A brand is the outward identity of something. While often associated with companies, each person has a brand which is unique to them. Brands are extremely important in design, a brand can explain what you do, differentiate yourself from others, sell yourself or a product, and help find your audience. While a brand can be attractive to people, it can be utilised to attract certain types of people to cultivate the user group that you want for your brand.
Marks of Excellence is a book detailing the extensive history of branding and trademarks. I’ve been making my way through this book and it’s been fascinating to see all the places where branding is incorporated into the world. I think I’ve assumed that branding is just for businesses but this book has helped me to understand how important branding is in all facets of life, from creating worldwide identities, to simply claiming ownership over something. As someone who is very interested in the historical aspects of design, this book has been excellent in showing the origins of branding and how it has evolved over time, which has enabled me to gain a further understanding of branding.
Branding can be seen everywhere throughout history, with the first true form of branding believed to be farmers literally “branding” their livestock to distinguish them from others. While this was mainly to claim ownership, the first form of the type of branding we see today started during the middle ages between the 5th and 15th centuries in the form of coats of arms and family crests. Family crests were designed to represent your family and to demonstrate what you stood for. Like brands today, family crests represented what you wanted others to think about you, this was achieved by the images that were shown in the crests whether that be showing what you do through an image or showing the attitudes of your family through the use of metaphorical colours, images, or shapes. Multiple family crests could be combined to form a coat of arms, which would demonstrate a union between various families, and show the combination of their various occupations or attitudes. The idea that branding has existed all the way back to the middle ages is incredible to me and it’s actually amazing seeing effective these brands are at showing a strong identity. I find this particularly interesting as it shows how integral branding is to humans. I think knowing this will enable me to consider my brand work better as I understand the incredible importance.
Another book I have been reading is “Designing Brand Identities” by Alina Wheeler which sets out the steps in which to create a successful brand. There are five main steps when creating a successful brand. These are; research, strategy, design, touchpoints, and assets. To break this down further, you first have to research the sort of brand you want to create, from that generate a strategy that makes your brand different or unique, next decide on how your brand will appear visually and through tone of voice. After that explore how users will interact with your brand, and finally apply the brand to everything involved in your brand. This breakdown was really useful to me in a similar way to reading “A Technique for Producing Ideas” in semester 1. Having this knowledge at this stage will allow me to break the project up and approach it in a time-tested way, which should hopefully allow me to create a successful outcome.
Knowing what you want your brand to be associated with is essential to creating a successful brand. This can be achieved by setting out your brand values and tone of voice early on in the branding process.
Brand Values are the ideas and words that you want to be associated with your brand. Knowing what these are can allow you to create a positive brand image and should be at the core of the design of your brand. The idea of brand values is very interesting to me as your essentially setting out values to use to manipulate your users into viewing your brand in a certain way and this reminds me of how James Webb Young described the relationship between designer and user when I read “A Technique for Producing Ideas” in semester 1. I look forward to exploring the use of brand values in this module's projects.
Tone of Voice is the style in which you want your brand to speak through text. While certain styles of tone of voice wouldn’t work with certain types of brands, there isn’t a set tone of voice that must be used with a type of brand. Frozen, Formal, Consultative, Casual, and Intimate are all tones of voices and can be used in a variety of ways. What I think is most interesting about the idea of tone of voice is being able to utilise an unorthodox tone of voice to attract a certain user group to a brand they may usually not take interest in and this is something I want to explore in this module's projects.