What Branding Challenges Have You Faced?
In the dynamic world of visual branding, Art Directors and Founders often encounter unique challenges that demand creative solutions. From utilizing Canva to ensure brand consistency to leveraging parent brand visuals, we've compiled four memorable stories from seasoned professionals. Discover how these visual creatives navigated their branding hurdles with innovative strategies.
- Utilize Canva for Brand Consistency
- Gamify Branding for Complex Software
- Merge Visions for CEO-Approved Branding
- Leverage Parent Brand Visuals
Utilize Canva for Brand Consistency
At our non-profit, each team is deeply involved in managing documents for trade shows, conferences, and events. This requires keeping templates and design files up-to-date with the latest statistics, impact numbers, and branding. To streamline this process, we integrated many design elements from Adobe programs into Canva. This app helps us maintain control over our brand style by locking most elements that team members don't need to edit. Additionally, we provide our partners and supporters with social kits for events. By making these templates partially editable, we ensure brand consistency while allowing them to customize their assets as needed.
Gamify Branding for Complex Software
I once faced a significant branding challenge while working with a client developing software to assist in filing Transfer Pricing, a notoriously complex area of tax compliance. Understanding that our target users—tax professionals—needed an intuitive and engaging experience, we decided to employ a gamification approach. We developed a unique character for the app interface and stylized symbols to represent different areas of information gathering and reporting.
This wasn't just about making the software look good, but simplifying a complex process. The character served as a guide, easing the user through the steps, while the symbols made navigating the various tax codes more intuitive. The identity system we created was meticulously applied across all marketing channels, collateral, and even packaging, ensuring a cohesive and memorable brand experience.
The impact was immediate—industry users found the software functional and enjoyable, which is rare in this field. This fresh approach to branding significantly elevated the company's market position, ultimately leading to its acquisition by EY, one of the Big Four accounting and advisory firms. This project didn't just meet the challenge; it set a new standard for how branding can transform user experience in the financial software industry.
The positive reception from industry users demonstrated that the software was functional and more engaging than traditional solutions. This approach contributed to the company's growth and eventual acquisition by one of the 'Big Four' accounting and advisory firms shortly after.
Merge Visions for CEO-Approved Branding
A few years back, I was working with an organization to design their annual report. Pretty straightforward—they had a vision for the piece: edgy, gritty, and cool. No problem, I thought, and as we went through rounds of edits and back-and-forth to refine the piece, a bombshell was dropped. The new CEO didn't share the same vision for the organization, and everything we'd done to date was not the tone they were looking for. From there, we were back to the drawing board, to come up with a way to bridge the gap between the CEO's vision for the future of the organization and the vision of those who had been with the organization for years. We worked tirelessly to build a mesh of ideas to create something that was so complex and meaningful it transcended the initial creative in every way. It was poised yet powerful, down-to-earth yet aspirational, and forward-thinking yet nostalgic to their heritage. The new piece felt strong, groundbreaking, and a pivotal moment in their overall branding. A perfect way to welcome new leadership to the organization.
Leverage Parent Brand Visuals
A specific branding challenge that I recall was creating a visual identity for a technology-focused conference that was being held by a parent organization that had recently undergone a rebrand. The challenge was twofold: creating a conference identity that specifically reflected the event's focus on strategies to implement industrial digitization in manufacturing companies, while still building brand equity and recognition for the parent brand.
The solution our team implemented was to leverage and play within the parent brand’s core geometry. Specifically, the parent brand’s logo featured pill shapes that repeat to form a complete circle. Given this circular geometry was a core feature of its visual brand, we used it to create basic modular components for the conference identity. It was expanded to create larger patterns such as rows of repeating pill shapes (suggesting data, a core aspect of digitization) as well as grids composed of circles (representing planning and implementation).
The conference identity package also incorporated supporting visual elements such as "x", "+", and "o" symbols built entirely from small circles (continuing the use of the core brand geometry and further evoking the themes of data and digitization). In summary, we successfully utilized brand geometry to create a visual language that served as a context-specific extension of the parent brand's identity.
