How to revive your brand personality traits with graphic design?

When creating unique, creative, and breathtaking designs for a company, the first thing you must consider is their brand personality traits. Some companies do not have a clear picture of their personality, which makes the process a little more complicated but way more fun! As a designer, you'll have a whiteboard where you'll be able to come up with fun and compelling designs, always considering the company's objectives.  

Firstly, let's look at brands as people. When we are getting to know someone, we'd like them to be approachable and genuine. Same thing with brands! It's essential to leverage elements like colors, fonts, patterns, and copy to create an outstanding first impression, thus increasing the chances of building a relationship with customers.  

Why are brand personality traits important?  

Understanding a brand personality is a critical element to design since it provides you with the vital insight to produce design that perfectly matches the brand. These emotional characteristics and qualities will also allow you to create more robust and genuine relationships with customers.  

A unique design is also the first thing your customer sees. When they arrive at your website, Instagram, or any other one of your platforms, they will be greeted by design. Colors, copy, and elements that will attract them instantly or make them click off your site. Leveraging that moment is essential to keep your customers on your site longer. Allowing them to see who your brand is and what it represents through design is pivotal.  

Brand Personality vs. Brand Identity  

Before we continue, let's not get confused. Even though brand personality and brand identity are part of a symbiotic relationship, they are not the same. Brand personality is a human association to a brand based on emotions. Brand identity is the image the company creates based on visual elements like logos, colors, fonts.  

Alignment between personality and identity is essential. It wouldn't be appropriate to have a fun or crazy logo accompanied by a very formal and traditional copy.  

Now let's go into the fun stuff.  

5 Elements to ramp up your brand personality traits game  

These are five elements to consider when bringing back personality to your brand:

   1. Brand research.  

Go back to basics. When starting a project for a brand, there are some basic things you must know. Implementing a discovery call, where you'll be able to hear first-hand what your client is all about and know exactly what they're looking for, is crucial. It will allow you to understand what the company does, why they do it, who their target audience is, and what their goals are with your design.  

Additionally, searching through your client's main competitors and knowing what they are doing design-wise allows you to create unique out-of-the-box designs that are different than the competition.  After all, the goal is to stand out!.  

   2. Hand-drawn typography

Hand-drawn typography is an exciting trend that's exploded during the past few years, and it's one of the most efficient ways to inject personality into a brand. Before, everyone was searching for ways to transform handmade elements into digital ones. Now, with this trend, we're going back to basics and creating things with our own hands, evoking a raw, organic, and retro feel.  

Also, businesses are in a continuous search for something that will make them stand out. With hand-drawn typography, companies will have the opportunity to leave behind the usual and standard fonts and make use of unique hand-drawn typography, something that no one else will be able to have.  

Customization is a feature that's attractive to many company owners since they can add many options to their designs, the sky's the limit.  

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   3. Specific imagery

Imagery allows a designer to communicate your product through visual elements. Visuals must be intentional and accomplish a specific objective that could inform, delight, and create a clear story for the user.  

Within your entire design, images should create a holistic view of your product and interconnect between each other. Whether you're using photography, user-generated content, or illustrations, they should reflect your product and the personality you want to portray with the same style and intention.  

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   4. Curated visuals

Visual elements within the design are essential. Research from Skyward shows that by using visual content you’ll average 94% more views, meaning that users they find more value in the images they're looking at than the copy they're reading.  

With that being said, curated visuals are a must to enhance any great design effort. Finding quality images that portray what your brand is about and aligns with the bigger picture will provide a better user experience and level up your brand's entire look and feel.  

   5. Attractive copy

Don't' forget about the copy! Even though it's more about what we see than what we read, creating engaging copy for your design is the perfect finishing touch. Design attracts the user and provides an unforgettable first impression, but the copy keeps them on your website or platform.  

Incorporate a copywriter into your workflow and let them see and understand your vision; this will allow you to obtain alignment between your unique design and the letters that will be included in it.  

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With these five elements, you'll be well on your way to bringing back personality to your brands. Allowing yourself to explore unique trends like hand-drawn typography, including illustration on your design, using specific imagery, and curating your visuals will allow you to stand out from the crowd with compelling and unique designs.