Visual Branding and How It Affects Your Web Design Decisions

June 28, 2020In Design, Branding, Web5 Minutes

Are you aware of how your visual brand is being perceived by your audience, specifically your web visitors? Visual branding is all about communicating the characteristics and benefits of your brand through the imagery, graphics, and design. There are many companies that have a strong message and compelling story but lack the solid design to give their audience a clearer understanding of what they are all about and what kind of value they can provide to them as users.

If you are in the process of creating a visual presentation that better represents your brand, you need to think about your web design decisions.

VISUAL BRANDING
Photo by James McKinven on Unsplash

When your visitors hit your website, they’ll be presented with the visual elements before they even start reading the words on the page. This will play a big role in your user experience for web visitors. For this reason, you want to communicate the value, uniqueness, relevance, and other qualities of your brand through your design. Much of web design projects are made up of trying to figure out how to deliver the content in a professional template or trying to design an SEO focused site while ensuring the design and site structure is good enough.

If you’re trying to make your brand a strong presence in your design, you’ll have to ask different questions. Questions like: “How can I sub communicate the luxurious and exclusive aspect of my brand?” or “How can we let the audience know that customer support is our top priority in an industry that has let them down?” It’s not easy coming up with design elements that reflect the message or qualities that you are trying to convey.

For example, you may want to communicate that your brand is dedicated to serving a specific segment of a niche market with generic imagery that presents that idea. But it is very much possible that other brands in the same industry are doing the same thing. This presents the challenge of trying to communicate your main message in a way that is unique. The last thing you want to do is look like a professional yet generic company that is using images from a stock photo site on your website.

Photo by James McKinven on Unsplash

The way you get around that is by using unique and relevant images, creating a recognizable logo, choosing the right color scheme, and having a strong overall identity. Trying to accomplish all this will mean that you’ll have to invest in custom photography, get a branding expert to come up with a new logo, or work with a web designer that understands how to create a design that gets your message across while meeting all your goals (whether it’s SEO, viral marketing, relationship building, sales conversions, etc.).

Another aspect of visual branding that is often overlooked in style. The style includes everything from selected typography, layout, content, graphics, to the icons. Style can also be expressed as an archetypal design from minimal, to robust and complex. Experimenting with many variations of style, itterating and versioning will help you figure out what combinations of design elements look great while also evolving communication of the main brand message.

In conclusion

Designing a website with the purpose of visual branding will inspire the process in an unconventional manner. You’ll find yourself iterating with something that satisfies all the criteria of good branding, aesthetics, and design. For this reason, it can be quite challenging and time consuming for many. Satisfactory and fulfilling for others. It’s often a good idea to work with a collective on a large project like this, but even if you decide to do it yourself, you’ll find that the result was well worth it.

Hero Image by Halacious on Unsplash

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