Firebrand

If you want to build your brand, than you have to standardize the aesthetic of all of your communications, spaces and products. Brands are all about leveraging previous positive customer experience to create future business. You can only do that if customers recognize your brand, and don’t believe that a logo alone will connect all the parts of your brand in the consumers mind.

People recognize things much more viscerally than cognitively. They take in the overall feel of something much quicker than the specifics. Often the feel of something is a gateway to whether it will be investigated further. For example, while flipping though magazine in a split second you recognize an ad for a high end watch though the black background and the gold figure. Your not in the market for a high end watch so you flip the page even before seeing who the watch was made by. Now if your recognized the brand colours or style of a company that made a watch that you had bought in the past, then you may have investigated further. It is important to make your brand consistent on that visceral level, so you can leverage those experiences.

A logo is the first step for a company, but the last step for a customer. Most companies their logo as a band aid solution to link something to their business. People use logos as a means of verification of their impression of who the ad or product is by. For example, “That looks like a Motorola phone. Is it? (Looks as logo)Yes it is!” Motorola has been on a mission to standardize the industrial design of their cell phones under the leadership of Tim Parsey. In doing so, they reduced the cell phone offerings for 96 to 10 in 2002. Now they are just about getting there. The Motorola Q, KRZR, RAZR, and ROKR are clearly related, and match branded industrial design on the Bluetooth headsets. How did they do it while still allowing for personalization? Consistent fonts, colours and graphic symbols on buttons, consistent formal language, and a liberal use of gloss black and brushed metal. All of those thing are echoed in TV, web and print graphic design. (Source: ‘Beyond Logos’ by Clare Dowdy.)

The ultimate test of the graphical branding is if you can show an advertisement or product to a customer that they have never seen before with the logo covered up. Could they recognize what company it is coming from? Some people take this test a little further. Martin Lindstrom described a “shatterable brand” in an episode of The Engaging Brand podcast. It is a mental exercise where you remove the logo from a product and shatter it like it is made of glass. Could you pick up each piece and recognize it as your brand? The advertising equivalent could be tearing up an magazine ad, or showing only a second of a TV spot.

That may seem like a lofty goal, but it is easier than you might think. We will talk about how that is done in the next article.

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By Colin Finkle. Colin Finkle is an award winning industrial designer who works with large brands everyday designing displays for FX Displays in Toronto, Canada. He is the principle designer at Firebrand Creative. He also writes for AMD’s FireUser.com blog.

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