Creating the brand identity for your business is more than crafting the perfect logo design. In this complete guide to how to create a brand identity, we’ll look at how to craft a business identity using a simple 5-step process, from building a brand mood board to launching your new branding and identity to the world!
In this article, we’ll cover:
- What is a Brand Identity?
- How Important is Brand Identity?
- How Long Does It Take to Create a Brand Identity?
- How to Create a Brand Identity: A 5-Step Guide
License this image via GoodFocused.
What Is a Brand Identity?
What is brand identity? The best brand identity definition is that it is the perceived personality, values, and visual identity of a business, company, or individual. A business identity can help the company to stand out amidst their competitors and make the brand instantly recognizable and memorable for customers.
A brand identity is the perceived personality, values, and visual identity of a business, company, or individual.
A brand identity usually includes a logo or brandmark, logo variations (including social media logos, and related graphics such as icons), a brand color palette, and brand typography (which typically includes both desktop (print) fonts and web fonts, as well as guidance on how the fonts should be used).
It can also extend to brand guides about how photography, illustration, and graphics should be presented on the business’ website and across print materials, such as stationery, signage, and packaging.
The most successful businesses globally often rely on the power of an ironclad brand identity to retain a captive consumer base. Think of the visual strength and instant memorability of brand identities used by companies such as Google, Amazon, Coca-Cola, or Nike.
Examples of some of the most famous and successful brand identities worldwide, across luxury retail, tech, and food, including Chanel, Starbucks, Hermès, and Apple. License these images via Rrrainbow, Drawi Pitek, Maddie Red, and Xeniia X.
How Important Is Brand Identity?
Creating a brand identity is an integral part of establishing and maintaining a commercial business or organization. A brand identity is likely to be the intended audience’s first point of contact with your business, ensuring that your business attracts attention, entices first-time customers, and builds a lasting relationship with a loyal customer base.
How important is brand identity design for businesses today?
In an increasingly crowded online market, it cannot be overstated just how important branding is in attracting easily-distracted eyes, and in building brand memorability to ensure customers don’t simply click once, but actually return to your business’ website time and again.
The importance of branding and identity in shaping customer decisions has been underlined by numerous marketing research studies, including this recent study which identifies the vital role that brand fonts play in forging positive consumer connections, as well as findings published by the Harvard Business Review that linked descriptive logos (logos which visually communicate the type of product being sold) with significantly improved brand performance.
It’s clear that identity design certainly matters in business!
Soda brand 7Up launched a zesty refresh of the brand’s identity in 2024, complete with polished typography and a super bright lime green hue (plus a traveling cool box at summer events). Pipped as one of the most successful rebrands of recent years, the brand identity refresh has led to a spike in sales and resurgence in consumer interest in this established drink’s brand.
How Long Does It Take to Create a Brand Identity?
Developing a brand identity can take very little time, or can be a longer or ongoing process, depending on the scope required of the brand, as well as on practical factors such as available design budget and design resources.
Building brands can be a process years, or even decades, in the making, with long-established businesses often adding to, refreshing or rebranding their business identity to maintain a strong market presence.
However, for small business branding, start-ups or solopreneur branding, designing a brand identity can be achieved in very little time. Below, you will find a simple five-step process for creating a brand identity that can be undertaken over the course of a few days, weeks or months, depending on how much time you have to commit to brand building.
License this image via Eric Isselee.
How to Create a Brand Identity: A 5-Step Guide
Here, we’ll look at how business owners, marketers, and graphic designers, as well as creatives looking to design their own brand identity, can streamline the brand design process, creating an effective and professional brand identity within a short space of time.
The five steps for how to create a brand identity include developing:
- Brand Mood Board: Begin by creating a mood board for your brand. Compile inspirational examples taken from photography, packaging design, brand design, and the visual identities of competitor brands.
- Logo: As the anchor of your brand identity, start the design process with drafting logo designs and refining a favored design. Consider how the logo could team with marketing visuals on a broader level. How will it work alongside photography or illustrations for editorial ads or social media?
- Brand Color Palette: Introduce color into your logo design and marketing visuals. Experiment with a wide variety of brand palettes until you feel you’ve struck the right tone for the industry and the brand itself.
- Brand Fonts and Typography: Experiment with font pairings alongside your logo and marketing visuals. Consider the impact of different type styles on websites and apps, and how this will translate to print media, such as stationery and packaging.
- Brand Mockups: Now that you have the core elements of your brand prepared, create visual mockups that demonstrate how the brand identity would look “in action.” These could include mockups of packaging, signage, website layouts, social media posts, or stationery items.
Optional Additional Steps:
- Graphics and Photography: Your logo design and/or marketing visuals might already have given you some ideas for how additional graphics (such as icons or illustrations) or photography might fit into your brand identity. If not, it’s worth considering how brand images should appear on the business’ website and print media.
- Brand Guidelines: A brand book or brand guidelines outlines all of the different elements of a brand identity, bringing both written and visual branding together and explaining how they should be used to create print and online media. According to this guide to brand guidelines by Papirfly, the key theme to emphasize in a brand book is consistency, which is “an essential marker of a brand’s quality and professionalism.”
- Brand Launch: Some businesses opt for a “soft launch” by releasing logo designs or a freshly branded website without a formal launch announcement, which might be followed by a test period during which the success of the brand identity is measured using marketing analytics and/or customer questionnaires. Other businesses will celebrate their new brand identity with physical or online launch events, social media campaigns, and PR press releases. Whichever launch strategy you think will suit your business, consider a brand launch as officially releasing your brand identity to the world!
From choosing brand colors, fonts, and imagery to visualizing your branding as stationery mockups and signage, this 5-step process for building brand identities is simple and clear to follow. License these mockup images via GoodFocused and hinterhof.
How to Build a Brand Identity: Case Study
With a recent Adobe study identifying the need for brands to prioritize earning customer trust and to do this through clear branding and communication, it’s clear that taking even a short time to build a business identity can have a huge impact on customer sales.
But, identity design needn’t be an arduous or difficult task! Creating a brand identity is simple when you follow the right steps.
We’ll use the example of a pet grooming parlor, Scruffs, to put this five-step business identity design process into practice.
Scruffs is a new business in need of a complete brand identity, ready for the parlor’s opening weekend only a few days away.
Aside from the brand name, the business is lacking all the vital elements of a cohesive brand identity, so we’ve got some work to do!
1. Brand Mood Board
First up, we need to collate our inspiration and ideas for the business identity, and there’s no better way to do this than with an old-fashioned mood board.
You can create a quick Pinterest board or use free online app Shutterstock Create to group your images together, with the goal of this exercise being to identify the visual elements you feel consistently drawn to.
Whether it’s a particular brand color palette, type style, or brand photography style, a brand mood board can help you to formalize your ideas and give your brand project a clear direction from the outset.
Combine images you’re drawn to from other creative fields—such as photography, illustration, or movies—with examples of brand identities, packaging designs, and stationery designs that catch your eye.
Also, be sure to consider the branding styles used by competitors within the same industry—these will give you a good sense of whether your own brand ideas will fit well within the sector.
Clockwise, from top left: Brand identity and packaging design for dog wellness brand Finn by graphic designer Daniel Brokstad. License these Shutterstock images via Kues and Yuttana Jaowattana. Rebrand for Bydog by graphic designer Gabriel Lobato.
2. Logo
You might already have some ideas about color, type, or photography from your mood board, but resist the urge to disappear down the identity design rabbit hole. A strong logo design is the cornerstone of any brand identity, and will make an appearance on everything, from signage to branded business cards.
When I’m thinking about developing a brand identity, I always begin with drafting logo designs. Often, a memorable logo design can lead almost naturally to other elements of your brand identity, informing the typography and stylistic personality of your website or business cards, for example.
Whether you opt for a type-based logo, a symbolic icon, or a combination of text and image, experiment with several different logo ideas first.
Whether you prefer to draft logo designs by hand or favor digital sketching in Adobe Illustrator, aim to fill a large canvas with plenty of quickly-constructed logo styles, working rapidly as you go.
Try a variety of pictographic icons and type-based logos—perhaps some of these will work well together in the final brand identity.
After your initial sketching, identify the logo designs that have the most visual impact, and continue to refine these. Eventually, you’ll have a logo design that’s approaching the final desired result.
Once you have refined your logo identity design, make sure to convert it into vector (EPS) format on Adobe Illustrator or Shutterstock Create.
For hand-sketched logo designs, scan or photograph your drawing before tracing over the image on-screen.
To make sure your logo design is going to be a strong foundation for the rest of the brand identity, try pairing the design with imagery—such as stock photography—to mimic how marketing visuals would look and see how everything gels together.
3. Brand Color Palette
While a logo is the foundation of a brand identity, color defines the personality of an identity design.
Able to transform the mood of a brand instantly, the right color palette can help a business to feel suited to the chosen market. It can also make customers feel more receptive and positive towards the brand identity.
Brand identities usually use one or two principle brand colors, which are used in the logo design and other commonly used brand media and marketing materials, plus a secondary brand palette which complements these principle hues, for use across backgrounds, text, and photography.
Experiment with different color combinations on your logo design, as well as trying different background colors. This will help you get a good sense of which colors work well together, which colors clash, and which make the logo design appear more legible.
In this example for Scruffs, I was initially drawn to orange and yellow, to give a cheerful, ’70s-inspired feel to the retro-style logo. However, I soon realized that red, pink, and white not only look more impactful, but feel more contemporary and were better suited for the overall business identity.
Experiment with different brand color options, testing levels of contrast and legibility against different background colors.
To test your brand identity color choices further, experiment with adding your color combinations to the rough marketing visual(s) you put together earlier.
You might find that your brand color choice brings the images to life! If not, it’s back to the color drawing board.
Experiment with different brand color options, testing levels of contrast and legibility against different background colors. License these images via GoodFocused and Eric Isselee.
As the next step in developing a brand identity, once you’ve decided on your favored brand colors, pull these together into a brand palette and use the Swatches panel in Adobe or Affinity software to identify the HEX, RGB, and CMYK values of each color.
You can also save the palette as an ASE file from InDesign, Illustrator, or Photoshop. Simply highlight the color swatches in the Swatches panel and choose Save Swatches from the panel’s main menu.
4. Brand Fonts and Typography
How to create a brand identity which really speaks to your customers? The next step in the brand building process is to focus on typography.
It’s likely you’ll use text in almost all of your brand communications. And, with consumers more font-aware than ever before, giving due consideration to the choice of fonts for your brand identity is extremely important.
Most brands will use at least two fonts as part of their brand identity—one for headlines and one for body type. A third font is sometimes used, but be warned that a well-executed type trio can be a tricky balancing act.
For the Scruffs branding and identity, I opted for a headline font that mimicked the style of the brand logo, helping to pull the logo and headline communications together.
Because the headline font, GT Super Display, is a curvy, retro type-style, I experimented with body text fonts that would act as a good font teammate.
A simple, slightly rounded sans serif like Europa still retains the same open, somewhat retro feel of the headline font, but is also exceptionally clear to read when set at a small size.
Put together a few examples of your brand type choices in action. This will help you to assess if the font pairing works well together in a variety of contexts or colors, and will also help you to define rules about how the type should be set.
For example, it might be that headlines should always have a leading of x points or that body text should always be aligned left and justified.
5. Brand Mockups
The final step in creating a brand identity? With all the core elements of your brand identity now in place, a good last step is to create some cool brand mockup images that will make you feel exceptionally proud of the identity you’ve created.
Mockups are also helpful for assessing how the brand elements will look in real-time, and help communicate your ideas clearly with teammates or clients.
Mockups don’t have to be difficult to create. Many apps and websites offer ready-made mockup templates that allow you to drop your logo and colors into a Photoshop file.
Or, why not add your designs to stock photos, such as in the store front example below? Super easy and really effective!
License this image via hinterhof.
It’s a good idea to create brand mockups for a few items that would be likely to feature the brand identity, so you can really see how it translates to different contexts.
In the case of Scruffs, the parlor signage and business cards will be highly visible elements of the branding.
However, for your own brand design, you may also want to consider mocking-up visuals for landing pages, social media posts, email headers, packaging, or T-shirts.
In five simple steps, you’ve learned how to create a brand identity that’s ready to share with the world!
From creating a high-impact logo to formalizing color, typography, and marketing imagery for your identity design, this quick and simple brand building process gives you the essential elements of a business identity that you can start using straightaway.
Of course, brand identities become more mature and professional as brands evolve over time. You can create a more comprehensive brand identity by carefully considering how your brand designs will work across a wide range of scenarios and media formats—from apps to business letterheads—as well as thinking about how to introduce additional elements, such as graphic icons and brand photography styles.
For more guidance on brand design, and how creatives can build their own beautiful brand identities, check out these additional tips and tutorials:
License this cover image via GoodFocused.
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