When it comes to branding, it's all too easy to obsess over the details.
I’ve spent more hours than I’d care to admit shuffling around individual pixels and obsessing over exact shades of grey. But as much as designers need to love details, the success of a brand is built on strategy, not perfect visuals. By first understanding what a brand needs to do, the details will quickly take care of themselves.
Starting with the ending
Look up how to write a story, and you’ll always get the same advice: Start at the ending.
By figuring out how a narrative concludes, we can work backwards to discover plotlines, characters, and themes. It’s a simple concept, and one worth keeping in mind when building a brand.
If we begin our process by defining what exactly success looks like, the pathway towards accomplishing this becomes far clearer. Instead of saying “I want a green logo”, think about what you want your audience to associate your organisation and your product with. The use of green might then be justified towards that end, but may also seem irrelevant or useless. What matters is the end goal, not the specific details needed to accomplish it.
Little details and big pictures
At Kooba, we see branding work as a holistic process. That means the little details need to reflect the big picture, and the overarching plan needs to account for each individual visual element. In other words, the different parts of the branding projects are constantly relating to and influencing one another. The shade of green used in a logo, for instance, should reflect the business strategy of your entire organisation. In this sense, beautiful design work is only as useful as its function within the larger project of your organisation’s success. By constantly judging each feature on its contribution to the whole, we can build brands that actually work, and don’t just look nice.
Making the team work
It takes a village to raise a brand.
In order to take a truly holistic approach to designing a visual brand, your team needs to include a diverse and wide range of expertise and perspectives. One of the great things about working on branding projects with Kooba is that we don’t only make brands. That means our branding team has access to expert UX designers, developers, accessibility auditors, copywriters, and everybody in between. This enables us to poach ideas from all of these disciplines, and create brands that are multifaceted, durable, and stress-tested. It also means that our brand designs can be smoothly converted into gorgeous websites, because our entire team has contributed to them from the outset.
This, to me, is exactly how a brand should be developed. It should contribute to every part of a business, and take from the full range of knowledge within an organisation. It is an all-encompassing and existential project that takes into account the totality of your business strategy.
And just in case, make sure the details look good.
