What is brand identity?
A company’s brand identity is the combination of visual and content choices that represent your company’s personality. It’s the face of your brand.
Your brand identity is composed of the visual brand elements you’ve chosen, like your color palette, but it also includes your brand’s voice and tone. If created successfully, your brand identity will represent and allude to your brand values and mission.
Creating a strong brand identity will help you develop a brand image that’s recognizable to your target audience, even if they only see one small element of it.
Here’s some of what brand identity includes:
- Brand visuals, like colors, logo, fonts, layouts, and design elements like photography and illustrations
- Brand voice and tone, including a slogan or tagline, social, email, and in-product content messaging, ad copy, and website copy
Key takeaways
- Brand identity includes visual design elements plus a brand’s voice and tone. When done correctly, it can represent a brand’s ethos, mission, and vision.
- Your brand identity should resonate with your target market, so market research is crucial.
- Creating a brand identity builds awareness of your product or service and helps you rise above the competition.
- A brand identity can shift and change over time — but be mindful about maintaining a positive customer perception even through rebrands
Brand vs. brand identity vs. brand image vs. brand
Brand encompasses everything that defines your company: your color palette, logo, fonts, imagery, voice and tone, mission, vision, goals, personality, products, pricing, social media use.
Brand identity is a little more specific. It’s the face of your brand: the visual, content, and tone choices you make to represent your values, story, and product.
Brand image focuses on the visual side of a brand, including colors, fonts, and logos, but also brand photography and videography, and the look and feel of all types of communications.
And branding is the verb that describes the process of creating a brand and implementing a brand strategy to run campaigns, increase awareness, and grow the business.
Examples of companies with a strong brand identity
A strong brand identity helps you stand out from competitors, build your brand on social media, attract your target audience, and ultimately grow your business. Here are some companies with memorable, recognizable, and delightful brand identities:
Slack
The go-to messaging app for B2B brands, startups, and modern companies has developed a brand that shows the app and company as a whole is friendly and engaging. They stand out from the stuffier, more corporate competition using casual, friendly messaging, a calming interface, emojis galore, and that knock-brush notification sound that’s now seared into millions of brains.
They’ve even created a public-facing Slack media kit and branding guidelines that shows the world how to properly use their brand.
Fenty Beauty
Rihanna’s beauty line is known for its high-quality formulations, unique, shiny, and glamorous packaging, an extremely inclusive shade range, bold, fun colors that encourage experimentation, and mid-range prices that make her products feel like a treat — but one that’s within reach.
Apple
Apple has never shied away from bold brand experimentation. From the clear and colorful plastic desktop computers of the 90s to the iconic music-and-headphones commercials of the 2000s, to the extremely minimalist, sleek look of the 2010s, to the combination of sleek neutrals with bold splashes of color that define the brand today — their evolution has been captivating to watch. But what’s stayed consistent the entire time is their bitten Apple logo, which has come to signify quality, trustworthiness, and cutting-edge, user-friendly products.
Some more successful, engaging brand identities to explore:
HubSpot: The original inbound marketing thought leaders whose cheerful brand has always made users feel like they can learn anything.
Google: The search engine is as ubiquitous and recognizable as their primary color scheme.
Squarespace: Through smart advertising and strong brand storytelling, they’ve become the approachable website builder.
Lululemon: Upscale wellness wear that represents not just a brand, but a community.
Coca Cola: As crisp, refreshing, and timeless as their drinks.
A note on brand accessibility
When developing a new brand identity or doing a brand refresh, always consider web accessibility guidelines. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are the international standard for ensuring that text, images, sounds, website code, and web visuals are accessible to everyone. The WCAG guidelines include info on required contrast between text and background colors, mobile accessibility, and ways to make sure that web content is accessible to those using screen readers or other adaptive technology.
For more on developing a strong brand identity, take the Canva Design School course on branding design.
How to build a brand identity
Building an effective brand identity that really connects with your audience requires a deep understanding of who they are, what they want, and what piques their interest.
The video below includes an expert explanation of how companies can create and scale brands – and ensure their brand guidelines are always adhered to, by using brand management tools.
To learn more about teaming up and collaborating in Canva, check out our full video series on collaborative brand building.
Here’s how to create a brand identity that helps your business scale and reach more engaged audiences.
1. Analyze your audience in depth and learn about their challenges.
Brand identity design starts with a thorough audience analysis, and requires a brand identity specialist. Asking a designer to make you a logo when you don’t have a clear picture of who you’re trying to reach is like promoting an ad to an audience of “everyone on the internet”. You’ll be lucky if it sticks with someone, and waste tons of time and resources along the way.
Look at the demographic profile, pain points, and challenges of your top performing customers and most engaged audience members. Talk to sales reps or customer support specialists to find out, in their own words, what people are struggling with and how you can help.
The more you’ve already posted online and communicated with your customers and prospects, the more data you have to analyze.
At Moneytree, the marketing team uses Canva to easily create presentations that resonate with their audience. “Our main clients are financial institutions and they’re very traditional. We need to make sure our message is going to the client in the right way. While our brand is not very traditional, we need to make sure the balance of what we present to them is correct,” shared marketing designer Hayoung Shin.
“Before Canva, designing these presentations was taking too much time and we were struggling with consistency and quality. In the past, our teams had to create a design request to change anything – even a few words of text – in a presentation. With Canva, team members can quickly make last-minute changes themselves – it’s saved everyone so much time,” – Hayoung Shin, marketing designer, Moneytree
2. Develop your key brand identity elements
Most great brands start with a (possibly messy) mood board, and evolve into the brands people can recognize from just the colors. Some brands, like UPS, T-Mobile, and Tiffany have even trademarked their brand colors.
Brand colors
Colors are powerful and can communicate your brand personality from the first glance. When choosing your brand colors, think about how they reflect your identity and speak to your target audience.
To choose a color palette that will help you create a memorable brand, look at the existing color schemes in your space, ask your audience, and learn what feelings certain colors evoke (while taking this data with a grain of salt).
Take a moment to learn about color theory in the video below. A solid understanding of color principles helps when choosing to put various colors together, picking out primary and secondary colors, trying to choose a mood you want to evoke, and when figuring out why something just doesn’t look right. Once you learn about color theory, you can feel more confident making design and branding decisions.
Here are the various types of brand colors you’ll need to choose:
- Primary palette: The colors you will use the most, that will express the primary voice of your brand
- Secondary palette: The colors you’ll use the least, for background colors or supplementary colors in data visualizations or marketing materials
- Text colors
- Background colors
- Accessible color combinations
When developing assets for your website or social media feed, customize your designs by choosing from your core colors. And Canva templates are designed to be easily customizable to suit any palette in keeping with your brand. Whether it’s an Instagram Story quiz or graphics for your website, you can add your brand’s color palette in seconds.
Brand fonts
Just like many brands have extremely memorable colors, there are signature brand fonts, too — like Chobani. After their launch, fonts like this seemed to show up everywhere, from wedding invitations to startup brands to books to website headers.
Why did Chobani change up their typeface? The old type was a bolder sans serif font (no curly parts), and the new font embraced a “warmer and stronger” vibe. What does your brand represent? A youthful skincare brand might want to lean into a rounded, “throwback” font style, whereas a financial institution geared towards a more mature audience might choose an easy-to-read, traditional serif (with the curly parts).
When choosing the right font for your brand, consider choosing two typefaces for your brand and using them consistently. The font for headings should be the largest and most expressive, and represent your brand persona. If you want to use a script, uppercase, or title font in your marketing materials, save those exclusively for headings as these typefaces aren’t easy to read in small or dense copy.
Subtitle fonts and body fonts should also be easy to read. A good tip for subtitles is to use the same font as your heading but at a smaller size or in a different style, such as bold or italic. Or, try increasing the letter spacing and using all capital letters. In general, you’ll want to aim for “typographic variance” to keep the layout and design from appearing flat and boring.
Brand logo
A brand logo is one of the most challenging, but important parts of your brand. How can you convey your brand’s mission, values, and personality in a single logo or wordmark?
Conduct a competitive analysis of top brands in your industry to see which brands stand out and why, and use these logo design tips to make sure you put in the effort where it counts.
Logo design best practices include:
- Communicating your brand personality
- Incorporating your brand color palette
- Creating balance
- Embracing white space
- Adding repetitive patterns
- Using contrast
- Highlighting a dominant focal point
- Establishing hierarchy to guide your viewer through the design