How can you create a visual style that aligns with your client's brand?

Understanding a brand before designing is crucial. Delve into their values, goals, identity, products, services, and unique benefits. Research their competitors, target customers, and personas. Familiarize yourself with their communication style, voice, and guidelines. This involves studying their website, social media, marketing content, and customer feedback. Interviews and questionnaires can provide deeper insights, ensuring your designs align perfectly with the brand's essence and objectives.

While thorough research and client engagement lay a solid foundation, it's also crucial to recognize the dynamic nature of brands. They evolve, and sometimes the most insightful understanding comes from not just formal briefs or established guidelines, but from the intuitive and creative interpretation of the brand's potential future direction. A designer's vision can sometimes anticipate and shape the brand's journey, not just echo its current state. So, while grounding your design in solid research is essential, leaving room for creative foresight can lead to designs that not only reflect but also elevate the brand's identity.

One crucial advantage I've discovered on my journey is that your competitors serve as the primary guidebook to reaching your initial milestone. 1) Familiarize yourself with your successful competitors. 2) Grasp the theme of their brand. Investigate their customer base. 3) Address their pain points, feedback, and demonstrate how your brand aims to resolve or streamline them.

A brand's design language is it's visual identity. The best example of a visual style belongs to Cadbury's. By consistently using the colour purple and white typography, Cadbury's has built a visual identity that is unassailable.

Beyond researching, fostering a direct conversation with the client provides nuanced insights. An open dialogue ensures a comprehensive understanding of their brand identity, allowing for a more personalized and impactful visual representation.

Presenting the visual style through mood boards or style tiles enhances client engagement. It not only facilitates clearer communication but also allows for an iterative process, ensuring the final visual style resonates seamlessly with the client's brand.

This piece lie very dormant yet very important while creating a piece. Each visual, contributes a key characteristic when it comes to the vibrant nature a piece can develop to. Defining the visual style is a nuanced process that involves deliberate choices in design elements to convey a specific aesthetic. It's a visual language that communicates the essence of a brand, project, or artwork. From color palettes to typography, each element contributes to shaping a cohesive and memorable identity. Striking a balance between creativity and functionality is key, ensuring that the visual style not only captures attention but also aligns with the intended message or purpose.

While this point is important to store and access brand kits, You may use Canva for Teams to manage your brand and collaborate with ease, and future-proof your design systems. A brand style guide, which includes brand identity guidelines, can be either an internal or external document, serving as a tool for your team, and inspiration for others.

Once you know what the objective is like, definitely setting a visual tone to the entire communication being built towards enhancing the brand persona is a must. Fonts, KVs, adapts, colour scheme, graphics or human involvement, VFX, VO etc everything when comes together creates something different and unique. That’s not just visually pleasing but brand resonating too.

Consistency is key across varied content formats. Employing templates and guides streamlines the application process. Utilizing resources like Adobe Color ensures a cohesive visual palette, strengthening the brand's identity across diverse platforms.

Applying a visual style across multiple different channels requires creativity and flexibility. The brand visual guidelines should not be so inflexible as to stifle creativity, especially when it comes to social media content.

Post-implementation analytics are vital for continuous improvement. Tools like Google Analytics provide valuable insights into user engagement. Real user feedback, obtained through platforms like UserTesting, becomes instrumental in refining the visual style for optimal impact.

Collaboration is a dynamic exchange. Regular communication fosters a symbiotic relationship, allowing for mutual understanding. Flexibility and confidence play a dual role - adapting to client needs while asserting your expertise ensures a balanced and fruitful collaboration.

Absolutely, knowing the brand in and out. As to what it’s looking to achieve from a holistic POV is a must. You just can’t hop on to any framework or opinion as to this would work for the brand and this won’t. Knowing the vision, mission, why the service or product they offer exists, where they want to lead any particular conversation around their growth too etc. if you know and understand the brand as if its your own. You will know where and when to start from.

Every project is a stepping stone for growth. Reflecting on successes and failures, and actively seeking client feedback, creates a continuous learning loop. Engaging with other content developers further expands your creative toolkit, enriching your ability to craft compelling visual styles.

Creating a visual identity for a brand is a long process, this article is looking at a more traditional approach to this, but I believe it's ok to think out of the box if you want to create something truly unique. That being said, it has to be a mix of traditional and innovative. Sticking to the old guidelines come up with a completely new process. I sometimes look at competitor visual identities and how they have decided to express the brand, with that information I look at the client's needs, where are the gaps and where does it overlap and that is the sweet spot to create something that stands out and is true to the client's requirements for the brand identity.

To align with your client's brand, focus on their color palette, typography, and imagery preferences. Incorporate these elements consistently across various visual assets, maintaining a cohesive and recognizable style.

If you're not completely building or rebranding a company then they should already have a standard Company Brand Guidelines written out. Study that along with iteration and exploration. Look for new pathways within the set guidelines, look at past iterations and see how successful those were. Have an overwhelming drive to be different and the shear cleverness to accomplish that within their lines. You can find ways to color outside the lines as long as you stand behind your choice and make it just as necessary as the color that stayed inside the lines. When you push the boundaries and it works you will get praise, if you take a risk and it flips...you'll never hear the end of it lol no pressure!!

The market changes poised to happen for the next few years should be carefully considered to maintain elements that would reflect the future positioning of the brand. These elements can be further solidified through a series of brand building narratives.

Roadmap your way to success. From knowing the brand to taking impactful calls when and wherever required. Mapping and charting out business opportunities and plans where the brand can grow and thrive. A roadmap helps with the way upwards.