What brand design covers
| Area | Typical work |
|---|---|
| Identity design | Logo, symbol, wordmark, colour palette, choice of typefaces or a custom typeface |
| Design system | Grid, spacing, type scale, colour roles, icon set, illustration style, motion |
| Applications | Website, slide and document templates, packaging, signage, social formats, trade show stands |
| Guidelines | The rules and examples that let others use the system. See brand guidelines |
Graphic design for a single campaign or brochure uses the brand design; it does not change it. Brand design sets the rules, and most daily design work applies them.
The brand design process
- Brief and research. The brand strategy, the audience, the visual codes of competitors, and an audit of current material.
- Direction. Two or three visual directions, shown as mood boards or rough applications, chosen against the strategy rather than personal taste.
- Core elements. Logo, palette and typefaces developed for the chosen direction and tested at real sizes: a favicon, a business card, a building sign, a dark slide.
- System. The rules that turn elements into layouts: grid, hierarchy, colour proportions, photography direction.
- Applications and templates. The formats people produce most often are built first.
- Handover. Final files, guidelines and templates, delivered in formats people can use without design software.
Testing at real sizes is the step most often skipped. A logo designed at poster size can become unreadable at 16 pixels, and a thin typeface that looks refined in a presentation can disappear on a printed label or a low-resolution screen.
What a brand design project should deliver
| Deliverable | Formats and contents |
|---|---|
| Logo and symbol | SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics, a W3C Recommendation) and PDF or EPS for vector work; PNG with transparency for documents and slides; full colour, one colour, black and white versions |
| Colour palette | HEX, RGB, CMYK and Pantone values, and a swatch file for design tools. See brand colours |
| Typefaces | Font files with the licence terms, and a fallback typeface for people the licence does not cover |
| Templates | Slide decks, documents, social posts and email signatures, in the tools people actually use |
| Guidelines | Rules with examples of correct and incorrect use |
| Source files | Editable design files, so that a future agency does not have to start again |
Put the source files and font licence terms in the contract. Both are often missing when a brand passes to a new agency several years later, and recreating a logo from a PNG produces small differences that then circulate for years.
Design tokens: brand design for digital products
Digital teams store brand design decisions as design tokens: named values for colours, type, spacing, corner radius and shadows, such as color.primary = #047DBA, that software reads instead of fixed values written into each screen. Changing a token changes every screen that uses it. The W3C Design Tokens Community Group publishes a common file format so that tokens can move between design tools and code.
For a brand team, tokens are the colour and typography pages of the guidelines in a form software can apply directly. They also make a refresh cheaper: when the primary colour changes, the website, the app and the email templates change with one edit instead of hundreds.
Brand design in day-to-day work
After launch, the brand designer's work shifts from creating to extending. A product team needs an icon the set does not include. Sales asks for a one-page datasheet format. A partner programme needs a co-branding lock-up with clear rules for whose logo comes first. Each request is either answered with an existing template or becomes a new addition to the system. A brand design that does not grow this way gets bypassed, because people improvise when no template fits.
Brand design in Freedam
Freedam is where a finished brand design is stored, applied and checked:
- The brand guide holds the logos, emblems, colour palettes and typefaces, with do and don't examples for each logo and emblem.
- Templates are designed once, or imported from a Photoshop file with each font mapped to a brand typeface. Colleagues change only the text and colours the designer unlocked, and a template set generates several formats in one pass.
- Themes for custom pages work like design tokens: six colours, a heading font and a body font, corner radius and shadows, applied to every page in the spaces that use the theme.
- Studio places logos and brand text on images, and blocks an overlay that breaks a logo's minimum size, maximum size or clear space rule.
How to design a brand center explains how to present the result to partners, and create a brand center shows how to start.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between brand design and graphic design?
Brand design creates the identity and its rules. Graphic design is the wider discipline of visual communication, and most graphic design work, such as a brochure or a banner, applies an existing brand design.
What does a brand designer do?
A brand designer researches the audience and competitors, designs the logo, palette and typography, builds the system and templates, and writes the guidelines. After launch, they review new material and extend the system to new formats.
Should a logo be delivered as SVG or PNG?
Both. SVG scales to any size and is what designers and web developers need. PNG with a transparent background is for people who insert the logo into slides and documents.
Related terms
Generate an on-brand image from a template
Open a template in Nordi's demo library, place a product photo, fill in the text the designer left editable, and generate the image without touching the layout, fonts or logo.
You enter Nordi’s workspace as an administrator.