Your website is the digital face of your brand. So much of your success, both online and offline, depends not only on how well your website functions, but also on how well it’s able to represent your brand and persuade visitors to do business with you.
Ultimately, it all comes down to web design. And in order for your website to represent your brand ideally and contribute to its image, it needs to be designed with brand consistency in mind. From the overall picture to the tiniest detail, consistency is key – without it, you really can’t have a strong, unambiguous brand identity.
A website that emanates a consistent and cohesive brand image, in line with your digital marketing campaign, suggests to potential customers that they can expect the same level of professionalism, organisation, and quality from your products and services. Here’s what you need to pay attention to in order to build brand consistency into your website.
Finding Your Brand Voice
Before you even set out to design your new website or improve on the existing version, you first need to determine what kind of a brand image you’re trying to project in the first place. This is really the essence of all your branding efforts. Without it, you’ll be unable to determine why you should choose certain aesthetic solutions over others, thus inviting amateur-like randomness and discrepancy into your design.
In other words, you need to go on a journey of self-discovery and pinpoint the values your brand represents, as well as how it will represent them. Go over the answers to questions such as:
What is your value proposition?
What is your brand personality? For example, are you a light-hearted and playful brand or do you want to exhibit authoritative professionalism?
What’s the story behind how it all started?
Finding the narrative that suits your brand best will help you establish your tone of voice, which you can then exhibit consistently in every detail of your site. The look of your website, as well as your web copy, will exhibit the same tone of voice as your advertisements and the entirety of your digital marketing efforts.
Branding Basics
Once you’ve got your brand persona pinpointed, you’ll have the necessary sense of direction and purpose for making decisions regarding the layout, colour palette, and fonts. These elements need to embody your brand and needless to say, they need to be uniform across the site in order to exhibit a sense of cohesion.
When people think of branding, the first thing that usually pops in their head is logo design. As you can gather from our previous point, branding is so much more than that, but your logo will certainly be an important element that influences other aesthetic decisions – most notably, the colour palette. The dominant base colour of your website should be correspondent with the dominant colour on your logo.
That’s why it’s crucial that you revisit your logo design and if need be, make adjustments to it before delving into the design of your website. Your best bet is to consult professional logo design companies who will help you create an emblem whose colours and shapes give more insight into what your brand is about.
Once you’ve ensured the colours on your logo correspond well with your brand identity, integrate them into your site as primary and secondary hues. Most importantly, don’t overlook whitespace. As a crucial part of your layout that increases accessibility, empty space will give your design the contrast and breathing room it needs in order to effectively communicate the key points of your brand image.
Lastly, don’t overdo it with the fonts. Don’t use more than two different fonts across your site. Make sure they correspond adequately with your tone of voice and fit well together.
Logo Placement
It’s not only the design of your logo that heavily influences your website, but its placement as well. You might have noticed that logos are most often placed at the top left corner of webpages. This placement is no coincidence, but rather a deliberate decision based on the fact that, since the majority of languages are read from left to right, the top left corner is where the visitor will look first. By making the logo the first image they see, the idea is to influence the visitor’s subconscious once they land on your site and imprint your emblem into their mind.
Pictures worth a Thousand Words
Images are powerful branding tools that penetrate the viewer’s mind. High-quality photos and hero images will help convey your message visually before the visitor even starts reading the text.
Clearly, you want to display visuals that amplify your brand voice, but it is equally important to ensure they all have a common thread and follow the same aesthetic.
For example, you might display moody, atmospheric images that add drama to your content. Or, at the opposite end of the spectrum, your website might feature only light, airy photographs of a gentle colour palette. Think about Instagram and Pinterest, and the importance of curating images is instantly clear.
In other words, don’t just feature images that are pretty, impressive, or seem fitting at the moment – think of the bigger picture and how they will all together contribute to a consistent brand image.
Brand Personality over Trends
The art of web design is in a state of constant change and evolution, much like everything else related to the web. That being said – beware of trends and web design fads. Sure, your website will need to be constantly updated and every now and then you’ll introduce some design changes. But make sure each design decision is deliberate, purposeful, and coherent with your established brand voice.
Follow these tips to maintain consistency and once you’ve captured that special feel that emanates your brand voice, weigh each new design decision carefully in order to preserve it.
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Vanessa Davis is 32 years old, lives in New York and is currently a full-time technical writer at designrush.com. Her areas of expertise are content marketing and design and in her free time she enjoys yoga, skiing and having a day in the park with her kids.
