The document discusses how to integrate a brand's identity into all aspects of its visual design. It recommends establishing a core message, defining the brand's personality, ensuring consistency across platforms like websites, optimizing the logo for different contexts, developing print and font styles, and creating a style guide to maintain coherence. The goal is to present a unified brand image while allowing for diversity.

1. How to Integrate
Your Brand into All
Aspects of Your Design

2. 2 | How to Integrate Your Brand into All Aspects of Your Design
No matter what kind of business you run, your brand
identity is how you distinguish yourself from your
competition.
In most cases, 20% of a business’s customers
generate 80% of its revenues, and that relationship is
established and maintained through a business’s brand.
While a storefront sign used to be all the branding you
needed, these days, to succeed, you have to integrate
your brand into every aspect of your business’s visual
appearance. From your logo to your packaging to the
fonts you use, consistency and unity in your brand’s
graphics and design aesthetic can be the difference
between keeping business and losing it.
How to Integrate Your Brand
into All Aspects of Your Design

3. 3 | How to Integrate Your Brand into All Aspects of Your Design
Why is Branding so Important?
Just about every business today
is either online or has a website.
E-commerce means that consumers
are interacting with most businesses
and their products in the same way
– no matter how big or how small the
company is – on a screen.
While search engine marketing and
paid listings and ads will get consumers
in the digital door, gaining their trust
and business and turning them into
repeat customers requires connecting
with them.
Your brand is how you do that; it’s
your business’s identity, and it gives
your company a style and personality
that inspires trust and a belief in
the consistency and quality of your
products or services. That’s why
branding is so central to any business
trying to succeed in the 21st
century.
But, if you want to be successful, your
branding needs to be consistent and
applied universally. That doesn’t mean,
however, that you should simply stamp
the same logo on every single thing
related to your company;
rather, it’s about unity in
your visual identity.
So where to begin…

4. 4 | How to Integrate Your Brand into All Aspects of Your Design
Establish Your
Business’s Message
To create a universal and consistent brand identity that’s integrated
into all aspects of your business’s design, you need to make sure
you have a basic, solid message that encapsulates your business’s
values and principles. This will help inform your design choices.
If you have a mission statement, start with that. If you don’t, then
reflect on what your business is all about: who is it serving and why?
What need does your business fill and what about it is unique?
Take those core ideas and boil them down to a few
bullet points that are defining of what your business
does and how it’s special. Let those be guidelines
for your brand design integration, so that you
ensure that every design choice you make
somehow reflects this message.

5. 5 | How to Integrate Your Brand into All Aspects of Your Design
Having established your business’s
message and core values, you can begin
to make sure your brand identity is
strong and well defined.
This requires taking a long, hard look in the
mirror and determining the personality
of your company. This should be a mix of
what you want as your identity and what
you think appeals to your market. Do you
want to exude professionalism? Simplicity?
Innovation and newness? Sleekness?
Determining those things requires knowing
who your target consumers are. Are they
business people? Other companies?
Consumers in a specific age group?
Define Your Brand Identity

6. 6 | How to Integrate Your Brand into All Aspects of Your Design
What appeals most to your target
audience and how does that relate
to your brand’s appearance?
Most brands, for example, use
only two or, at most, three colors
in their logos and graphic design
elements. This exudes simplicity
and consistency. But, if you’re
trying to appeal to younger
generations, maybe you want to
use more colors, or uncommon
colors so as to emphasize being
different.
Having a well-defined brand
identity will help you determine
the basic features of your design.
Define Your Brand Identity

7. 7 | How to Integrate Your Brand into All Aspects of Your Design
When it comes to integrating and
establishing your brand identity
and message across all your media
and design features, consistency in
appearance is key. And no matter
your product or the type of company
you run, in all likelihood your website
constitutes a large portion of the
design component of your brand.
Even if you’re not running an online
store or ecommerce site, people rely
on websites for information about a
brand and they consider the simplicity
and effectiveness of a website to be
part of a brand’s character.
In fact, 73% of people in the US say
Responsive Web Design

8. 8 | How to Integrate Your Brand into All Aspects of Your Design
a bad brand website negatively
impacts their opinion of that brand.
That’s why, when it comes to design
integration and brand consistency,
you need to think about responsive
web design from the outset so that
your website and digital marketing
materials render effectively on
a variety of devices and web
browsers.
You can have a fantastic looking
website with perfect design
integration on all your pages, but
that, when used on a smartphone,
looks terrible and ends up turning
consumers off to your brand.
Responsive Web Design

9. 9 | How to Integrate Your Brand into All Aspects of Your Design
Color is, perhaps, the most salient characteristic of a business’s
design. Unless it’s intentional, using too many colors or being
inconsistent in your color use will look garish and amateurish.
That’s why you want to establish a color range that you use for all
your design elements: from your logo, to packaging, to the fonts
you use and the backgrounds of your webpages.
Determine one or two basic colors for your logo (if you haven’t
designed one yet), webpages and fonts. Use those colors as the
basis for additional business ephemera, like business cards and
letterhead, and for any product packaging.
Next come up with a few color variations that compliment this color
scheme, but that are also distinct and can be used to diversify your
business’s appearance. Those colors can be used for new product
launches or for content that you want to stand out and appear
different or distinct.
Color Consistency

10. 10 | How to Integrate Your Brand into All Aspects of Your Design
Whether you’ve worked with a graphic
designer or have been doing your site or
business’s design on your own, you’ve
likely developed a logo for your brand.
While the most important thing about a logo
is its ability to communicate the identity of
your brand, you also want to make sure that
it looks good and is effective on different
products, marketing material and when
viewed at different sizes.
That’s why most logos use no more than
three colors and why the majority of them
are simple and follow responsive design
principles so that they are still legible
and effective on mobile devices and in
a variety of media.
Optimizing Your Logo

11. 11 | How to Integrate Your Brand into All Aspects of Your Design
The logo is the most important
graphic design element for your
business and brand. It’s often
times the first thing that users
see on a website or notice about
a business.
At the same time, you don’t
want to overwhelm consumers
with your logo: you can end up
alienating your market if you
appear too logo-centric. That’s
why you should develop a variety
of logo variations and offshoots
that you can use to add diversity
to your design aesthetic while
still maintaining brand cohesion.
Integrating Your Logo

12. 12 | How to Integrate Your Brand into All Aspects of Your Design
Here are a few different variations you can try:
If you have a simple, monochromatic logo, try applying
one of your alternative brand colors to it to add variety
while maintaining consistency in your design.
If you have a two-tone logo, you can try using each
color on their own for the logo, or inverting the colors
to create variety.
If your logo has your company name or is composed of text
and a graphic, separate the two and use each independently.
Render your logo in monoline for something distinct
and different.
Take any strong graphical elements in your logo and use them
as individual features that you can use in place of the full logo.
Integrating Your Logo

13. 13 | How to Integrate Your Brand into All Aspects of Your Design
Establish a handful of different print and
pattern designs that you can consistently
use for your branded material – whether
they’re for the backgrounds of webpages
or for product packaging.
You might be able to simply integrate
the patterns and prints you’ve already
designed for your website or products and
integrate them into your additional design
materials.
Develop a few different patterns or designs
using your color palette that articulate
your brand identity and use these to
further create a sense of cohesion across
all the design elements of your business.
Prints and Patterns

14. 14 | How to Integrate Your Brand into All Aspects of Your Design
Just like all other elements of your business’s design
aesthetic, the font you use relates to your brand identity.
Establishing a few fonts that you use for different kinds of
text is another way of maintaining design consistency and
cohesion.
For your website, marketing materials and for your products,
you’ll need two basic fonts: one for headlines and one for
content. You might use the same font but distinguish them
by font weight, size or by color, or you might use two entirely
different fonts.
For your headlines, title and product names, use a display
typeface. These fonts are meant to be large and are used to
attract and interest people in your content or in a product.
Your display typeface can establish a mood or personality.
You could, for example, use a homemade looking display
font to give off the appearance of being down to earth and
Font Consistency

15. 15 | How to Integrate Your Brand into All Aspects of Your Design
accessible, or you could go with sleek sans-serif fonts that
appear modern, minimalistic and professional.
If you have a font that you use in your logo, this might
be good for a headline font, or you might want to use
something that contrasts with your logo text, so as to
create a more dynamic overall design character.
Text or body typefaces are fonts that are for content and
information. They are all about legibility and are meant to be
between 6-point and 14-point.
Some things to consider about your text fonts:
Serif fonts—fonts with the small lines that come off the
ends and corners of letters—can be easier to read in printed
material. Because they’ve been used for a long time they
also have a classic feel to them.
Font Consistency

16. 16 | How to Integrate Your Brand into All Aspects of Your Design
Once you’ve established the basic elements
and variations of your brand’s design aesthetic,
you should assemble them into a style guide.
You and any other employees or designers can
use the style guide to maintain cohesion in
the visual appearance of your company while
also allowing for variations to make your brand
dynamic and unique.
A simple style guide can have examples of your
logo and logo variations, color palette, prints
and patterns and fonts. You can also develop
a comprehensive style guide that follows a
precise formula for your products and marketing
material and that outlines exactly what kinds of
design elements should be used for different
kinds of visual features related to your company.
Create a Style Guide
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