What every product designer needs to know about brand

A crash course on the essentials, packed with resources + tips from my time at IDEO to level up your design skills

These days, it pays to know about brand. The rise of startups has created thousands of new brand design opportunities, and people of all disciplines are working to help brands compete in a crowded world. Increasingly, the lines between design and strategy are blurring, and smart designers are developing the skills to nimbly navigate both.

“Often as product designers, we develop such a deep empathy for customer needs, fears, and desires, that it can become a natural extension of our thinking from product requirements to emotional brand attributes.”

— Ron Golding, Product Designer at Google

You may not consider yourself in the business of making brands, but whether you’re designing pixels, developing interfaces, or inventing new products — understanding brand is key to creating a successful outcome (and defining what success means in the first place).

This quick crash course will get you up to speed on all things brand. We’ll cover:

• Part 1: What brand is, what it’s not, and 5 big reasons it matters
• Part 2: 8 steps to build a great brand — with resources and tips from my time at IDEO

Let’s jump in.

Heads up: I’ve curated a big list of top resources and exercises to help jumpstart your work — find them at the bottom!

PART 1

What Is Brand?

More than a mark

When you think of a brand, the first thing that probably pops into your mind is a logo. Let me guess — was it a swoosh, an apple, or some golden arches?

There’s a good reason for that. Archeological evidence of early logos can be traced back to ancient Greece, where craftsmen stamped marks on their pottery as unique signatures and signifiers of quality. Today, logos are ubiquitous. You likely encounter hundreds each day, and can recognize a thousand more.

Test your logo knowledge. With the logotype removed, can you recognize them all? Hint: number three makes sweet treats (answers at the bottom).

While logos are powerful symbols of a brand, a logo is not a brand. A logo is an essential part of a brand identity — which is one half of the brand equation.

The brand equation

At its core, brand is about human connection and communication. A brand is a deliberately crafted relationship with people, built around thoughts, emotions, and shared experiences.

“People do not buy goods & services. They buy relations, stories & magic.” — Seth Godin

We can break this relationship down into a simple equation: identity+experience=brand.

The Brand Equation

What’s a brand identity or experience, you ask? Let’s find out.

Brand identity: purpose, personality and POV

To connect with people, good brands act like people: they develop a unique character, look, and communication style. These traits become part of a brand’s identity, which should reflect its distinct personality and a unifying purpose.

Imagine CocaCola, Instagram and Ford as people — they have pretty clear characters, right? If these illustrations of brand identity don’t match the one in your head, maybe you’ve had different brand experience (read on below). Image credit.

Creatives, strategists, and executives alike are often called upon to help define this identity, which may include a number of components. Here are the most important:

Core components of the brand identity include high-level concepts and tactical deliverables that define how a brand looks, acts, speaks, thinks and feels.

Just like a person’s identity, a brand’s identity extends beyond its looks, encompassing a complete set of characteristics that makes it feel relatable and human. We’ll dive deep into how to build a brand identity in Part 2 — so hang tight.

Brand experience: interfaces, interactions, and emotions

Identity doesn’t mean much on its own, though: it’s only by expressing their personality that brands and people develop relationships. A brand communicates its identity with the world through experiences — and experiences are a two way street.

The brand experience encompasses how people feel about and engage with what a brand puts out into the world.

People’s experiences quickly define their relationship with a brand, and cumulatively define the brand itself. Nailing the brand experience is essential because, as brand guru Marty Neumeier concisely puts it:

“Your brand isn’t what you say it is. It’s what they say it is.”

Putting it all together

A brand is most successful when it expresses its identity in a way that resonates with the right people. Think of Nike and Apple — these brands present a clear, unique identity through a consistent experience that has helped build strong connections with a targeted audience — creating not only regular customers but devoted fans.

A few elements of Apple and Nike’s brand identity and experience — working in harmony to build strong relationships.

Why Brand Matters

As Nike and Apple clearly illustrate, brands are powerful tools for influence and action. Understanding brand can help you tap into that power the next time you design a product (and hopefully use it for good).

Here are 5 big things you can do with brand:

1.Stand Out and Stick: Starting in the industrial age, markets became increasingly saturated with competing products. To help products stand out in crowded grocery aisles and stick in people’s minds, the modern brand was born: Lyle’s Golden Syrup (est. 1855) is noted in the Guinness World Records as the oldest brand, with a unique identity featuring a dead lion that has made it (rather morbidly) memorable.

As the world’s oldest brand, Lyle’s Golden Syrup has survived the grocery store wars, and also happens to be an essential part of Harry Potter’s favorite dessert. (Photo credit)

2. Build Trust and Loyalty: We form emotional bonds with brands just as we do with other people, creating deep, lasting relationships. After a positive brand experience, people build trust and often remain loyal for years. In Nielsen’s Global New Product Innovation Survey, 59% of respondents preferred to buy new products from familiar brands, and 21% purchased products simply because they liked the brand.

This can also work the other way, however. Because people make purchasing decisions based on feelings and associations, if a brand breaks trust it can have a devastating effect on bottom lines.

At 61.5%, Subaru has the most brand loyalty of any automaker. Volkswagen’s 2015 emissions scandal broke trust, resulting in a loss of almost a quarter of its market value, and this amusing take on its brand slogan. (Photo credit)

3. Bring in the Millions: In this way, brands also have enormous economic value, sometimes far beyond the worth of the organization’s tangible assets. Interbrand has concluded that brands as intangible assets account for more than one-third of total shareholder value, which jumps up to over two-thirds for luxury brands. Apple takes the top spot, with a brand valuation of over $230M in 2019.

Interbrand’s list of the world’s most valuable brands — with Apple on top and Amazon jumping up the ranks.

4. Communicate and Influence: Leveraging their strong relationships with people, brands can build influential campaigns that promote concepts or calls to action aligned with their specific interests and values. Social media mavens, corporate lobbyists, advertisers, and activists all tap into brand’s power to spark emotions, change minds, and inspire change.

Dozens of top brands have built campaigns to align with and promote pride, part of a growing trend of influential cause marketing.

5. Unify and Inspire: Personal and brand identities can become so closely linked that entire communities and lifestyles are built around a brand — think sports fans, Nike sneakerheads, or Harley riders. Brand also has powerful influence within an organization. A strong brand helps employees unify around a shared purpose, define and align with company culture, and even make tactical decisions. For example, the innovation-focused Tesla team can expect to take bigger risks in product, design, and marketing than their counterparts at traditional automakers.

Sports brands spark avid followings. Tesla introduces its futuristic Cybertruck in a bold display of its brand. (Photo credit)

Putting a Bow on Brand

Let’s wrap this up. Since ancient times, brands have served as a means of communication and connection. Built around unique identities and experiences, brands inspire and are defined by powerful emotional relationships with people. It pays to understand brand, as the brands you interact with regularly guide your work, affect your thoughts and actions, and maybe even shape the world.

Now you know, ready to try building one yourself? On to Part 2!

PART 2

Want to Level Up Your Product Design? Build a Brand

As a designer, your work builds on the bedrock of brand. Facing a rapidly changing market, adding brand design skills to your repertoire will open new opportunities while strengthening existing skillsets. The good news: after completing 8 steps that follow a familiar design process, you’ll be set to deliver a stellar brand identity and a more holistic, strategic approach to product design.

Let’s walk through the process, following the rebranding of IDEO’s open innovation practice, OpenIDEO, and applying resources from today’s top brands.

Check out the full list of exercises at the bottom!

The brand identity — half of the brand equation — defines how your brand looks, feels, acts, and speaks. We’ll cover all the tools you need to produce a stellar brand identity.

1. Make it clear: don’t start without a brief

As with any design project, before you kick off branding work, get clarity on what you’ll create. Because brand touches so many elements of a business, scope creep can be particularly dangerous. Make sure to put your project background, objectives, deliverables, and work plan in writing — here’s a good template to get you started.

A few key elements of my brief for OpenIDEO:

• The organization: Since 2010, OpenIDEO has been connecting leading organizations with people worldwide to collaboratively build solutions to today’s toughest societal problems using human-centered design. Think of it as building communities online and around the globe to crowdsource smart ideas for social good.
• The problem: Over the years, OpenIDEO’s business model and expertise had advanced, and its dated brand needed to reflect this evolution.
• The objective: Lead a small team to build a complete brand identity that resonated internally, engaged a global community, aligned with parent company IDEO, and stood out on the global innovation landscape.

In OpenIDEO’s old brand identity, there were issues with a complicated color palette, legibility, and stylistic consistency. Our task was to completely refresh everything but the logo.

Some of our updated brand identity deliverables for OpenIDEO — see how (and why) we built them below!

2. Make it stand out: research to define your brand landscape

Look for competitive and analogous inspiration

Before you can create contrast with other brands, you have to know the colors of your brand landscape. Start with a quick competitive analysis: here’s a step by step guide. Pay attention not only to palettes and components, but also to the way competitors frame their offerings and overarching brand narrative. Exploring how your brand stands with and apart from the rest will help you uncover inspiration and identify key differentiators.

Pro tip: don’t stop with your competitors — there’s a ton to learn from analyzing other industries through analogous research.

Sites of others in the open innovation space + IDEO. Through our competitive analysis, we drew inspiration from 100%Open’s friendly illustrations and IDEO’s clean design. We confirmed an emphasis on community made OpenIDEO stand out.

Gather internal insights

You can find another gold mine of brand knowledge within your organization. Successful brands serve both strategic objectives and the needs of the team, customers and clients — so find out what these are. Talk to people in marketing, product, and leadership to get a clear idea of the business strategy and any existing brand content, like positioning or boilerplates. If these don’t yet exist or no longer ring true, I’d recommend working on them after you’ve defined your brand voice (step 4).

Understand your audience

In addition to employees, talk with customers to uncover core truths about your brand. Ask open-ended questions to capture abstract sentiments like feelings and associations with the brand, in addition to data on demographics and preferences.

By the end of the research phase, you should have a clear picture of your brand landscape, and hopefully many of these resources to guide you as you develop your brand identity.

Brand Landscape Deliverables

Exercises below

Business Landscape

• Competitive analysis: curate and analyze competitors’ brand assets and strategies, noting key differentiators
• Objectives: clarify the organization’s short- and long-term actionable business goals
• Offerings: clearly define the organization’s products and services
• Positioning/value propositions: outline the benefits the organization delivers, and how this value sets it apart from competitors

Messaging Landscape

• One-liner: create a single sentence that describes the people and problem the organization serves, and its unique solution
• Tagline: select a few words to communicate the brand’s offering and value
• Boilerplate: develop a brief, standardized description of what the organization does, including metrics and positioning

Audience Landscape

• Audience personas: build profiles of individuals that represent the behaviors, feelings, and preferences of a key segment of your audience
• Organizational culture audit: capture a sense of the team’s values, aspirations, and existing relationship with the brand

3. Make it aligned: build a compass to guide the way

Create tools to help navigate the future

With your research insights in hand, you’re ready for your next challenge — crafting a group of statements that establish your organization’s north star and speak to how you’ll get there. This process will likely require buy-in from multiple stakeholders and many revisions before it feels right, but it’s an essential step. Building a brand compass will help you center on a shared language about the heart of your brand.

Brand Compass Deliverables

Exercises below

• Mission statement: define the core mandate of the organization — what it does, who it serves, and the value it brings to the table
• Vision statement: clarify where the organization is going and the change it seeks to create in the next 3–5 years
• Purpose statement: answer the fundamental question — why does this organization exist? — and articulate the shared meaning that makes this work worthwhile
• Values: name the organization’s core beliefs and the behaviors that will manifest its purpose

We landed on a single word and a simple statement to describe our values, featuring them on the OpenIDEO site so visitors could quickly get a sense of why we do what we do.

4. Make it consistent: give your brand some personality

Build relationships with people by acting like people

A brand should have a distinct personality, with defined characteristics that influence the way it looks, acts and speaks. Think about Siri, Elon Musk, and Ronald McDonald: all have pretty distinct characters, right? This personal identity helps people bond with and understand what to expect from a brand.

Clearly defining this personality helps your brand stay consistent — and in branding, consistency is king. Just imagine how weird it would be if McDonald’s started talking to you like a stuffy aristocrat, or if Apple switched to Comic Sans and started making puns about fruit. You might not want to interact with them anymore, and that’s bad for business.

Pro tip: To create your brand personality, consider developing a persona, just like you would for users. Here’s a good persona template to get you started. Use your brand landscape and compass to help define character traits.

I opted to build OpenIDEO’s persona collaboratively with the team, which helped us all bond with our brand character — named Maya. We then centered on five key words to describe Maya’s voice.

Give your brand a strong voice

Voice is the anchor of a brand identity. To define yours, try building a Brand Star (pictured above). In this helpful exercise I picked up at IDEO, you brainstorm and then center on just five words to characterize your brand’s unique communication style, aiming to create some interesting tension between the traits. It’s tricky but important to find words that resonate, as this star can be your guiding light towards consistency.

Map your tone in context

While your brand should always sound like it’s speaking with the same vocal cords, the tone of its voice should depend on context — reflecting who the intended audience is, and where they are physically, emotionally, and experientially. We can break this down into a simple equation.

Voice + context = tone. Understanding who you’re talking to when will help you deliver the right information at the right time, boosting your brand value.

Depending on the situation, you may lean into certain brand traits to strike the appropriate tone. Tone is an essential consideration in everything from your information architecture to your social campaigns to your error messages, so it’s a great idea to map it at the onset. Check out these voice and tone guidelines from top companies for inspiration.

Combine a few traits of your voice to achieve a specific tone. For the OpenIDEO team, I mapped some key content against our brand traits to explore how our tone will shift in context.

5. Make it scalable: KISS your visual identity

Get runway ready

Your brand personality traits should strongly influence your visual identity — the elements that define how your brand looks. When creating a visual identity, work to Keep It Simple and Scalable so your brand is easy to apply and can grow with your organization. Here’s how:

Visual Identity Deliverables

Exercises below

• Typography: limit yourself to two typefaces, and try pulling from the same font family
• Colors: use them with intention and restraint, and consider visual weight and hierarchy
• Logo: create something that looks great across different sizes, materials and contexts
• Creative assets (photography, illustration, iconography etc.): define a consistent style that is unique but scalable based on budget/resources
• Multimedia (data visualization, video, sound etc.): build off your other styles to determine standards you can stick with

When redesigning the OpenIDEO visual identity, we cut down our busy palette to make it more scalable, build clear hierarchy, and better align with IDEO.

Scale from visual identity to interface design

As you translate your visual identity into your UI, design with flexibility in mind, as your brand needs to work across components and devices. If you want to express big ideas, experiment with cutting text to the essentials and letting your visuals tell the story.

As we translated our visual identity into our digital design, we aimed for clarity, pairing visuals and text to better illustrate the complex concepts at the heart of OpenIDEO’s products. Check out the case study, if you’re curious.

6. Make it connect: tap into empathy and emotion

As you’re designing the visual and verbal language for your brand, don’t forget that humans should always be at the center. Brands are most successful when they connect with people on an emotional level, so ensure you’re creating with your audience’s unique needs in mind.

“Great companies that build an enduring brand have an emotional relationship with customers that has no barrier.”

Howard Schultz, former CEO of Starbucks

Pro tip: Thinking beyond your offerings, empathize to ensure people’s deeper desires — perhaps comfort, status, safety, or belonging — are reflected in your brand design.

We wanted to authentically communicate the strength of our global community of participants and inspire a feeling of belonging. That’s why we modeled all our illustrations (by the talented Erika Diaz-Gomez) after real OpenIDEO community members, and used language that is welcoming and accessible to an international audience.

7. Make it tactical: create practical brand identity guidelines

Build your brand a home

If you’ve reached this point in the process, you’ve got all the elements you need to build a strong brand identity. Now, it’s time to put it all together. In an ideal world, brand guidelines should become living resources, evolving into a full design system with clear rules that span engineering, marketing, product and design. Check out this comprehensive checklist, or this design system collection for inspiration.

Make what works for your team

Many companies don’t have the resources to build and maintain these complex systems, and that’s okay. The key is to create a centralized hub for all your brand resources that’s easy for your team to access. This should be home to your visual identity guidelines (all the elements you built in step 4), and verbal identity guidelines (including your brand landscape, compass, voice and tone, plus an editorial style guide if you’re a grammar fan).

As you’re building these resources, think about how to make them practical for your team. Can you include an intuitive navigation system, or break down visual style rules so they’re accessible to non-designers?

Pro tip: For a time-strapped team, consider making templates for key resources that already have your brand built in.

As our team often needed to build presentations, I worked with our visual designer to translate our style guide into a master deck so the team could easily plug and play our brand identity elements.

8. Make it stick: turn your team into ambassadors

Take the pain out of brand training

A brand is only as strong as it’s ambassadors, which means it’s time to train your team. While few people are psyched for training sessions, they don’t have to be boring. Consider your audience and your brand character, and think about creative ways to make an introduction.

At OpenIDEO, I turned our training sessions into a gameshow experience. The team jumped into interactive games about our brand, and the competition to become the first ‘Brand Star’ was fierce. While this may not work for every team, think outside the box to build enthusiasm and encourage widespread adoption of your new brand identity.

A snapshot of a brand training game, and the winner wearing her Brand Star hat. This was a great fit for the spirited OpenIDEO team, but pick a training style that works for yours.

You made it!

If you’ve made it this far, you’re a brand star in my book. You’ve got the tools to map your brand landscape, build a compelling personality and consistent style guidelines, and bring your whole team on board. Developing a brand identity is no simple task, but the value you’ll create through the process makes it a worthy investment — building a strong foundation to take your business and your product design skills to the next level.

After following these steps, you too will be a brand star. Cheesy Keynote animations not guaranteed.

Since we’re all fans of efficiency, I’ve compiled every brand element shared here, plus top exercises and resources to help you master them. May it help guide you on your brand design journey — just don’t forget to pack your compass.

Find all Brand Identity Elements/Exercises here!

Build a Brand Cheat Sheet

Know any other great brand design tips or resources? Share in the comments!

P.S. This is my first post on Medium, and it’s great to join the community! If you’d like to see more, have any comments or questions, or just want to say hi, drop me a line (see bio). Thanks for reading!

(Logo Answers: 1. Levi’s; 2. UPS; 3. Haagen Dazs)

The UX Collective donates US$1 for each article published in our platform. This story contributed to UX Para Minas Pretas (UX For Black Women), a Brazilian organization focused on promoting equity of Black women in the tech industry through initiatives of action, empowerment, and knowledge sharing. Silence against systemic racism is not an option. Build the design community you believe in.