How to Find and Hire the Best Brand Identity Designers for Your Business?

Improve your brand value and attract customers through superlative brand designs.

Building your brand designs is like shaping expectations, perceptions, and memories of potential consumers of your product or services. How you could motivate them to choose your product or service over others can be translated to how to attract consumers to choose your brand over others. For superlative brand designs that help you enrich your brand image and acquire and retain brand loyalty, you would need the services of outstanding brand identity designers or an expert brand identity design agency. This blog helps you understand everything about brand identity and hiring the right brand design service team.

Building a brand is an essential part of any business strategy. Brand identity helps to separate your company from the crowd and helps to connect with customers on a personal level.

A successful brand strategy will inspire trust in your customers while also differentiating your firm or company from competitors. This article will discuss how to create a personal, unique brand identity that reflects your business and sets it apart from others. The tips and insights are provided by the team of brand identity design service experts from a reputed brand identity design agency.

Understanding The Terms – Brand, Brand Identity, and Brand Identity Design

Let’s first remove all the confusion regarding what is a brand and what refers to brand identity, and then move to what comes under brand identity design.

Brand

The significance of the word brand has changed over time. Hundreds of years back, it was a symbol or name that indicated one seller’s offerings from another, be it the cattle they were selling or their merchandise.

The term brand now refers to a business and marketing concept that helps people identify a particular company, product, or individual. By itself, a brand is an intangible asset.

It is a good idea to consult with an expert and experienced brand design services agency that helps you understand branding, brand identity building, and brand identity design through practical examples. It is wiser, however, to acquire a better understanding of these concepts before you hire a brand identity design firm. This is what this blog is about. Let’s move on.

As brands are intangible – there is no physical element that is called a brand; an expert lets you know how to correctly perceive it. People often think a brand is a logo or some recognizable mark or symbol. A logo is a branding tool and not the brand itself. It definitely serves as a brand identifier.

Brand Identifiers

Identifiers of a brand include not only its logo but everything visually connected to it, such as a name, a slogan, a mascot, etc. For example, when someone mentions Columbia Pictures Industries, most people immediately remember the logo – an image of the Roman warrior lady with a shield in one hand and a wheat spike in the other. The name Columbia Pictures also appears in mind.

The film production studio would not want any other studio or company to use the same or similar image and identifiers for their brand. That is why there are trademarks and copyrights to protect the brand identifiers of a company.

Brand Identity Design

David Aaker, called the “Father of Modern Branding,” is a recognized authority on branding. His words would give you a clear picture of what brand identity is – “a unique set of brand associations that the brand strategist aspires to create or maintain. These associations represent what the brand stands for and imply a promise to customers from the organization members.”

Designing the identifiers of a brand is essentially what brand identity design is mostly about.

What is Included in Brand Identity Design?

Brand Name:

Choosing a good brand name can be extremely difficult, and it is essential for you to select a name that would reflect the company in a way that enhances its values, vision, and perceptions about it.

Sometimes, it is not just the name that matters, but what the brand does and how it wins the loyalty of customers. Nevertheless, a name that people can easily remember and associate with the other identifiers of your brand always has its advantages. A brand identity designer would need a brand name to work on.

Brand Logo:

Without a logo, it’ll be very hard to get people to visualize your company in the manner you desire. If people have a symbolic image to associate with, that’s the image that will stay in their minds when they think of your company. Your brand logo is a powerful brand identifier. It should ideally be memorable and unique.

Brand Colors:

Colors are an integral part of the symbolic image of your company or its brand. Whether it is the logo or the brand name, the colors used to design them will reflect them in a particular manner. Choosing the right color palette for your company depends on how you want your brand to be perceived by customers, your community, and all the stakeholders.

Visual Elements:

Apart from colors, your brand name, logo, and other identifiers would comprise several distinct and subtle visual elements. The shapes, forms, motifs, typography, symbols, graphical elements, and the entire imagery involved are the visual elements of your brand.

Typography:

The right font category and text size, shape, and weight are all game-changers when it comes to the overall branding of a business. While Virgin America uses the font Gotham in a particular style, Walmart, a company with an all-American presence almost everywhere in the country, uses a widely popular font, Myriad Pro.

You would now have a pretty clear notion of how visuals or design elements play a huge role in developing the different brand identifiers of your company. This understanding leads to the next question – how to hire the right designers for creating your brand identity designs. There are some steps before getting into hiring activities.

Steps Before Hiring Brand Identity Designers

Analyze your Company’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats

Business owners or founders of an organization would have their own notions, dreams, and vision of the entities they create. How to remove the illusions and assumptions from the real picture? This is where SWOT analysis could be helpful.

A clear picture of where your organization or firm stands, what are the real strengths it can leverage and project, and the direction where its opportunities lie, etc. – this knowledge and insight helps you design in the most effective and powerful way possible.

Let us share an example. A legacy business into textile and wood handicrafts had a very rudimentary symbol for a logo – a symbol their ancestral founders used to mark their packages. When the current owners decide to expand and diversify the business, they need to reposition their brand and redesign brand identity.

We asked them to get insights from SWOT analysis and share the inputs. The ideas that developed after the analysis were incredible. They understand where their opportunities and strengths lie and what needs to be projected to enhance their brand personality.

Define Business Goals and Key Customer Segments

Business goals are much more than just achieving profits in the short run. Rather it is a long-term portrayal of plans on how the business will continue and what are the steps needed to maximize the profitability with full responsibility.

Identifying your customer segments gives you a better understanding of where your revenues, profits, opportunities, and goals can be realized. Once you have formed the right understanding, you will know which kind of designs would align with your findings and which will not.

Define The Brand Personality

There are several kinds of brand personalities like- innovative, competent, reliable, vibrant, and much more. It’s very important for a brand identity design firm to always consider such personalities while formulating branding strategies.

This example might help you understand better. The logo of a financial services provider offering gold loans, wealth management, and other services has two elephants shaped into an alphabet. This brand identifier symbolizes not only the roots of the corporation but also evokes a projection of strength, resilience, and reliability.

Do Competitive Research and Find Brands That Your Targeted Customers Prefer The Most

Competitive research helps you understand the graphical elements, imagery, typography, symbols, hues, and colors that are perceived as amazing, widely popular, well-accepted, innovative, mesmerizing, eco-friendly, etc., and which are perceived as negative, prosaic, and superficial.

Identify Your Brand Positioning

Brand positioning is one of the most important aspects of designing an effective marketing strategy. Researching that will help you understand how your brand identity design will impact your existing and future brand image.

Define Your Brand’s Key Message

The key to a strong brand is to develop a message that resonates with your target market. It has to be succinct and easily understood by your audience. A clear and concise message will allow consumers to remember who you are and what you stand for.

It’s the core concept of what makes a business unique and why customers should choose it over its competitors. In order to make an effective key message, you need to determine how your brand can help solve customers’ problems or fulfill their desires.

How to Choose the Right Brand Identity Designers For Your Business

1- Size Matters

The size of the company offering brand design or brand identity design solutions does matter.

A team of three designers could give excellent ideas for the brand identity design program of a huge company but not based on practical insights. The kind of branding campaigns a big company manages needs experts in brand design with the experience of managing a similar scope of work.

On the other hand, a small firm, a local business, a startup, or a mid-sized company would end up paying a lot more than needed when they hire big-sized brand design service firms, which might not have the experience of knowing about making small scale campaigns for local audiences work like magic.

This is one of the reasons why at Sprak Design, we have developed a big team to look into big-sized brand identity-building campaigns while maintaining a network of remote teams ideal for small-sized firms and local campaigns.

2- Portfolios

Checking portfolios of the brand design experts you have shortlisted is undoubtedly a necessary step. But how should you go about it? An experienced brand identity design firm or specialist brand identity designer would have a good portfolio.

You could check for the kind of markets and industries they covered. Someone with experience in designing brands in your industry would be many steps ahead in assessing what could work for you than brand identity design firms that have no exposure to your industry.

3- Knowledge, Innovation, and Values

A good brand design service agency will stay updated on the latest trends and innovations shaping the way brand designs are developed and campaigned.

An expert brand identity designer would be some more steps ahead with the experience of having used the latest techniques and trends that would prove advantageous for your brand identity design campaigns. The more innovatively you could develop your brand identifiers and use them in different mediums and campaigns, the more outcomes you get from brand-building activities.

4- References and testimonials

When searching for a company that specializes in brand design services, it is strongly recommended that you do not solely rely on online reviews or social media posts. An expert brand identity design agency will be able to provide professional references on request.

5- Approach and Process

A strong approach behind successful brand identity designs is not limited to aesthetic designs but to the ability to project a great brand image and personality.

An expert brand identity design agency will customize project approaches to align with outcomes. They also develop a process chain for a brand design project that involves iterative processes, responsiveness to client demands, quality checks, tests, etc.

6- Costs Involved

Branding agencies may charge on an hourly basis, task-basis, per month basis, or on a recurring retainer price model. It depends on the volume of work involved and the number of designs to be created per task.

Conclusion

Sprak Design is a design service company with a strong team of brand identity designers with specialized experience in different industry sectors. We have designed brand-building campaigns for hundreds of firms in the SME sector, big and mid-sized companies, and other types of organizations.

Our approach and project processes are customized to meet every requirement a client puts forward for highly successful brand identity design campaigns and other brand-building activities. You would never have to worry about template-based simplistic approaches that do not create a unique brand identity.

When it comes to costs, we have the ability to offer flexible pricing models tailored for your unique needs and scope of services.

To know more about brand identity designs and to increase the value of your brand, please reach out to us!