Your personal identity uniquely identifies you, your likes and dislikes, your experiences, and more. A brand identity is just that but imposed on your business. In other words, your business has its own personal identity. It's a business' own special sauce that differentiates it from every other Tom, Dick, and Harry. The brand identity shapes your business.

But what exactly is a brand identity? How is it directly linked to design? And more importantly, how do you shape a strong brand identity that will take your business to the next level?

These questions and their answers are essential for any brand to effectively influence its target audience and be considered a unique, meaningful, and valuable brand.

Let's take a brief visual journey into iPhupha Digital's own brand and identity to gain a better understanding of what makes up a great foundation for a great brand identity.

What is brand identity?

Most people interchangeably use the terms "brand" and "logo". This is a common misconception.

A brand is more about what your business says, what your values are, the way your business chooses to communicate with its customers, and how you want people to feel when they interact with your business. To touch on a few specifics, your logo, colours, typography, print designs such as business cards, chosen communication mediums and words, marketing campaigns, employee conduct, and everything in between.

As Jeff Bezos once said, "Branding is what people say about you when you're not in the room."

How to develop a great foundation for your brand identity?

1. Know who you are

Before design even comes into play you need to know the brand's personality and what it stands for on a more personal level. This is the anchor that customers use to align themselves with a brand and ultimately become loyal.

• The vision
  • iPhupha Digital has the vision to create influential brands and digital experiences for the 21st century.
• The mission
  • iPhupha Digital is on a mission to become essential for influential brands by providing innovative, creative, and data-driven products and services.
• The personality
  • iPhupha Digital loves to describe itself as a Sage, a Magician, and a Lover. A Sage is the discoverer of truth. A Magician is the catcher of dreams. A Lover is the nurturer of human connections and love. Personality keywords that would generally come to mind include expert, research, truth, and analytical for a Sage, mastery, change, renewal, and dreamer for a Magician, and trust, connection, intimacy, and beauty for a Lover.
• The unique proposition
  • As a creative group of digital creators, iPhupha Digital is first and foremost an open and collaborative space for South African digital creators to discover, learn, and create. Unlike most other digital technologies companies, we strive for community and inclusivity through an embrace of remote work. Working together to build the fastest and most affordable solutions.
• The brand's voice
  • As a Sage, iPhupha Digital is always very analytical in its understanding of the world around it and loves facts and data. This might sometimes cause us to be a bit boring to some but we are very unapologetic in our opinions. But the Magician in us tends to balance the Sage perfectly. So we are data-driven but maintain our love to imagine and dream. The Lover completes the trio because the customer should always know that we want to understand everything about them on an intimate level and make sure that they are the center of influence. In simple terms, our voice is very opinionated, unique, unapologetic, balanced, analytical, and very intimate and understanding.

If you’re having trouble figuring out who exactly you are, don’t sweat it. Sometimes, all you need is a simple brainstorm to help you get clarity on who you are as a brand.

Ask yourself:

• Why did we start this business?
• What are the beliefs and values that are important to us as a company?
• What do we do better than anyone else?
• What makes us special?
• If we could describe our brand in three words, what would they be?
• What are the three words we would want our customers to use to describe us?

2. Design everything based on who you are

Just like how your Nike and Adidas built the brand identity of your high school's star athlete, your designs will build the brand identity of your business.

Your designs will be all tangible elements that represent who you are. Elements like your logo, your packaging, your web design, your social media graphics, your business cards, and the uniforms your employees wear.

In other words, nailing your design = nailing your brand identity = building a successful business that’s an accurate representation of who you are as a brand.

• The logo
  • iPhupha Digital's logo shows multiple elements of who we are in the most multi-dimensional representation.
  • The 3 rectangular shapes represent the books and bar graph of the Sage to emphasize the analytical and data-driven nature of our identity. Furthermore, the bars' horizontal slant and the 3D-esque nature of the shapes are meant to show a new, higher perspective of the Magician.
  • As a ubiquitous visual element, the logo is meant to achieve simplicity, memorability, and meaning.
• The colours
  • Through the use of the fundamentals of colour theory, our colour palette contains 3 colours with each representing our personality. Blue is for the Sage, Red is for the Magician, and Yellow is for the lover.
  • Most other visual elements, including the logo, will aim to emphasize these colours as they are what give us meaning.
• The typography
  • As a 21st-century digital technologies company, iPhupha Digital decided to go with a sans serif font as it is one of the most modern, progressive, and clean font groupings. There are 4 major types of groups: serif, sans serif, script, and display.
  • The "Red Hat Display" and "Red Hat Text" font types form part of the brand identity.
  • Interestingly, if you look closely, you will notice that some of the letters include a horizontal slant at the top. This connects our font very well with our logo design and more broadly, our brand identity. Allowing for a very consistent and cohesive design.
• The forms/shapes
  • Straight edges and lines are the names of the game for iPhupha Digital. These kinds of forms and shapes — like squares, rectangles, and triangles — make people think strength, efficiency, and trustworthiness. But to ensure that we remain fun and connected with our customers, dynamic colours go hand in hand with the forms and shapes. Hence, such a colourful logo.

By now you'll start to notice that the Sage is the most emphasized in our brand's identity. This is important because, in order for us to create the most influential brands and digital experiences, data analytics will be one of the most important tools in our set and would drive our creativity and decision-making.

3. Build on the basics of your designs

From here on you can start designing more complex and intricate messaging and mediums such as your brand's website, business cards, product packaging, email design, and more.

To ensure that consistency is maintained, we'd also suggest a brand identity guideline at this point.

Brand identity in a nutshell

Your brand identity is what sets you apart from the endless sea of competitors and shows your customers who you are and what they can expect from working with you. And if you want your brand to be perceived in a positive light, it’s crucial that you nail your brand identity and create designs that accurately portray who you are to your customers. And now that you know how to nail that identity, it’s time to start designing.

If you want more branding tips, you would like more tips on brand and identity, don't hesitate to sign up for our newsletter, The Plug.

If you'd like us to help you and your brand with its own identity, contact us.