Corporate brand design and identity is the starting point for everything in business. It is the first thing a company needs to create before... well, anything! Without a brand... without a logo... without an identity you are nothing!

Brand identity is one of the most important parts of a good business – it helps people get to know you, it communicates so much more than just a name, and, if your branding looks disorganised, dull, frantic or indeed anything negative then this will be reflected on your company the second a potential customer sets eyes on your brand.

When you consider that a website has 3 seconds to capture the interest of an average visitor before they go elsewhere, branding can be said to be even more important for an online business! So when it came to creating the brand for VanLeasingQuotes.com we knew we had to get it right.

Where to start?

When creating a brand we start off by doing 4 things – reviewing the initial brief, speaking to the client, reviewing the competition and reviewing the ‘non-competition'.

The initial brief is a document we refer back to throughout the process. In this case it reminded us that VanLeasingQuotes.com want to create some new and different – this will have a bearing on the brand identity concept.

The client is also a great place to start because, not only do we want to create something that they buy into, but they also have good knowledge of their marketplace and any things to definitely avoid. In this case the team at VanLeasingQuotes.com were really keen to let us take the reigns and they were keen we didn’t get tied down by their perception of what might work and what might not (it’s great to get a client like this who really just wants us to flex our creative muscle!)

Reviewing the competition is a key part in the initial process because it lets us see what our brand will be up against. When we reviewed the competition in this case, we found that there wasn’t much out there that was particularly strong.  Most competitor websites made the mistake of trying to draw attention and say too many things at once (the end result looking a bit messy).

Reviewing the non-competition is a great way of finding inspiration from other industry sectors and using it in a new place. In the case of VanLeasingQuotes.com we found that their competition wasn’t strong so we knew we wanted to create a brand that stood out a represented something completely new.  We wanted to create a brand that represented a clean, fresh, approachable and easy-to-use website. One of the major industry sectors we looked at was price comparison websites – these sites are really easy-to-use and the best of these companies have great brand identities – we took inspiration from this.

Brand Concepting

This is where I start to get down some ideas. I’ll work with Ryan initially to think about the kind of look we want to create and we’ll sketch down some shapes and general sketches. After that I go away and spend a lot of time trying lots of different things (some I quickly abandon!) before coming back with 3 or 4 solid concepts for discussion. We all review this internally and there’s usually a couple of days of reviewing and tweaking each concept before we present 2 or 3 to the client. In this case we went back to the client with 2 concepts – both we felt were really strong.

It’s not just the logo we create at this stage, we also think about use of colour, font and language and how this would be used across the whole site.  

Client Approval

Presenting a new brand identity concept to a client is always a bit nerve racking – after spending a lot of time and energy going down a certain route with a brand that you really like, you just hope to god that they like it too! In this case they quickly chose one of our concepts and the process was fairly painless from here – just a couple of minor tweaks.

The Final Brand Concept:

Well this is the logo, what do you think? Hopefully you agree that we’ve created exactly what we set out to – a clean, fresh and approachable brand identity. Although we can’t show you the full brand manual we created for VanLeasingQuotes.com, the new logo is just one part of the overall look. We’ve also chosen corporate colours and fonts as well as developing how we will use language and tone across the new website. So this initial branding stage will really inform everything else we do when creating an online business for VanLeasingQuotes.com – it will give us a clear guideline on where to go with the look and feel of the website and the marketing material to follow after that.

It’s Ryan next week on keyword analysis and website planning.

Speak to you soon!

Since branding and rebranding are a big part of what we do, we thought we'd show you an example of a logo we recently created for a company called Blimey! Loans.






In this logo Blimey! is the brand. The use of lower-case font, choice of typeface and bold colour give the brand a young, fresh and  approachable look whilst still maintaining a professional, sleek and corporate feel at the same time.
This logo is designed to last – it won’t date quickly. 

The way in which the word ‘loans’ is separated into a rounded grey shape still keeps loans as a prominent feature but tones it down somewhat to make the Blimey! brand really stand out.

Over time if Blimey! diversify into other areas then the text inside the shape would change accordingly – continually building on the brand.

So as you can see there is a reason for everything when designing a logo from the use of colour and shape to considering the future of a company's development.

What do you think?