Brand identity for your business: one look across every touchpoint

A brand identity is often called a company’s branding: the logo together with colors, typefaces and the rules for using them on every medium. A logo alone is enough as long as you order materials rarely and from one person. A brand identity makes sense when:

• several people prepare your materials: an employee, an agency, a printer, the person who runs your website,
• you’re ordering signage for your premises, vehicles or clothing,
• you’re pitching bigger clients and want to look consistent in a catalog, a presentation and a bid,
• you’re refreshing your brand and don’t want old and new materials to mix by accident.

Rules written down once save time on every later order. Your printer doesn’t call to ask about a color, an employee doesn’t pick a font by eye, nobody guesses the space around the logo. A brand identity is also the starting point for a website and social media: the person who makes them gets ready colors, fonts and examples, not just a logo file.

The base is the logo presentation, about 11 pages: the mark and its versions, colors, typography, examples of use. A brand identity expands it with company stationery and the rules for using it.

If you need a full set of rules, the brand guidelines can be extended by about 20 more pages. They can include, for example:

• clear space and minimum size of the logo,
• misuse of the mark, such as changing the proportions or placing it on a background where it gets lost,
• a color palette with CMYK, RGB and HEX values,
• typography rules for documents and the web,
• graphic elements, photo style and icon style,
• designs for company stationery and social media templates.

The presentation is enough when one or two people make your materials. Extended brand guidelines help when you pass the rules to many contractors, branches or new employees and everyone has to understand them without calling you. We agree on the scope with you after the brief, so the guidelines describe the materials you really use and don’t become a thick volume nobody opens.

Business cards and letterhead are in the package because a company uses them from day one: you hand out a business card at a meeting and send an offer on letterhead. You get both designs as print-ready files, together with the logo and the extended brand presentation.

More items come with time. You can add to the brand identity, for example:

• post templates and profile backgrounds for social media,
• a flyer, a brochure or a catalog,
• a presentation template,
• banners and ad graphics.

We quote each one separately and give you the price before we start. Do you order some materials from other vendors? No problem. Give them the brand presentation and the logo files, and they’ll know how it should look. Everything you order from us, we design by the rules from the brand guidelines that we wrote ourselves.

If you already have a logo, send it as a vector file (SVG, PDF, AI or EPS). Do you have only a PNG or JPG, for example pulled from an old email signature? It happens. Say so in the brief: the logo will have to be redrawn as a vector, and we’ll include that in the quote.

Materials you already have (business cards, website, posts) will help too, with one sentence on what works in them and what gets in the way. Add a list of the materials you order most often and a few brands whose look you like, even from a completely different industry. If you don’t have a logo, we start with it (3 sketches, up to 12 at no extra cost), and we build the brand identity on the mark you choose.

You don’t need to have everything at once. The brief at the bottom of the page (four short steps) or a 30-minute call is enough to start, and we’ll ask about the rest. We’ll prepare a contract, an NDA and the transfer of copyright if you need them.