Brand Consistency in Web Design

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?

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.

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.

(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.

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.

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.

The Social Foodies

There’s an inspirational story behind this food brand and how they come up with the logo. The company's brand mission to sell socially sustainable food products is seen in its product pictures, CTA buttons, and the font selection for the main heading.

Living with OCD

This is a great example of brand consistency that utilizes color composition, and playful geometric web graphics. The brand's purpose is to give education and resources about OCD mental disorder and it is accommodated by the scroll-down animation that attracts the visitors to keep navigating the web content. The orange color adds up a nice accent to the web design.

2. Easy Access to Brand Identity Assets and Guidelines

It’s quite handy to create a set of brand toolkit files or a web page where your company team can access it easily. Your social media and marketing team, copywriter, graphic and web designer, as well as web developers, are those who often need the brand identity asset files.

With the same understanding of the brand concept, your crew would keep the web design appearance and your web publication consistent with the style guidelines. The toolkit would normally include these files:

• Logo with its alternatives, such as logo icon or favicon, or the logo with the text or without the text
• Icon style for social media and navigational purposes
• Color palettes with hex codes to list
• Brand guidelines for the website's UX/UX such as buttons, fonts for headings or paragraphs, image formatting, etc.
• Templates for blog post’s featured images, and social media campaign banners
• Design kit for affiliate marketing purposes and the web community

Easy Access Study Cases

Twitter Brand Toolkit

As a well-known social media website, Twitter provides a page to list its brand assets and guidelines. They also include the official standard of content embedding for further integration options. This would solidify their brand authenticity not only for their internal team but also for the greater publication purposes by many Twitter users.

3. Rebranding

There are many reasons why a company needs to rebrand. One of them is often needed when the customer’s conversion or sales are decreasing or the lack of brand clarity in time. The rebranding will surely help to improve brand consistency on a web design.

The first step of rebranding is to launch the newest logo version and the style guidelines. While the next step will not always require a total website revamp to stay up to date, the web redesign will also give you the chance to fix any bugs and user experience issues.

Rebranding Study Cases

Reddit Web Redesign

Being one of the major starters in social media players, Reddit’s brand concept is quite strong and that makes the website keep getting noticed by the users. However, web technology is always evolving and there’s no other choice but to keep up with it by redesigning Reddit’s website look and adding more functionalities.

Before the redesign:

After the redesign:

Website design as the brand identity component should follow the style guidelines to build stronger brand consistency, yet without overpowering the company logo as the visual mark of a brand, especially when it comes to applying the color schemes.

Setting up an accessible brand toolkit on the web for an internal team or general users will ensure the continuity of brand clarity and familiarity for the consumers on all various types of media publications.

It’s crucial to keep the brand identity up to date and rebranding is one of the solutions. However, even for the sake of brand consistency, a website redesign should not be done too often unless there are good reasons, such as low conversion rate, very low traffic, or any technical reasons.