{"id":168123,"date":"2022-03-15T08:30:58","date_gmt":"2022-03-15T08:30:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/realbusiness.co.uk\/?p=168123"},"modified":"2024-04-23T08:19:53","modified_gmt":"2024-04-23T07:19:53","slug":"is-your-brand-a-great-design-story-in-the-making","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/realbusiness.co.uk\/is-your-brand-a-great-design-story-in-the-making","title":{"rendered":"Is Your Brand a Great Design Story in the Making?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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As a designer, I believe that every brand has a great design story just waiting to be discovered.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s more obvious for some brands, certainly \u2013 design was a crucial element for Apple early on, and continuing to lean heavily on its design pillars has always come second nature to the tech leader. Burberry, despite a moment of lapse<\/a> in the early 2000s, has successfully resuscitated its iconic luxury look. And US broadcaster ABC<\/a> recently launched a refreshed identity inspired by the channel\u2019s original logo by Paul Rand.<\/p>\n

A number of brands have embraced nostalgia in recent years, harking back to their roots through visual cues, and this trend, intentionally or not, celebrates these brands\u2019 design histories.<\/p>\n

In owning the legacy of their design, brands from Apple all the way through to Burger King don\u2019t just create recognisable and laudable visual stories over time, they create meaningful shortcuts to emotional connection with their audiences.<\/p>\n

Which is all well and good for brands with rich design credentials to fall back on\u2026 but don\u2019t forget that all design-forward brands started somewhere. So if you\u2019re ready to start building a design legacy that can carry your brand through the ages, here are some essential tips to get you started.<\/p>\n

Look to the history you do have<\/strong><\/p>\n

Japanese publisher Kodansha was 100 years old<\/a> when it launched its first ever logo, but just because the brand didn\u2019t have a strong design history in its own right, didn\u2019t mean there wasn\u2019t a wealth of inspiration to draw on. The history of Kodansha\u2019s products and content became the foundation for the brand identity, with the logomark emulating Japanese henko stamps, manga panels, and the Kondansha \u201cK\u201d all in one.<\/p>\n

Of course, your brand doesn\u2019t have to be a hundred years old, or even a year old, to draw on meaningful history and tell a compelling story through design. Electric car company Pi\u00ebch, launched in 2017 with a brand that was largely inspired by its founder\u2019s personal history \u2013 Toni Pi\u00ebch, is the great-grandson of Ferdinand Porsche. The Pi\u00ebch brand pays visual homage to its founder\u2019s European heritage, celebrating the beauty and emotion of classic sports cars, whilst simultaneously steering the company forward toward to an electric future.<\/p>\n

Look to your industry and market<\/strong><\/p>\n

Companies wholly new to storytelling through design can start crafting a compelling design message by looking to the cues present within their market. Knowing the design conventions within your industry can help you do two very important things: speak the design language of your customers, and set yourself apart from the competition.<\/p>\n

Whether you\u2019re subverting classic cues within your category (like Innocent did for juice) or incorporating iconography your ideal customers will recognize (take Mozilla\u2019s 2017 rebrand<\/a>), you can use the wider narrative around design in your market to help your brand leave its own unique and memorable mark.<\/p>\n

Look at yourself<\/strong><\/p>\n

The greatest design stories are usually the ones that transcend history and category, and represent something bigger than the brand itself. Nike, Disney, Chanel, Volkswagen. These brands created<\/em> the histories and categories that other brands look to for design inspiration.<\/p>\n

So why not take a leaf out of their book and use design to start telling a wholly new story? Airbnb did it in 2016 when the company used design to launch itself out of the budget-travel sector and onto the global tech and lifestyle stage. Airbnb didn\u2019t lean on its own history, or confine itself to industry conventions, and as a result, the brand became a legend in design and marketing spheres.<\/p>\n

Look behind the curtain<\/strong><\/p>\n

However you ended up finding your design story, don\u2019t forget that it\u2019s only as successful as its implementation. Design isn\u2019t just about the identity that customers see in front of them, it\u2019s about how well that design story is integrated behind the scenes and across the business.<\/p>\n

Apple isn\u2019t just a great design story because its logo is iconic \u2013 in fact, the logo is iconic because design pillars and design thinking play an integral role in Apple\u2019s business and marketing strategy \u2013 ditto for the likes of Airbnb and Innocent.<\/p>\n

Your brand has a great design story to tell, I promise \u2013 but remember that no matter what the story is, the real success is in the consistent telling of that story, inside your organisation and out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In owning the legacy of their design, brands from Apple all the way through to Burger King don\u2019t just create recognisable and laudable visual stories over time, they create meaningful shortcuts to emotional connection with their audiences.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26320,"featured_media":168124,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11013],"tags":[11976,11983],"class_list":["post-168123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion","tag-rb-2022","tag-rb-march"],"views":5959,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/realbusiness.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/realbusiness.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/realbusiness.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/realbusiness.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26320"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/realbusiness.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=168123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/realbusiness.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168123\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/realbusiness.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/168124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/realbusiness.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=168123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/realbusiness.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=168123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/realbusiness.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=168123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}