What is Brand Identity and How to Build One | ClickUp (2024)

When you think of a favorite brand, chances are you can bring to mind its specific attributes like color, logo, how their advertising sounds, and the kind of imagery you associate with them. That is brand identity at play.

Think of your brand identity as the face of your brand. It is what differentiates your brand from all the others in the space.

Creating an identity for your brand takes time, sweat, and a creative spirit.

Use this guide to learn how to create an unforgettable brand identity that mirrors your brand’s DNA.

What is Brand Identity?

Brand identity is an important component of a brand strategy. It allows you to portray the right image of your brand to your customers by actively shaping your brand using text, visuals, and more.

Your brand identity must include different brand elements, such as:

• Brand values, beliefs, and mission
• The way your brand communicates with the product (your brand voice)
• How users feel when they interact with your brand (your brand personality)
• How customers perceive your brand (your brand perception and positioning)

Working on your brand identity design is a good starting point to demonstrate your brand’s personality.

Why is Brand Identity Important for Your Business?

A well-defined brand identity:

• Connects your product/service to your brand
• Makes your brand instantly recognizable
• Cements an indelible image in your customer’s mind
• Builds a solid foundation for improved brand retention
• Differentiates your brand in a sea of sameness

Companies maintain a brand style guide with clearly defined guidelines to ensure consistency among all brand elements.

Think of this as a holy grail for your graphic designers, copywriters, etc.

4 Examples of a Strong Brand Identity Design

Brand identity has evolved over time from just symbol-led origins.

It is no longer restricted to creating a logo for placing on t-shirts, coffee cups, and other brand assets.

Today, creating a brand identity includes building your brand’s personality and using a brand management strategy to amplify your brand story.

Let’s dig a bit deeper into four brand identity examples worth emulating.

Four brand identity examples to leave you inspired

1. Glossier

See Also

What is a Brand Identity (And Its Correlation to Logo Design)?Brand Identity: What It Is and How To Build OneHow to Build a Strong Brand Identity +Examples | Brand2414 Brand Identity Examples to Inspire Your Own

Glossier’s brand identity shouts all things honest and transparent with its minimalistic typeface.

The design aesthetic at every touchpoint is eye-soothing, thoughtful, and clutter-free.

Every brand element—from its product packaging to the powerhouse of a blog—encourages honest conversations with customers.

Key takeaway for your brand strategy:

Use your brand identity to help your target audience:

• Develop a consistent image of your brand through visuals, words, and text
• Have fun (considering the brand is in the beauty space) in their journey with the brand

2. Airbnb

A strong brand identity exudes its brand personality with every interaction—case in point, Airbnb.

From using a consistent color palette to nailing the typography, Airbnb’s branding is on point. In fact, everything about the brand reinforces the concept of ‘belonging,’ from the unique ‘Belo’ logo and real-life imagery to the simple user interface and transparent messaging.

Key takeaways for your brand strategy:

• Learn about what’s your brand’s ‘why’
• Use a singular vision (in this case, belonging) at every touchpoint of your brand identity
• The vision should also translate to your user experience across platforms, channels, and creatives
• Keep listening to your customer’s feedback and incorporate it if relevant, so that your target audience feels heard and your brand is more relatable

3. Oatly

Oatly is a brand built around a commitment to sustainability and transparency.

The brand’s marketing campaigns often use humor and creativity to engage customers with its distinct brand voice. Oatly’s packaging and overall branding feature a minimalist design aesthetic, with clean lines, simple typography, and a basic color palette.

This design approach reflects the brand’s focus on natural ingredients and simplicity.

Key takeaways for your brand strategy:

• Oatly doesn’t shy away from discussing its challenges of sustainable food production, allowing it to build trust with its target audience
• The brand’s approach to branding is innovation-driven; it is willing to take risks with in-your-face fonts and challenge conventions with unique packaging
• If you aren’t sure how to be bold, consider this: If your brand were a person, what personality would it have?

4. Headspace

Headspace’s brand personality characterizes a sense of mindfulness and happiness in guided meditation users.

It uses a clean and modern typography that is easy to read and reflects the brand’s focus on simplicity and clarity. Furthermore, Headspace’s visual style is defined by clean lines, simple illustrations, and a minimalist aesthetic.

However, the most interesting element in Headspace’s brand identity is its color palette—which leverages a lot of white space interspersed with bursts of color (aka energy).

Key takeaways for your brand strategy:

• Every element in your visual brand must mean something—for example, the orange dot in Headspace’s logo symbolizes a feeling of being centered and calm and is representative of the temple of the forehead
• The brand uses color to demonstrate a sense of playfulness without it being jarring; the illustrations and the typography are soft-edged, signifying a soft tone and voice

How to Create a Unique & Memorable Brand Identity

Want to build a brand identity that resonates with your target audience?

Follow these five steps:

Step 1. Research and reflect

The first step in creating a memorable brand identity is understanding:

• Who your most engaged audience is, what they want, what their pain points look like, and what they like at a deeper level
• The challenges of your top-performing audience
• Your own value prop and mission
• Your brand’s characteristics and inherent personality

Leverage the services of an experienced brand identity specialist to drive a comprehensive audience analysis and speak to your customer service as well as sales reps to get real-time data into what’s making your customers stick around.

This information will help you design your brand guidelines—a resource that should be easily accessible to your designers, content writers, developers, and more.

This is where ClickUp shines. Whether you want to create a brand identity for your business or that of a client, using software like the ClickUp Marketing Project Management tool speeds up things and keeps everyone in the loop.

ClickUp Project Management tool helps you manage all stages of creating a brand identity.

Creating a brand identity includes multiple steps and components, which make tracking the branding process difficult. To build a strong brand identity, you must keep tabs on every brand element, such as visuals, text, and animation, and track various tasks managed by different team members.

ClickUp brings all the tasks, resources, and assets together so teams can monitor every step as the brand guidelines are created.

Further, the ClickUp Task Management feature allows you to achieve an overriding mission— organize your brand identity creation process according to different task types.

Use it to customize your tasks and subtasks as per the needs of your project and target audience in a few clicks.

Step 2. Work on key brand elements that your audience will relate to

You’ve done your research to identify what your brand stands for and what your audience expects.

The next step is to create a “moodboard” for all the elements of your brand, such as:

• Creating a logo that accurately represents your brand’s values, mission, and personality
• Finalizing the color palette based on the emotions your chosen color palette invokes within the audience
• Choosing a variety of color palettes that demonstrate your brand personality, such as:
  • primary palette
  • secondary palette
  • background color
  • text color
• Experimenting with fonts to see which typeface best reflects your brand’s vibe and then selecting a set of fonts to be used consistently across all your customer touchpoints
• Nailing the voice and tone by focusing on the dos and don’ts of the language, the styling and formatting of the content, and using specific words that best highlight what your brand is all about
• Designing the packaging and other image-related design elements to set the tone for your brand

Ensuring all these elements are followed across your brand tasks takes effort. This is where ClickUp Docs helps you to organize your brand identity.

Here’s how:

ClickUp Docs helps you collect all your ideas, including images, files, links, etc., in one place and share them with your team. You can use nested pages, embed bookmarks, add tables, and styling options to customize Docs for convenience.

Additionally, you can use the same document to pen your brand guidelines, edit in real-time, tag people in comments, format as needed, and share with the team with one click. Docs also allow you to assign action items, chat directly with your team members, and quickly resolve any doubts.

With ClickUp Docs, you can convert text into trackable tasks directly. Moreover, you can link them and tasks together to ensure you do not have to make the same changes again.

Step 3: Get your brand elements together

You’ve done the grunt work.

Now it’s time to put all your brand elements in one place—in the form of brand guidelines, templates, and a brand design kit.

Suppose you want your brand identity to be consistent across your social media and other marketing materials. In that case, you must help all your teams—from customer service and sales to marketing and product—to get their hands on the brand guidelines and the brand kit at one click.

Let’s say you want to create brand mockups for your client. Having only your marketing and branding teams involved won’t cut it.

You need your design team, developers, and content writers to be able to see what’s happening in real-time.

In this setup, think of using ClickUp Whiteboards—a collaborative way to create product mockups that are good enough to get you successful marketing collaborations:

Remember, your brand identity design and brand voice are interlinked.

If your final product does not align with your brand personality, your investments will be in vain. To ensure all your teams are on the same page, we’d suggest creating a brand book for everyone to follow and using mind-mapping software to brainstorm collectively.

Get your team to collaborate and create brand guidelines from scratch—with every brand element in the book—using ClickUp Brand Guidelines Whiteboard:

Step 4: Define and execute your brand strategy

You’ve nearly reached the final leg of your branding process—the fourth step is to ensure your brand is portrayed consistently across all touchpoints—your website, social media, emails, etc.

Here are a few tips to follow when implementing your brand strategy:

• Think about how your brand will evolve—visually
• Tailor your brand strategy according to the channel in question (such as advertising, social media, email marketing, internal communications, and so on)
• Conceptualize how your content will map to your brand’s visual identity in terms of tonality as well as look and feel
• Build a brand style guide keeping in mind the following:
  • how your customers perceive your brand
  • your organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats
  • what your brand image looks like
  • what your brand’s key business goals are
  • what your brand’s unique voice is
  • the type of product/service you are offering

You can also use ClickUp’s brand guideline templates to build a powerful brand.

The mark of a strong brand is a visual brand, considering people process visuals 60,000x faster than text. But in the hustle of daily tasks, your brand story might sometimes take a wrong turn—in the form of a poorly edited image, an inaccurate illustration, insensitive text, etc.

The ClickUp Branding template helps you develop an easy-to-follow process that keeps your work and team in check. Use this template to communicate your brand story, values, and mission without wasting time or complicating stuff.

Another great template is the Brand Guidelines Template by ClickUp. Use this to detail all your elements, such as logo, colors, brand voice, fonts, etc., and ensure consistency of your brand’s values, identity, and messaging throughout the process.

If you’re looking for something more comprehensive to establish a unified identity across all channels, use ClickUp’s Brand Book template. This template helps you organize ideas, visualize assets, and track progress.

Step 5: Monitor, analyze, and repeat

The final step in creating a solid brand identity requires constant monitoring and tracking of your brand’s impact on users.

To ensure your audience views your brand identity positively, follow these tips:

• Track social media conversations and mentions
• Survey customers
• Use analytics to see how users are interacting with your brand

If keeping track of your brand objectives is becoming an uphill task, use ClickUp Goals to your advantage.

Creating a memorable brand that your target audience will remember starts with tracking your brand identity objectives—an area where ClickUp Goals helps tons:

Use this ClickUp feature to create trackable Goals for your team, helping them stay on course and achieve results faster without compromising on quality.

The Role of Seven Elements in Brand Identity

Your brand’s identity is your brand image—meaning there’s a visual aspect to brand positioning you must not ignore.

Typically speaking, seven key elements make up a brand’s visual identity, namely:

1. Logo

Your brand identity starts with a simple logo design.

If you want to understand the power of a visual brand logo, consider this:

If someone mentions a swoosh, you think of the brand Nike. And who doesn’t recognize the iconic golden arches of McDonald’s?

That’s the power of integrating your brand personality within your brand identity.

A strategically conceived logo stays with the customer forever. Here’s how to get it right:

• Must invoke an emotion
• Should be simple and minimalistic
• Needs to be strategically driven
• Must be given time to create and should include constant rounds of iterations

2. Brand color palette

Brand colors, too, have a significant impact on your brand identity. Customers connect to different colors psychologically.

For example, yellow translates to feelings of happiness, red to passion, green to nature, and so on.

So, your chosen color palette should let your customer connect instantly with your brand’s image. For instance, a color palette of yellow and red automatically makes you think of McDonald’s.

The most visually appealing brands follow these brand color tips across marketing collaterals and campaigns:

• Ensure color consistency across images, graphic designs, and brand fonts
• Use a color palette to set the mood of the brand in its entirety—specific colors (like warm, bright colors) affect the viewer’s emotions positively, stimulating happiness as well as energy
• Leverage a complementary color palette to make it more recognizable
• Select at most four complementary colors that accurately reflect your brand personality

3. Brand fonts

If brand colors are your brand’s visual identity, then fonts are its voice.

You use text to shape your brand’s tone and style. When it comes to typography, there are two types—logo fonts and brand fonts that you must choose.

For instance, Coca-Cola’s logo font is a classic example of a logo font. The unique cursive script of Coca-Cola is instantly recognizable and is used exclusively for the company’s logo.

Google’s brand font, ‘Product Sans,’ is a good example of a brand font. While Google also has a distinctive logo, the ‘Product Sans’ font is used across various aspects of the brand’s visual identity, including website headings, marketing materials, and their products.

To make the most of your brand’s typography:

• Ensure your team sticks to specific brand guidelines for fonts to use
• Utilize a font that can connect with your customer’s mind and mood
• Select a font that aligns with your brand personality; for instance, contemporary sans serif fonts best suit brands with a modern trait, and handwritten fonts are great for brands with a playful, young personality

4. Brand imagery

A strong brand identity rests on the emotions it invokes in the viewer. Strong imagery is a big part of this.

For your brand identity design to be successful, embrace these tips:

• Every image, illustration, and picture you use must be intentional and consistent in terms of the message it conveys
• Align the brand imagery with the content tone and brand personality
• Use clean, high-quality, and professional images to boost relatability and improve brand connection

5. Brand typography

Your brand typography, consisting of typefaces and fonts, conveys your brand’s personality through text. Just like your logo and color palette, your choice of typography should align with your brand identity.

Follow these typography tips for the best outcome:

• Understand why you want to use a specific typography; for instance, script fonts have a more personable feel to them
• Try not to have too many types and sizes of fonts
• When deciding things like line length and spacing, consider readability
• Make sure your typography is legible and easy to understand so that the user experience is positive. You can do this by testing it on different screen sizes

6. Brand shapes and patterns

Brand shapes and symbols are essential visual elements that give your brand an edge. Use these tips to select shapes and patterns that make aesthetic sense for your brand:

• Choose shapes and patterns that are:
  • Responsive to your audience’s changing needs
  • Relevant to their current demands
  • In alignment with your brand’s message and vision

• Go for versatile shapes and patterns that will adapt to different screens and platforms more easily
• Don’t forget about your brand’s color palette when selecting the shapes and patterns
• Make sure that the shapes are scalable
• Test and experiment with the patterns till you get it right

7. Slogans and taglines

Slogans and taglines also boost your brand’s affinity to a great extent. A tagline is generally fewer than seven words, whereas a slogan is nine words or more.

Both these textual elements must encapsulate your brand in words. They should be simple and short.

While your slogans may change, depending on the product/service you are marketing, your tagline is more permanent. As long as both are punchy and catchy in their execution and to the point in describing the brand, you are good to go.

Communicate Your Brand Purpose—and Improve Brand Experience—with ClickUp

A good brand creates brand images; a great one focuses on improving the business’s identity. A great brand identity is not chanced upon—it is built intentionally, always keeping the brand attributes in mind.

Give your visual branding a makeover—use ClickUp and have your brand seen and remembered.

Common FAQs

1. What are the key elements of a brand identity?

The core elements of brand identity include the company logo, color palette (including primary and secondary colors), brand fonts, brand voice, tone, and more.

2. How to create a successful brand identity?

Creating a successful brand identity is a 5-step process:

• Conduct target market research to understand more about your target customers as well as your value proposition and brand characteristics.
• Develop the various elements of your brand—from your logo and colors to the font and tone—as per your brand personality.
• Put all your brand elements in one place in the form of brand guidelines, templates, and a brand design kit.
• Define and execute your brand strategy to ensure that your brand is portrayed consistently across all touchpoints such as website, social media, emails, etc.
• Monitor and track your brand impact across social media conversations and mentions via customer surveys, analytics, etc., to gauge how users are interacting with your brand.

3. How does ClickUp aid in establishing a strong brand identity?

The ClickUp Brand Management software makes creating a brand identity easier. It offers features to:

• Store your brand style guide via ClickUp Docs
• Manage brand assets and other visual elements using ClickUp Tasks
• Create marketing materials in record time from scratch using readymade ClickUp Branding Templates
• Collaborate on mapping the brand’s mission with the brand design using ClickUp Whiteboards
• Track brand identity objectives using ClickUp Goals

With all your brand identity deliverables streamlined, creating a strong brand image will be that much easier.