Each company that provides products or services should have a strong brand to stay in the market or even lead the market. But what exactly is a brand? and why is it so important in running a business?
What is Brand?
Seth Godin's definition of the brand can be understood in a simpler way, where a brand is the collection of hopes, memories, experiences, and relationships that contribute to a consumer's choice of one product or service over another. In other words: a brand would be a bridge to connect the company and its consumer with visual and emotional perceptions.
Brand vs. Logo
With visual perception, the consumers will keep the imagery remembrance of products and services, while the emotional perception over products and services will trigger or influence consumers’ purchase decisions.
However, it is essential to understand that a brand is different from a company logo even though they both have ‘visual’ elements in the definition. A brand represents visual perception, while a logo is part of the brand itself to assist this visual perception to work well using the logo visual mark. A well-designed logo will help a consumer to remember a product or a service. It identifies a business or company’s brand in a visual manner, which can be in the form of an iconic symbol, pictorial mark, logotype, or a composition of these two forms.
What is Website Design?
(In terms of branding)
In a further application, a logo will set an identity system that contains style guidelines to visually represent a brand in greater depth across the product and service. It stands to enable everyone who’s involved in the business to easily apply and design the brand identity components in a consistent look and style.
The brand identity components are commonly known as business stationery, packaging design, outdoor signage, and online design channels in addition. Website design and any web graphic appearances such as web icons, banners, graphics for social media campaigns, etc, are what we understand as part of the online design channels.
Why Does Brand Consistency Matter
in Web Design
As already discussed earlier, website design is one of the brand identity components. But what is the significance of brand consistency in web design, and how can you integrate it into a successful design strategy?
Let’s find out about it!
1. Represents your business credibility
No matter the type of products or services that are featured or offered on a website, professionalism in the business environment is crucial. Web design can represent trustworthiness and business credibility from its appearance.
The professional brand will be consistent to keep that trust and credibility so it will ensure consumers who buy a product or a service get a fair reward for their investment. A positive overall design impression and a clear mission of a company brand are the keys to achieving professionalism in a business.
2. Increases your brand awareness
Consumer’s familiarity with a brand visualization on your website will directly measure the brand awareness level. Strong brand awareness will position products and services in the thought of targeted customers. The more customers who are familiar and comfortable with a brand, the more likely they will keep returning to purchase a product or service.
First-stage awareness would often be an easy-to-remember logo. This kind of logo is usually simple and also has interesting color combinations. A web design should be consistent with the style guidelines of a logo
The next brand awareness would be determined by how often and persistent it is seen by the consumers throughout web and print media publications.
3. Establishes solid authenticity
A genuine visual look of a brand is truly essential in today’s market competition. A unique brand concept would beyond doubt stand out in the crowd. This solution would add more solid authenticity to consumers’ loyalty and satisfaction in the long term.
Establishing stability and satisfaction to consumers would need brand consistency throughout your web design, which can be an application of creative picks of color palettes or a special composition of layout elements that are strictly aligned to the brand identity guidelines.
3 Tips to Improve Brand Consistency
In this section, we will focus on some tips to improve and achieve brand consistency in the website design. It will be easier to understand this topic with examples or study cases, so let’s start with them.
1. Follow the style guidelines
As one of the brand identity components, a website design should follow the brand style guidelines. The style guidelines specific for web designing generally include:
Branding concept (brand story, language tone & emotion)
Company Logo
Web graphics
Color palettes
Web typography
Branding Concept
Web design would reflect much on the brand concept root which describes the company story and its true mission. The brand concept will be the primary basic reference in the web design visualization and represent the business foundation to the audience.
Designing a website would also need to meet the brand’s language tone and emotion when approaching the customers within a certain demographic target market, such as age range, generational group, gender, social income, cultural background, lifestyle, and many more.
Company Logo
A logo is the main visual reference for the style guidelines. It will directly define the web design style and representation. Professional look logo style would ideally use a corporate business web design theme rather than using the web design theme for entertainment business for instance.
Web Graphics
Choosing the right style of web graphics would maintain consistency with the company brand as it will bring a certain mood when they are combined with other elements on a website. Web graphics are usually a set of featured photos, illustrations, graphic animation, and icons.
Color Palettes
The web color palettes are using what’s in the company logo as a reference unless a few additional colors are included in the brand guidelines for a monochrome logo to add an artistic element to the web design. A logo can be so colorful with up to 5 colors in maximum number, yet it’s better to limit the use in a website with only 3 colors from the logo for simplicity reasons.
These color palettes can be applied to some web elements, which are: web typography, layout, icons, buttons, and any other web elements that need to have color. It’s important to keep a good color contrast between the web background color and the text or the rest of the web content such as photos and CTA buttons.
Web Typography
Similar to color palettes, web typography would also give a certain visual impression in the web design, hence improving the brand consistency when it’s done right. Font selection and pairings are an important part of brand identity guidelines.
It also has the purpose to deliver a written message to the audience, so that would mean every web visitor who reads, would get familiar with the company brand accordingly.
Style Guideline Study Cases
The New Yorker
As an online news resource, The New Yorker has been around for a long time. Yet the brand seems timeless with its website appearance that uses a perfect pairing of beautiful fonts for the headings and paragraphs to match the logo design.
