Paulina McFarland, Author at Emotive Brand

5 Common Mistakes in Brand Design Today

Posted on June 12, 2018November 22, 2024 by Paulina McFarland

The Brand Design Journey

If you’re looking for a brand design or redesign, you’ll need more than a logo or a new website. Brand design is bigger than that. Designing a brand entails designing every moment and experience people have with your brand. It’s about every touchpoint, and these days nothing goes unnoticed. Brand design reflects how your brand looks and how it feels.

This means colors, graphic language, typeface, photography, and your logo. In the end, brand design is what brings the brand to life. It’s what makes your brand recognizable and powerful to the people that matter to your business. Because developing your brand design is no easy task, it’s easy for businesses and the people behind them to fall into common design traps. So before your brand engages in design work, consider these five common mistakes, why they are problematic, and how to avoid them.

1. Designing for tomorrow and not today

In a world where digital innovation and advancement is critical to a brand’s survival, brands need to be designed for new technology. Fluidity and flexibility is key here. The digital landscape requires adaptability. And in order to maintain brand relevance, brands need to anticipate how they will compete in the future market. Stagnant brands simply don’t create powerful brand experiences. Every touchpoint and interaction counts. Designers who want to design a powerful brand with a strong emotional impact, one that will stay relevant over time, and drive business in a sustainable way need to design with the future of the brand in mind. This means taking an adaptable, dynamic, digital, experiential, and always forward thinking approach that aligns with the brand’s vision and aspirations.

2. Playing lookalike

Differentiation in branding is of great importance. Yet many brands take the safe route. And as a result, brands end up looking similar to competitors or adapting to the short-lived design trends of the month. Even though design is supposed to help brands stand out, the design landscape continues to be filled with brands that quite honestly, look and feel the same. And sameness doesn’t move a business forward. Designing a brand requires taking risks. It takes courage. You have to be bold. And we know it’s not always easy. Challenge yourself and your clients to design brands that aren’t afraid to say something different.

3. Forgetting about guidelines

Your agency or company could build the most prolific visual identity, pick the perfect colors, or create a logo that could change the entire game. But the fact is, a brand can’t come to life if the visual identity isn’t rolled out correctly. Businesses often overlook the importance of brand guidelines because they aren’t easy to create. No one wants to create or read a manual. However, people need a roadmap for keeping the brand consistent and powerful. Brand guidelines give businesses the tools people need to bring the brand to life, keeping it clear, consistent, and recognizable. Brands without brand guidelines often end up inconsistent, valueless, and unable to grow. If you want to make the brand rollout a success, you need guidelines.

4. Overcomplicating it

Simplicity and clarity is key for brand design. Complicated brand design ends up diluting the brand’s overall emotional impact and making the brand less recognizable to the people who matter to its success. However, it’s important that when straying away from overcomplicated you make sure you understand your audience and don’t dumb it down for them. Simple doesn’t mean banging your audiences across the head. Working as a team and eliciting feedback at multiple points of the process can help move the design towards clarity and simplicity.

5. Ignoring Strategy

Tying strategy with design is one of the most important things a brand can do. Use strategy as a guiding map for how the brand should come to life visually. Even though strategists and designers often have different toolboxes, marrying the two skillsets and ways of thinking can help build a more impactful, purposeful brand. Often times, clients want design that has nothing to do with the strategy that’s been developed. Make sure you explain the impact that strategically informed design can create, and demonstrate the power of strategically informed design. By bringing design and strategy together, your brand becomes more valuable and impactful.

Brand Design for Maximum Impact

Design a brand that engages your target audience and generates demand. One that will be able to adapt to digital advances, increased customer experiences, and heed off competition. Use your visual identity to help your brand stand out and highlight what makes you stand out. Keep it simple. Use your strategy to lead you in, and don’t forget to create the guidelines the brand needs for a successful rollout. If you avoid these five mistakes, the brand will be more powerful to its audiences, and more able to move business forward. The brand design will support the brand as it grows and prospers in a competitive design landscape.

Read another post from our design team: Brand Identity: What’s Your Type?

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy and design agency.

Changing Your Logo: What Works?

Posted on June 25, 2017 by Paulina McFarland

A Logo Redesign and A Flood of Reactions

The introduction of a logo redesign is controversial. Look back to some of the most talked about rebrands of the past years. When Instagram released it’s new logo, everyone had an opinion. Similarly, Uber’s new brand identity created endless buzz, attention, and debate. When Tropicana abandoned their old, trusted look, sales plunged 20% in one month.

Sometimes, it seems like a lose-lose situation. Consider one of the most recent, buzzing rebrands in the news: MasterCard. On one hand, MasterCard’s new logo has been commended for keeping a low profile. At the same time, some think they played it too safe, didn’t push the envelope enough, and that the design lacks overall inspiration. Expectations are high, and it’s nearly impossible to please everyone.

Finding Balance

Finding the right balance between old and new, safe and progressive, too far and not far enough is a challenge. Brands have to figure out what to hold onto, what to build of off, and what is simply holding them back. And change is hard for people to accept, especially at first. Customers get used to a certain look and feel of a brand and when that becomes different or evolves, people question if it’s the same brand. Can they still trust it? Will it evoke the same emotions? Does the brand experience come through?

However, the fact is that brands need to evolve in order to survive. Initial reactions are only part of the story. The real question is how a logo can help move a brand forward and position it to thrive. If brands fail to evolve with changing markets, shifting consumer needs, and evolving digital landscapes, they will not be able to compete. Eventually they’ll fade out and fall off the map altogether. So what works?

In order to evolve your logo successfully, you need to:

1. Gain a deep understanding of your brand.

The steps you take before designing are often just as important as the design phase itself. And in order to create a logo that evolves alongside the people who matter to your brand, you need a deep and complete understanding of your target audiences. This requires research and thoughtful questioning. It’s essential to understand your brand’s levels of equity, recognition, and differentiation within the market. In order to know where your design should go, you need to understand where you currently stand – why you matter and to who.

2. Use strategy as a pillar and guide.

Redesigning a logo doesn’t happen in a silo. The logo is only a part of a greater visual identity that is informed by an overall brand and business strategy. At Emotive Brand, we firmly believe that design must be informed by strategy in order to create maximum impact. A redesign can’t happen just for the sake of wanting a new logo. It has to stem from a larger strategic vision. Shifting the visual identity to reflect that vision, bring the brand promise to life, and steer the brand towards your envisioned future is what makes a new logo powerful and valuable.

3. Design dynamically for the future.

Logos that are not designed for the future simply cannot compete. In the ever-evolving digital landscape of today, brands need to be dynamic. This means logos need to be flexible and able to adapt with shifting markets and customer needs. Stagnant, un-dynamic logos can’t move a business forward. And brand relevance relies on looking towards the future.

4. Build within a greater brand language.

For a logo redesign to survive, it has to live and breathe the brand. It can’t just be seen as mark. So you can’t depend on a logo alone. It has to exist as part of a greater brand language. This means thinking about how the logo translates to different environments. Make sure you play with many different treatments of the same logo. For example, a logo might take on an entirely different color in a different region. Most importantly, the logo has to be dynamic in order to come to life in all brand environments. In the end, a stagnant logo has no value to your business.

Embracing Change

Because of the buzz that new logos frequently create, it’s easy to be afraid of change. However, change is often times necessary. You can’t be afraid to begin a logo redesign just because you’re afraid of negative opinions. There will always be negative opinions. The most important thing is that the logo isn’t built on sand. If you use strategy as a pillar and guide, and design a logo that can live and breath your brand, the change will pay off. We believe logos can be powerful catalysts for change if done right. Focus on creating a logo that helps your brand evolve in the right direction. A successful logo redesign can help position your brand and business to thrive.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy and design agency.

Minimalism: Not a Passing Trend

Posted on February 3, 2017 by Paulina McFarland

Trendy Business

Design can be a trendy business. It’s easy to fall into the trap of following what others deem exciting – moving with the grain rather than against it. However, there’s a problem with trendy design: it gets old.

Recently, there has been a resurgence of simple geometric forms in branding: simple color blocks of type in packaging, white book covers, and clear lines. And it may seem like this minimalist way of designing is a new-ish trend, popularized via Behance or famous design blogs, when it actually is just a reach back into a real movement etched in art history books.

So What is Minimalism?

Rather than the newest flavor of the month, Minimalism is a skillful technique rooted in classic typography and a simple composition style. The concept of Minimalism is embodied in the principle the architect, Mies van der Rohe, coined: Less is More. Minimalism, as a design style, embraces a generous use of negative space, sparse typography, limited color, and a strong sense of hierarchy. In essence, it is all about stripping down the design to its most essential elements. Again, less is more.

Minimalism: Steeped in History

It’s important to understand that Minimalism isn’t a new concept. It’s a historical technique that has come back into view. You can easily find elements of minimalism in design, art, and architecture in almost any Modernist time period: the geometric abstractions of Bauhaus, the De Stijl art movement (1917-1931), Russian Constructivism (1940’s), American Minimalism in art (1950), or even traditional Japanese design.

Artists of these eras – Theo Van Doesburg, Piet Mondrian, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Buckminster Fuller, Dieter Rams, among others — advocated for the return to the most basic elements of design (form and color), reduced design to its most fundamental components (lines, primary colors, black and white, positive and negative space), and embraced unobstructed open space, marking their designs with extreme clarity and simplicity.

Simple or Complex?

One of the most common misconceptions about Minimalism is the idea that because it is so sparse, it must be simple to execute. But nothing can be further from the truth. An impactful minimalist design not only conveys the most essential elements, but strikes a perfect balance between them. Because there are so few elements, the designer has to make calculated choices in composition, color, line thickness, and font size. And sometimes the incremental differences can make or break the design.

As a result, Minimalism requires that in order to avoid being boring, the artist be particularly innovative, clever, and creative. The simpler the design, the bigger the opportunity to infuse it with an unexpected twist. To attract attention and energize the look, a minimalist logo may rely on turning letters upside down, spelling a word backwards, or surprising the viewer with a visual pun.

That’s why designing on a grid is one of the fundamental techniques of a successful minimalist composition. The grid allows for a logical and harmonious arrangement of text and image, so that the final piece is balanced and functional. This goes tenfold for web design. Simple user-interface is essential for websites heavy on information and complex in structure.

Why is Minimalism Relevant Now?

With the advent of smartphones and the high-speed digitalization of the world, there is a growing need to organize the enormous flow of information people encounter every day. The human brain can only absorb a certain amount of visual overload before it shuts down. And often, this overload can cause anxiety for viewers. That is why it is more important than ever for businesses to learn how to cut through the chaos with clean fonts and design that calms instead of adds anxiety.

With the majority of people viewing pages on a smaller smartphone device, users need faster loading times and easy to navigate interfaces. Most smartphone users are too impatient and or unwilling to read or scroll endlessly just to complete a simple task. That’s why streamlined functionality is so key.

Minimalist Brands Are Outperforming

From fashion to technology, some of the most successful brands are driven by minimalist design. The most obvious example is Apple. Under Jonathan Ive, Apple has created a slick minimalist cult-universe, stronger than any brand before it.

According to the information leaked by the Apple University, aspiring design trainees study Picasso’s famous 11 bull lithographs – lithographs that one by one strip down the drawing of the bull to only its bare outlines. This method is at the core of Apple’s brand design.

Everything about the Apple experience is intuitive and stripped of all complexity. The design feels natural, from the weight of the iPhone to the feel of the mouse, all is human-centered as if the technology was a natural extension of the user.

Google has also found enormous success by reducing the users’ anxiety by placing only a logo and a search box front and center. When other competitor search engines were using the “kitchen-sink” method, Google’s decision to embrace Minimalism positioned them automatically ahead.

Minimalism and Strategy-Driven Design

Dieter Rams, an icon of minimalist industrial design, followed der Rohe’s, “Less is more,” with, “Less but better.” This became another famous statement of Minimalism. And a mantra that many brand strategists are taking to heart these days as well.

If a brand strategy is well researched and focused in on the right market, if it possesses the right message and speaks in the right tone – that’s the goal. And strategists can learn something from the clarity and timeless simplicity of minimalistic design and art.

For instance, we’ve seen short and precise taglines thrive in the last decade. Think of Apple’s “Think Different”, Nike’s “Just Do It”, or L’Oréal “Because You’re Worth It.” These simple and effective slogans help these brands stand out, create meaning for their audiences, and keep them memorable for years. It’s all about communicating the essential – what will have the most value to the specific people a brand wants to reach.

Striving for the clarity that comes with Minimalism can help your brand forge stronger and more emotional connections with the people you want to reach. It can help a brand resonate faster with people, present itself as more approachable, and better engage with its audiences. There’s a lot to learn from the history of Minimalism, and simple, clear, essential design will never get old.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency.

Hello!

Author: Paulina McFarland