When it comes to branding, visual consistency matters – here’s how to do it right
Do you find that your product quality is high, your brand identity is clearly defined, but your commercial results aren’t meeting your expectations? One of the simplest ways to check whether you’re going about things correctly is to pay attention to your branding consistency
For years, the Depositphotos stock content platform has helped clients maintain consistency in visual communication and beyond. In this article, the Depositphotos team shares some time-proven tricks to improve KPIs and open new marketing perspectives for your company.
What is visual consistency across branding?
If branding is about the “look and feel” of your product, brand consistency refers to a brand’s image being coherent, recognizable, and without contradictions.
Consider that contradictions in fundamental (ideological) branding aspects are the first things that prevent you from sharing a powerful and comprehensible message. So, to start with, check if your company’s values and mission work together and match your target audience’s values. Another question to ask is if your marketing objectives are realistic—taking your mission and audience into consideration.
Example: You produce premium pet food supplements and your mission is long and healthy lives for pets. Although every owner wishes their pet a long and healthy life, your branding can’t be consistent if you target low-income pet owners.
If you didn’t find any discrepancies in your ideas, well done. Now it’s time to conduct your visual branding consistency audition. We need to make sure that the form you choose for your messages doesn’t gainsay your ideas, but makes them clear and digestible to audiences.
Visual branding covers several aspects:
Logo
A logo is a basic branding element by which clients recognize you. It must be original, clearly visible from afar, and translate your brand values into a visual. Consistency here means that your logo looks the same on various online and offline materials, and there are certain rules for its location in layouts (indents, size, certain page corner).
Typography
What font sets do you use on your website, in printed materials, advertising, and elsewhere? To reach consistency, define fonts for each type of text elements (heading, subheading, main text, note) and make sure they harmoniously combine with each other. Make sure your audiences recognize you from first glance, regardless of where they spot your message.
Color palettes
Colors have their own mood and carry symbolism; they can generate associations when combined. Brand colors are often divided into primary and secondary ones.
A primary palette includes hues from your logo and critical text elements (titles, headlines, button texts). A secondary palette is wider and contains a range of shades for backgrounds, frames, and secondary design elements. Consistency with color means you stick to the same palette when communicating with visuals.
Tip #1: To save time on finding stock visuals that match your brand color palette, filter search results by colors on Depositphotos.
Visuals: images and video
Websites, brochures, ads, and social media posts contain more than just a company logo and a short text on a colored background. To stay engaging and save time for clients, companies leverage videos, interactive graphics, vectors, and photos that feature a certain graphic style, which ranges from animecore to futuristic—depending on the brand’s vibe and its campaign objectives.
Consistent communication means that you use styles that only match your brand’s mood and values.
Tip #2. The clearer you define the vibe your marketing messages should foster, the more likely customers are to recognize and feel connected with you. To find your style, check out this article: Top 7 graphic design trends 2023: Overview, ideas and cases.
Design layouts
The structure of digital and printed materials—as well as social media posts and corporate blog articles—are main objects of standardization. If you have templates for all the platforms where you are present, and those templates match each other, your visual communication is likely to be consistent and recognizable.
Featured people
Some brands invite celebrities to appear in their commercials, others work with brand ambassadors or collaborate with artists. Whatever strategy you prefer, remember that people who become the face of your brand have their own values and reputation, which will influence your brand image. Visual consistency here mainly means partnerships with figures your target audience likes or may like.
Tip #3: Collaborations can go a long way in strengthening your market position and raising brand awareness. To succeed, make sure you and the people who represent your brand have similar values and audiences. Explore the most promising collaboration formats for brands here:5 types of brand collaborations and why they’re crucial for effective marketing.
Building visual consistency: Check list for brands
Visual consistency is key to gaining the trust of your clients, differentiating yourself from competitors, improving customer experience, and opening up new opportunities for brand development.
You already know how consistency works across different aspects of your identity and can check whether your brand is visually consistent. The next step is to adjust your workflow, so that you can maintain the same consistency level in the future. Some universal tips in regards to this are:
1. Create (improve) your brand book and brand guidelines
A brand book is a document that describes key principles of your brand’s positioning. It includes your values, history, current mission, unique value proposition, target audience, and key identity aspects like TOV, logo, brand colors, and visual style.
Brand (identity) guidelines is a larger document devoted to specific cases of brand communication. For example, it may contain instructions on how to respond to negative company-related posts on social media.
Tip #4: An approach that saves time for those looking for visuals that match your brand’s style is to create a shareable collection of references. On Depositphotos, you can compile your own “mood board” by marking files as Favorites or request a collection from content curators.
2. Ensure that your brand book and guidelines are up-to-date - and accessible to all
All employees of your company, not just those directly involved in marketing, should have access to things like an up-to-date logo and be able to easily find instructions on how to cover company activities.
Keep brand identity-related data in secure cloud storage and regularly update them. Your centralized repository should also have convenient navigation.
Tip #5: You can use any cloud-based tools for keeping and organizing your existing brand guidelines (from Google Drive to Notion), however, for startups and small businesses, some dedicated tools like brand guidelines generators can make the task much easier.
3. Present a brand book to your team
The more you speak with your team on your brand’s philosophy and train them on using brand guidelines, the more likely your communication will be visually consistent across platforms. And don’t forget to hold regular events to discuss branding updates!
Tip #6: Make sure your brand guidelines cover AI-powered tool usage for generating visuals and texts. ChatGPT or DALL-E may be time-saving solutions, however, their application might be limited due to copyright regulations. Read more about them here:How the use of AI-generated images can jeopardize brand trust.
4. Test new approaches and document results
Brand consistency does not mean you can’t experiment with messages and visual storytelling. Conduct interface A/B testing, motivate your creative team to generate digital assets (and measure results of their usage!), and keep an eye on what’s trending in your target audience’s world to adjust your content plan. If any experiments works—discuss the achievement and update your brand guidelines.
Example: Seasons and events influence your visual communication. In particular, you can show support for the LGBTQ+ community during Pride Month by adding a rainbow to your logo, or address environmental issues on social media on Earth Day. Go ahead. And pay close attention to how your audience reacts to your messages to collect insights.
5. Conduct a visual branding consistency audit
Making mistakes is natural. Review your visuals and shared messages several times a year to avoid repeating mistakes (for example, someone of your team members may be using an outdated logo without noticing).
Wrapping up
Inconsistency in visual communication remains one of the most common branding headaches. Among tthe negative consequences of it are gradual audience loss and wasted marketing budgets. However, the good news is that visual inconsistency is not difficult to detect, correct, and maintain.
For your communication channels to work in synergy, develop and follow a brand book and communication guidelines. Consider that these two documents will not work by themselves—You need to train a team to understand your brand identity and teach them to use a centralized repository of brand assets throughout their work.
Don't forget to update your brand book and audit your communications too—this will help you remain a visually consistent brand over the years.