Thinking around defining unique aesthetics for brand strategy

Brand Design

Thinking around defining unique aesthetics for brand strategy

By Jason Brown

One of the most challenging but precious moments of design is when a business tasks you with creating their outward-facing identity. It’s a great opportunity to set the company’s visual personality and direction that could last for years. After all, the most rewarding thing for a designer is to see their work last and enjoy longevity.

In this piece, I outline how designers should go about creating a ‘new aesthetic’. The goal is to get designers to play more with the building blocks of the brand strategy and experiment more with the foundational elements of a visual language, design system, or presence.

Brand assets vs Branding

Branding is the holistic view that we percieve and all the assets work together to communicate one narrative. There is the brand and there are the brand’s assets. Brand assets a financial sense, are the things that generate real value for companies – ‘touchpoints; products and services that can be continually improved over time; websites, apps, and physical presence.
Then there is the brand or brand essence, the visual aesthetics and presence that give the brand a point of visual difference in the marketplace. The brand’s positioning (in marketing terms) comes from the brand values.

If I presented you with a white ribbon on red, you might instantly think of Coca-Cola, and then maybe the shape of the bottle or sound of the can opening.

A traditional output that communicates brand essence is ‘the big idea’. There is a consensus amongst leadership that brand is about specific behaviour. During the recent rebranding of Good Design & Build, the ‘big idea’ was to create interior design and build projects that the customer was envious of. It aspires to be a premium service firm and after carrying out research, it was established that this resonated with their clientele.

To get to that point, however, we need to understand the purpose of the firm and the values it stands for in order to explore the visual aesthetic.

Upacking Brand Values

Brand values (defined by the business stakeholders) are used as a foundation for visual exploration. We seek inspiration and research regarding the symbolism of what these values mean. Brand narrative or brand personality is the strategic purpose that aethetics are unified around.

When you start developing the visual look and feel of a brand’s personality its ideal to base it off a creative brief, that summarises the purpose and mission and their values. We can then explore existing cultural ‘tropes’ (visual rhetoric) that exists in the marketplace be it competitors or aspirational brands so that it feels like it fits in with the customer, suppliers, and competitors within that marketplace.

If you feel the quality is generally pretty poor (which is normally the case) try and be as radical and imaginative as possible. Then, iterate, based on testing, to pull it back a bit, so that you have evidence-based design decisions to present to the client.

Aligning market fit and visual direction

Market fit and definition of visual direction is about finding parity between company values and value proposition.

Uncovering what resonates with the customer, suppliers and employees requires a deep dive into the company’s heritage and story.
Explore where their defined business values appear in the wider cultural context unpack what visual elements and visual devices communicate this feeling.

Setting the scene

Visual devices are called this because they can communicate design detail – attributes or feelings, such as structure, ‘organic’, or ‘seriousness’ that all come together to create a mis-en-scene/mood or even feeling.

You can add another layer of flexibility by applying literary devices, such as metaphors and similes. How you play with these is only limited by your imagination. You should avoid working to current design trends, as they will date quickly.

Aesthetics devices include; material, shape form, typography, image, pattern, composition, colour and various other ways to build a mood.

Compare and contrast the aesthetics to identify the differences and understand why it is that something feels more premium or not.
The outcome is generally an agreed set of moodboards that reflect visual direction.

Defining brand assets

Start creating brand assets that reperesent the brand narrative visually. A logo is the linchpin, it is not only the name of the company, but also the most simplified visual version of the purpose of the company. Typically they appear as combination marks – the logo itself represented as a visual metaphor. A classic example would be FedEx.
Then we look into photography, what percieved lifestyle should the ideal customer have? how should the product or customer behave in this landscape? what lifestyle are we trying to pair with the product?

Advertising campaigns are micronarratives to extend influence. Brand stories; strategic pieces of advertising where very visual reference in their image will have meaning, symbolism and connotation to always communicate a consistent brand look and feel. Celebrities, or significant cultural moments are leveraged that reflect cultural values which are reapropriated to be an extension of the brand.
We see that colour, that icon and because of surface repetition its reinforced by the brand.

Defining brand stories

Keep in mind what the client’s goal is, who the audience is, and most importantly, how they should feel when they engage with the piece.

It’s important to understand your audience and what’s culturally relevant to them. Does the narrative you’re creating reflect a cultural moment?

What story are you telling and what’s the emotional purpose of the piece? What should the audience or spectator feel, and what form does this take?

Leveraging compositional devices

The following will help you to be more creative with your visual aesthetic.

These include the patterns, texture, depth of field, lines, curves, frames, colour, viewpoint, depth, foreground, background, visual tension, shapes. Then there is Gesture, Balance, Contrast, Focus, Motion, Pattern, Proportion, Rhythm and Unity.
Some devices elevate the brand while some are more passive, and this contrast intensifies the business output.
Can the different compositional devices contrast with each other?

Line – the visual path that enables the eye to move within the piece.

Shape – the areas defined by the edges within the piece, whether geometric or organic

Colour – hues with their various values and intensities.

Texture – surface qualities that translate into tactile illusions.

Value – the shading used to emphasise form.

Form – 3-D length, width, or depth

Space – positive and negative, filled space.

Similarity, Continuation, Closure, Proximity, Symmetry, Asymmetry.

Unity, consistency and direction

An effective visual design language not only acts as a communication framework for all stakeholders on a product development team, but also unites a brand and its customers to ensure that a company’s brand identity matches the customer’s brand perception.

As designers, we should try and push for better design, while working within the client brief, and be more experimental in our design process because of the potential we have to communicate things for the sake of art that the audience can appreciate.

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Thinking around defining unique aesthetics for brand strategy

Brand Design