Visual branding refers to increasing a business’ success by making great brand first impressions including a great logo design. To make sure your company’s visual brand is a good one, you need to start by assuming that your customers don’t know you at all. Just as people have first impressions about each other when they meet, people have first impressions of your brand when they first come into contact with it. Your website, your logo design and other branded communications experiences give consumers clues about who you are.
People use their first impression of your visual brand when they make purchase decisions. For example, if your website looks cheap and doesn’t perform well, a consumer’s first impression might be that your business is untrustworthy. That’s why it’s so important to invest wisely in developing your visual brand. If consumers can’t trust your business based on your visual brand, then you’re losing opportunities to make sales and build your business. You won’t get a second chance to make a positive first impression.
If consumers don’t feel like they can trust your brand, then your business will earn a reputation of not being credible. Credibility is essential when it comes to brand and business building. With that in mind, following are five tips to help your brand and business look more credible to consumers:
1. Simplicity works, so lose the clutter in both your logo design, site design and copy. Think about some of the top brands like Apple and Nike. These brands use a simple approach that works very well. The Nike swoosh is a great example of a sports logo design that is instantly recognizable.
2. Use clean and balanced design in all branded materials and communications.
3. Use no more than two basic colors in your branded materials and communications rather than a variety of distracting colors.
4. Select one typeface to represent your brand and use it everywhere. Use font attributes like size, italics, bold, and so on to make messages stand out. If necessary, you can use a secondary font for headlines, but try to stick with a single font when you can.
5. Use a consistent look across all of your branded materials and communications. That means everything from your business cards and invoices to your website and signage should look like it comes from the same company with the same visual brand.
People consider first impressions to be a tangible form of exercising their sixth sense. Make sure your visual brand tells their sixth sense that your business is credible and trustworthy, and watch your business grow.
