keep track of the work you’ve done. Commonly this comes in the form of brand guidelines, potentially one of the best I’ve seen is from the people at Atlassian. Don’t feel the need to go as far as them, after all, with a valuation of $4.5B they can afford fancy brand guidelines. However, the most important parts to consider are:
- Logo
- Colour
- Typography
- Social media guidelines
- Icons
- UI components
It’s important when it comes to UI that you make sure you’re also defining a language for your UI components. Aim to group UI elements and reuse as much as possible to keep things consistent. Below is an example of my companies envolving UI component sheet which we base all of our UI off and add to as we release new components.
If you fancy looking at a more realistic brand guideline, check out my companies one. It’s a work in progress and is a living document so it will continue to evolve. Just like the people that make up the brands, brands evolve, so should your brand and it’s guidelines.
Summary
Creating a great brand is the combination of executing well on all of the points I’ve spoken about above and more. It can feel overwhelming when you’re faced with the task of starting from scratch but think of it this way, you’ve got a blank canvas to craft your message, you can do it however you want, enjoy it. It’s a beautiful creative process which, if done well, can produce something truly special.
