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Corporate Design

A corporate design is a marketing strategy that takes both the corporate identity and branding strategy into account to facilitate brand positioning and brand recognition.

Using visual design, a corporation or an enterprise reveals its brand identity, which comprises the heart of the business - its vision and mission, particularly the corporate value in the eyes of target customers. Through the corporate choice of color, typeface, logo elements, and unique patterns and characteristics of design, businesses implement direct visual storytelling as a door to a more vigorous brand positioning and effective corporate strategy deployment.

It's a step-by-step process for corporations to reassess its market position and image related to other competitors in the same field.This reevaluation needs to be carried out after a thorough brand analysis of external factors such as their target audience profiles in consideration of internal components such as corporate culture, objectives, values, etc.

Corporate Strategy

The first part of corporate design includes the approach to corporate strategy, which allows a business to define who they are and who they want to become in the market. By carrying out a clear picture of the corporate vision, mission and objectives, it helps the business to enact the right efficient marketing strategies to build a consistent corporate image. Accordingly, corporate strategy gets the business to rethink about its corporate identity, its market standpoint relative to other competitors, and its corporate organizational culture.

File:Corporate Design Example.jpg

Example of a beauty brand design

Corporate Identity

A corporate identity is an initiative step of establishing brand awareness in the market. A corporation must be able to answer the questions of who it is, whom and how it offers its products to the end-users and for what purpose. Altogether, these elements are in collaboration to depict its specific characteristics and to stand out from other competitors with its own brand design.

Branching from the brand identity, a corporate identity seeks to construct a story for its people and organization as a whole in the market. It tells how it differs from other businesses in terms of organizational structure, team representatives and corporate culture and values.

Corporate Differentiation

A corporation marks its difference by offering a unique product portfolio or a unique selling point to its target customers, compared to other brand competitors in the field. By defining its distinctiveness in corporate vision and brand value, a business is able to apply aligning corporate strategies to appeal to potential customers as well as to construct a consistent brand image in the long-term.

Google demonstrates its corporate culture in an exhibition

Its differentiation is drawn out via number of ways - pricing strategies, attention-catching marketing campaigns, unique selling point or exceptional storytelling.

Corporate Culture

Example of Branding Identity - consistency in all communicative formats

A corporate culture is a set of common rules, language and behaviors established and executed by a whole corporation in terms of its organizational structure. The beliefs, behaviors and standards of the organization contribute to the backbone story of a brand. This internal working reflects and manifests to the external sensation and experience of outsiders. Therefore, a thorough understanding and assessment of a corporate culture is beneficial to the construction of brand storytelling, and the final product of visual branding.

Visual Branding

Research & Ideas Brainstorming

The stage of research and ideas brainstorming is the 'briefing' stage - where clients (corporations) and designers sit down to talk through the objectives of the visual branding guidelines, comprising of the brand logo, color, typeface characteristics in align with the brand corporate strategy. In addition, customer surveys (quantitative or qualitative) are carried out for companies and their stakeholders to better understand customer brand perception.

Storytelling : Concept Development

The stage of concept development is when the designer comes into place, as an interpreter and translator of messages. For effective storytelling, the designer drafts out a concept, a visual story by translating the needs of the client into images, words, visuals that capture the target audience's attention.

Range of color, conveying meanings and sensations

The concept development stage involves also brainstorming, developing and sketching out ideas to gradually refine the brand image to a compatible version.

Color

Color conveys sensations, feelings and meanings to the eye and the mind of the viewer. It is one of the major components in visual branding, with its contribution to the common language the designer has interpreted to connect both the client and the customer.

Additionally, the use of color combination (monochromatic, primary, analogous,...) constructs the mood and tone (i.e of a brand logo), and the business spirit in customer's eye.

Typeface

Groups of typeface

Typeface differs in its implementation of weight, stylistic variants and glyphs.

Altogether, the fonts generated and used in its 'font family' would make up the second essential component of visual branding. The typeface gives the context to the story the brand is telling and attracts customers who feel the connection of the brand personality through its use of font, typography, and typeface.

Logo

Logo is the simplistic representative of a whole business landmark.It encourages brand recognition and awareness in the pool of different other brands. Logo helps a brand stand out from other competitors in the same industry by presenting its own business story, business identity and culture through the use of color, shape, space, layout and hierarchy of various elements.

See also

• Corporate identity
• Visual brand language

References

1. Hembree, Ryan. The Complete Graphic Designer : A Guide to Understanding Graphics and Visual Communication. Rockport Pub, 2008.
2. Airey, David. Identity Designed : The Definitive Guide to Visual Branding. Illustrated, Rockport Publishers, 2019
3. Logo Design Love : A Guide to Creating Iconic Brand Identities, 2nd Edition. 2nd ed., Peachpit Press, 2014.
4. Melewar, T.,et al. “Corporate Identity: Concept, Components and Contribution.” ResearchGate, 1 Sept.2005, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279653990_Corporate_identity_Concept_components_and_contribution
5. Evamy, Michael. Logotype : (Corporate Identity Book, Branding Reference for Designers and Design Students) (Mini). Min, Laurence King Publishing, 2016.
6. Wheeler, Alina. Designing Brand Identity: An Essential Guide for the Whole Branding Team, 4th Edition. 4th ed, John Wiley and Sons, 2012
7. Schweizer, Urs. “Corporate Design for Regulability: Comment.” Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics, vol. 162, no. 1, 2006, pp. 130–133.