How do you create a cohesive brand identity?
At one point, we decided our agency would only use black-and-white photography. Very disciplined. Very tasteful. Eventually, very annoying.
We’d find an image that could do something interesting for the brand, and immediately start taking things away from it. We’d made the rule ourselves. Now we were negotiating with it.
That’s the slightly complicated thing about creating a cohesive brand identity. You need a system. You also need to be able to do something with it.
Give the pieces a relationship.
A brand identity includes your logo, typefaces, colors, patterns, illustrations, photography, and the way those things are used together.
That last part does a lot of work.
You can have a perfectly good logo, a perfectly good font, and a perfectly good photograph. Put them together, and they might look like three people who have never met.
A system gives them a relationship. How does the typography sit alongside the photography? Where do the patterns belong? How much can you change from one application to the next and still feel like the same business?
This is where people tend to drift. They find something that looks good, which is understandable. We also like things that look good. But does it make sense for this particular brand? And does it work with the decisions already made?
Show people how to use it.
Designers love brand standards. Give us enough time and we’ll write you a textbook.
There’s beautiful work in manuals like NASA’s, designed by Danne & Blackburn. When your identity has to work across spacecraft, buildings, and uniforms, there’s a lot to account for.
Flip-through: Bibliografik ↗
But your team shouldn’t need a master’s degree to make a social post. The rules need to be useful to the people actually using them.
Show them what that looks like. A presentation. A social post. A page of the website. Practical examples help people understand how the pieces work together, and where they have room to play.
Otherwise, you’ve handed someone the ingredients and assumed they can cook.
Leave yourself somewhere to go.
People are always looking for something new. Meanwhile, your business has a website, social channels, campaigns, and the content beast to feed.
A system that makes every piece look exactly the same can run out of things to say pretty quickly.
Some parts should stay familiar. Your logo, wordmark, and established colors often carry recognition you’ve spent time building. Other parts can have more room to move.
Maybe a campaign aimed at the technology industry uses a technical monospace typeface. It connects with that audience and gives the campaign its own character. Whether that works depends on the rest of the identity and what remains recognizable around it.
You’re making a deliberate decision about where the flexibility belongs.
Our photography rule eventually became a cage. Keeping it meant passing up ideas that would have made the brand more interesting. At that point, it was worth asking what, exactly, the rule was helping us do.
More possibilities can still have rules.
For Off Menu, the big realization was that the brand could live in a whole field of color.
New products mean new flavors. Locking him into four colors now would give him a problem to solve later. We needed room for the next flavor, and the one after that.
So we built a color tool. He can explore any hue, with limits on how light and saturated it can be. Those rules keep the colors deep and rich, and help them work with the identity. Watch us choose a few below, including one that doesn’t fit.
A color field, with a few rules.
Off Menu · Original toolThat’s where a system gets really useful: it gives you more to work with as the business grows. The same applies to illustration. You might need six illustrations today and sixty next year. The style needs enough definition that someone can extend it without making the next batch feel like it wandered in from another company.
Your team now might include an agent.
We’ve started illustrations by hand, then used AI to help extend that visual language.
The original work establishes the character. The system gives us something to evaluate new work against.
An agent needs guidance, too: the actual assets, the rules, examples of good applications, and enough context to understand what belongs. “Make it on brand” is asking quite a lot of four words.
There’s still judgment involved. Someone has to decide whether the new work fits.
Keep the standards somewhere people can find them.
We prefer a shared online home for brand standards. Everyone has the same link, and updates happen in one place.
Standards, Corebook, and Frontify are a few places to start. Each lets you publish and share your guidelines online.
Otherwise, someone is inevitably working from a PDF they downloaded eight months ago. As far as they know, they’re following the rules perfectly.
Revisit the system every year or so, or when the business changes enough to warrant it. Look at what people keep struggling with. Which rules are useful? Where are you running out of room? What’s already evolving?
You’ve worked to make the brand recognizable. Keep that recognition in mind as you develop it.
A good identity should give you somewhere to go. Ideally, without having to negotiate with your own photography policy.