What is Visual Identity? (And Why it Matters for Your Brand)

How do most people meet your brand? (Spoiler, it’s online.)

The first time many people meet a brand today, they’re scrolling on their phone, with their mind half-in a task elsewhere. It’s not something many brand strategy meetings take into account – the target audience, but distracted. 

This means that in this digital side of our creative industry, we have to create visual identities that demand their full attention, in less than a second. Think of an irresistible piece of packaging on the shelf that says “PICK ME!”.

But your website has to work harder than a nice bit of packaging. Because once the initial discovery moment has gone, the digital visual identity has to stack up the recognition, the trust and the user experience to truly stick in the mind of that user. 

And this is where brands lose that fleeting attention they were granted in that moment. Not because their visual identity isn’t impactful, but because it was treated like a deliverable. The brand guidelines are 86 pages long, and no one on the client side has looked at them since the website launch. And since then, with all the content updates and shifts in focus, the identity has been, well, watered down.

Now that websites are the core brand asset  - there’s no more thinking about a visual identity in static terms. Yes, the concept designs or brand guidelines will still be delivered, but the questions you need to ask now is this: has your brand’s visual identity been translated into a digital visual system, that allows it to live online?

Before we take a look at that, let’s do a quick explainer of what your visual identity is and why it’s not exactly your whole brand identity. 

Visual identity, brand identity - is it all the same?

Your visual identity is the way your brand looks — the face of your brand. Your brand identity is the personality, the heart, soul and characteristics that make it unmistakable.

Your visual identity includes:

• Logo
• Fonts and Typography
• Colour palette
• Editorial assets - the style of your photography or illustration
• Design system - the layout style of your website, social content, packaging and print materials
   

Your brand identity:

• Vision and Mission
• Values
• Tone of Voice
• Personality
• Target Audience

Put it this way, a visual identity alone is shallow, with no substance to it. And while it may look attractive, it can’t retain an audience, because there is no real meaning, no human connection attributed to it.

That’s because the visual identity and brand identity each have a role to play; the visual is all about recognition. The brand is all about emotional resonance. 

But that’s not to say they work independently of each other, quite the opposite. They’ve got to hold each other’s hands, and move as one. If your visual identity is defining your brand as dopamine, but if your tone of voice is subtle and serious then your users will be baffled. Are you bold and confident or are you understated and cool? 

This friction between the way you look and what your saying seeds doubt in their minds. It’s the equivalent of meeting a person for the second time, only for them to act differently from the first time you met them. 

When attention is so scarce, there’s no time to leave your audience guessing about who you are, and what your brand is all about.

Why visual identities need to flex 

You might be thinking why? Must branding get more complicated? But a flexible design system is not only a simpler way of stewarding your visual brand identity across platforms, digital channels and mediums, but also supports the long-term evolution of your brand in three ways:

1. A visual identity system can adapt endlessly to meet your audience in the moment - think small screen sizes, dark mode, motion-based content. 
2. The old static systems will always cause internal frustration with their lack of flexibility. If your team is always working with a brand that never seems quite fit for purpose, that’s when the pitches for a rebrand start. 
3. The interplay of visual and interactive elements all designed to the tune of your brand personality ultimately defines how your brand feels in a digital environment. If your brand feels how it looks and sounds, then it connects with your audience. Simple, really.

The visual identity system taps into the significance of the UX/UI elements in your brand’s ‘visual language’, all of the micro-animations, scroll behaviour and typographic choices that feed into, and further augment the digital experience of your brand. It scales, and is designed to interact and adapt to those varied audience states - think greater colour contrast for distracted minds and clearer formatting of text for fast comprehension. 

It’s a dynamic system that simply reflects the dynamic digital environment that brands live in now. That is, where 70% of people will meet your brand. 

Another note which feels important to add, aside from the points of scalability and usability, is a visual design system crafted for your brand will make it distinctive. At a time when AI is contributing further to the sea of sameness and saturation of current design trends, the depth of a design system will resonate on a deeper level. 

💡Food for thought: Why branding needs digital-first design thinking

The Core Components of a Visual Identity System

In the introduction, we walked through the basics of visual identity. Here’s how a design system further expands the core components to be strong and adaptive in a digital space.

• Responsive logo - back-to-basics but it goes without saying that your logo needs to be recognisable across every digital format
   
• Colour palette - your brand’s colours need to work harder; they need to communicate your identity and be effective on a screen — both from a user and accessibility perspective.
   
• Typography - your font choices need to echo your brand’s personality, but a playful font won’t be that fun if it’s not legible or easily scannable on the go. Equally, a web-based font renders faster than a custom font but doesn’t offer the brand distinction you might be after. Typographic choices have far-reaching impacts on the performance of your website as a digital product — a good example of where system-thinking is a big win for future brand growth and marketing effectiveness.
   
• UX/UI style - the visual rules that guide the functional aspects of the brand - buttons, forms and other on-page elements - that steer the user's interactions in digital spaces.
   
• Image and media assets - the style of photography, illustrations, video and motion-design content produced to be the right resolution and orientation- not to mention scalable and adaptable - for a wide range of digital touchpoints.

The development of the visual identity as a system responds to the fact that there are simply so many more creative devices available to us to bring brands to life in the mind of audiences, which is a good thing(!)

Where Craft CMS comes in 

Does your CMS choice impact how well your brand lives in a digital context? (The answer is yes.) 

Stewarding brand standards across the board is tough whether you’ve got multiple web editors and marketers, or just one. Time dictates how well creative is delivered in accordance to guidelines. So I feel, as digital designers and front-end developers, it is our responsibility to make sure the visual identity is baked into reusable components that internal teams can use to build out pages, without assistance. This is the visual identity system in action, when it comes to a brand website.

It’s why we are a Craft CMS partner. It is our CMS of choice, for every single project. And has been, for over a decade. It allows us to develop bespoke brand experiences online, and user-focused designs that don’t have to compromise on their identity elements just because of limitations at the development stage. Intuitive design funnels down into the matrix fields, so every web page can be built and managed to maintain a consistent visual identity. 

It means we’re delivering a website that not only is the brand asset our clients commissioned us for, but something they can use and work with day-to-day. 

Plus, as with any headless CMS, it means the identity can evolve to, with ease. A new sub-brand, a refreshed palette, multiple sites that each focus on one particular initiative or product; without needing to go back to go back to the drawing board each time. That saves your brand time and money as it grows and changes, and makes content management less of a pain point for brand stewardship.

💡Further reading: 5 Reasons to Choose Craft CMS for Your Website

Making design systems the new normal

This idea of a visual design system is nothing new, but there are still so many brands who don’t have this kind of digital-first mentality as a foundation for their visual identity. Hence, this article.

Think, the brand is the experience of your audience. The experience, for almost every company, is mostly digital now. Which means the visual identity is mostly the website, the product UI, the social, the email, the everything-else.

Treating it as anything less than that — the logo, the colours (read, the basics) — is settling for less impact, and less long-term resonance. And considering AI is going to start offering even more interactive capabilities to website design, the more static your website is, the less likely it will hold that fleeting moment of attention. 

If your visual identity is feeling restrictive, and increasingly incompatible with the digital touchpoints you are working with day-to-day, it's time to evolve your visual identity doc into a visual design system. A system that works now, but creates space to flex in the future.

So maybe it isn’t a rebrand you’re looking for, after all? It might be something of a brand evolution, with a website redesign, instead.