how to integrate your brand into all aspects of your design

How to Integrate Your Brand into All Aspects of Your Design

2 | How to Integrate Your Brand into All Aspects of Your Design

No matter what kind of business you run, your brand identity is how you distinguish yourself from your competition.

In most cases, 20% of a business’s customersgenerate 80% of its revenues, and that relationship is established and maintained through a business’s brand.

While a storefront sign used to be all the branding you needed, these days, to succeed, you have to integrate your brand into every aspect of your business’s visual appearance. From your logo to your packaging to the fonts you use, consistency and unity in your brand’s graphics and design aesthetic can be the difference between keeping business and losing it.

How to Integrate Your Brand into All Aspects of Your Design


Why is Branding so Important?Just about every business today is either online or has a website. E-commerce means that consumers are interacting with most businesses and their products in the same way – no matter how big or how small the company is – on a screen.

While search engine marketing and paid listings and ads will get consumers in the digital door, gaining their trust and business and turning them into repeat customers requires connecting with them.

Your brand is how you do that; it’s your business’s identity, and it gives

your company a style and personality that inspires trust and a belief in the consistency and quality of your products or services. That’s why branding is so central to any business trying to succeed in the 21st century.

But, if you want to be successful, your branding needs to be consistent and applied universally. That doesn’t mean, however, that you should simply stamp the same logo on every single thing related to your company; rather, it’s about unity in your visual identity.

So where to begin…


Establish YourBusiness’s MessageTo create a universal and consistent brand identity that’s integrated into all aspects of your business’s design, you need to make sure you have a basic, solid message that encapsulates your business’s values and principles. This will help inform your design choices.

If you have a mission statement, start with that. If you don’t, then reflect on what your business is all about: who is it serving and why? What need does your business fill and what about it is unique?

Take those core ideas and boil them down to a few bullet points that are defining of what your business does and how it’s special. Let those be guidelinesfor your brand design integration, so that youensure that every design choice you makesomehow reflects this message.


Having established your business’s message and core values, you can beginto make sure your brand identity isstrong and well defined.

This requires taking a long, hard look in the mirror and determining the personality of your company. This should be a mix of what you want as your identity and what you think appeals to your market. Do you want to exude professionalism? Simplicity? Innovation and newness? Sleekness?

Determining those things requires knowing who your target consumers are. Are they business people? Other companies? Consumers in a specific age group?

Define Your Brand Identity


What appeals most to your target audience and how does that relate to your brand’s appearance?

Most brands, for example, use only two or, at most, three colors in their logos and graphic design elements. This exudes simplicity and consistency. But, if you’re trying to appeal to younger generations, maybe you want to use more colors, or uncommon colors so as to emphasize being different.

Having a well-defined brand identity will help you determine the basic features of your design.

Define Your Brand Identity


When it comes to integrating and establishing your brand identity and message across all your media and design features, consistency in appearance is key. And no matter your product or the type of company you run, in all likelihood your website constitutes a large portion of the design component of your brand.

Even if you’re not running an online store or ecommerce site, people rely on websites for information about a brand and they consider the simplicity and effectiveness of a website to be part of a brand’s character.In fact, 73% of people in the US say

Responsive Web Design


a bad brand website negatively impacts their opinion of that brand.

That’s why, when it comes to design integration and brand consistency, you need to think about responsive web design from the outset so that your website and digital marketing materials render effectively on a variety of devices and web browsers.

You can have a fantastic looking website with perfect design integration on all your pages, but that, when used on a smartphone, looks terrible and ends up turning consumers off to your brand.

Responsive Web Design


Color is, perhaps, the most salient characteristic of a business’s design. Unless it’s intentional, using too many colors or being inconsistent in your color use will look garish and amateurish.

That’s why you want to establish a color range that you use for all your design elements: from your logo, to packaging, to the fonts you use and the backgrounds of your webpages.

Determine one or two basic colors for your logo (if you haven’t designed one yet), webpages and fonts. Use those colors as the basis for additional business ephemera, like business cards and letterhead, and for any product packaging.

Next come up with a few color variations that compliment this color scheme, but that are also distinct and can be used to diversify your business’s appearance. Those colors can be used for new product launches or for content that you want to stand out and appear different or distinct.

Color Consistency


Whether you’ve worked with a graphic designer or have been doing your site or business’s design on your own, you’ve likely developed a logo for your brand.

While the most important thing about a logo is its ability to communicate the identity of your brand, you also want to make sure that it looks good and is effective on different products, marketing material and when viewed at different sizes.

That’s why most logos use no more than three colors and why the majority of them are simple and follow responsive design principles so that they are still legibleand effective on mobile devices and ina variety of media.

Optimizing Your Logo


The logo is the most important graphic design element for your business and brand. It’s often times the first thing that users see on a website or notice about a business.

At the same time, you don’t want to overwhelm consumers with your logo: you can end up alienating your market if you appear too logo-centric. That’s why you should develop a variety of logo variations and offshoots that you can use to add diversity to your design aesthetic while still maintaining brand cohesion.

Integrating Your Logo


Here are a few different variations you can try:

If you have a simple, monochromatic logo, try applyingone of your alternative brand colors to it to add varietywhile maintaining consistency in your design.

If you have a two-tone logo, you can try using eachcolor on their own for the logo, or inverting the colorsto create variety.

If your logo has your company name or is composed of text and a graphic, separate the two and use each independently.

Render your logo in monoline for something distinctand different.

Take any strong graphical elements in your logo and use them as individual features that you can use in place of the full logo.

Integrating Your Logo


Establish a handful of different print and pattern designs that you can consistently use for your branded material – whether they’re for the backgrounds of webpages or for product packaging.

You might be able to simply integrate the patterns and prints you’ve already designed for your website or products and integrate them into your additional design materials.

Develop a few different patterns or designs using your color palette that articulate your brand identity and use these to further create a sense of cohesion across all the design elements of your business.

Prints and Patterns


Just like all other elements of your business’s design aesthetic, the font you use relates to your brand identity. Establishing a few fonts that you use for different kinds of text is another way of maintaining design consistency and cohesion.

For your website, marketing materials and for your products, you’ll need two basic fonts: one for headlines and one for content. You might use the same font but distinguish them by font weight, size or by color, or you might use two entirely different fonts.

For your headlines, title and product names, use a display typeface. These fonts are meant to be large and are used to attract and interest people in your content or in a product. Your display typeface can establish a mood or personality. You could, for example, use a homemade looking display font to give off the appearance of being down to earth and

Font Consistency


accessible, or you could go with sleek sans-serif fonts that appear modern, minimalistic and professional.

If you have a font that you use in your logo, this might be good for a headline font, or you might want to use something that contrasts with your logo text, so as to create a more dynamic overall design character.

Text or body typefaces are fonts that are for content and information. They are all about legibility and are meant to be between 6-point and 14-point.

Some things to consider about your text fonts:

Serif fonts—fonts with the small lines that come off the ends and corners of letters—can be easier to read in printed material. Because they’ve been used for a long time they also have a classic feel to them.

Font Consistency


Once you’ve established the basic elements and variations of your brand’s design aesthetic, you should assemble them into a style guide. You and any other employees or designers can use the style guide to maintain cohesion in the visual appearance of your company while also allowing for variations to make your brand dynamic and unique.

A simple style guide can have examples of your logo and logo variations, color palette, prints and patterns and fonts. You can also develop a comprehensive style guide that follows a precise formula for your products and marketing material and that outlines exactly what kinds of design elements should be used for different kinds of visual features related to your company.

Create a Style Guide

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how to integrate your brand into all aspects of your design

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