How to Build a Corporate Identity
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Similar to your social ID card, every company needs a visual ID that makes it different from other companies in the market. When you take a look at a famous trademark such as Nike, you can easily indentify it among other companies by its famous logo. Another example to indentify the company by its color is Coca-Cola and Pepsi; you can easily indentify both trademarks with the red color for the first and the blue for the second.
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The corporate identity or the corporate personality is based on the company products and philosophy. It is important to understand what the corporate identity means to be able to reflect it on company advertising, promotions, logos and prints…etc.
Based on what has been mentioned the above, building corporate identity is one of the important steps that you should take when you establish a company because it reflects on many of its visual communication resources. On the other hand, it is easier to initiate the corporate identity creative ideas and elements at the company start than changing it or deciding it after starting the company.
Today, we will see briefly what the corporate identity refers to and the basic steps to follow in creating your corporate identity.
What does the corporate identity include?
Many people think that a corporate identity consists only of the company logo and color scheme. This is wrong; the corporate identity extends to include business cards, letterheads, calendars and stationeries.
The corporate identity is designed to deliver the business objectives and philosophy through the basic visual elements such as the logo and color scheme and apply it to the company stationeries. When you think of creating the corporate identity, you should build your design to fit with all these company resources and appear clear on them.
The best method to make sure that your logo design and corporate identity will work fine with the rest of the company resources is to apply the guidelines for creating the logo and choosing the colors. You can find brief logo guidelines in 40+ Inspirational Black and White Logos.
The usage of the corporate logo does not only include adding the logo to the letterheads or business cards…etc.
You can use elements from the logo such as using the logo graphic outlines or part of the logo shape. Using the same logo elements and colors help unifying the design of the corporate identity and give a link between different stationary designs. It is a good approach to think of implementing the logo elements in other designs and stick with the same colors of the logo, this will help reducing the time to find other elements and colors and will keep the corporate identity unified between multiple designs.
Building the creative idea behind the identity
The first step to building a corporate identity is to analyze the company resources and philosophy to be able to come up with an identity that fits with the company’s targets and activities. For example, business companies always look for non-distractive colors such as grays and blues. On the other hand, these colors do not fit well for mother’s and children’s sites where you can use more joyful colors.
In general, when you think of the company identity, you can get ideas from the following:
- The type or the field of the company business
- The product that the company provides
- The company audiences
- The philosophy of the company
The benefits of using the above factors as guidelines is that it can help you create a design that meets with the client’s needs and not waste your time in ideas that are different from the main company’s focus.
Conclusion
The reflection of using the corporate identity along with a concern towards the topics above creates a unity for the company visual elements. For example, you can find the company offices and buildings are using the same color scheme of the logo, stationary and website. So, it is important to consider building the corporate identity and understand it will be the base for many projects and stationeries in the company. Also, it lasts for a long time and holds the company message to the world inside a few lines of a logo or color scheme
In general, it is not considered a ‘best practice’ to rip out elements from your logo and use them outside the full represention of the logo. This actually works against your ability to burn your identity into the minds of consumers. Having a “Style Guide” and “Brand Standards Manual” helps here. Certainly using consistent or complimentary colors across the organizational collateral is wise, just not deconstructing a logo into component parts.
To illustrate this thought, think of logos like people. We prefer to be called by our names – Jack, Sabrina – rather than by the confusing and forgettable description of ourselves such as “the guy who always wears black and has blonde hair”. In this same way, a logo should not literally describe what the business does but rather, identify the business in a way that is recognizable and memorable.