Let’s pretend your brand is a person walking into a room. The logo is the handshake, sure—but the identity is everything else: the way they dress, the rhythm of their voice, the words they choose, even how they hold eye contact. A pretty handshake with awkward small talk? That’s not charisma. That’s confusion in high-res.
Before we draw anything, I like to ask: Where will this brand spend most of its life? On phones? On packaging? On LinkedIn banners that get cropped at the worst spot every single time? If we don’t answer that, we’re painting the car before choosing the engine. Looks good in the driveway, overheats on the highway.
Now, let’s talk logos—quietly, like adults. A good logo isn’t a diva, it’s a family. There’s the main mark that does the red-carpet stuff, a tighter version for those tiny, stubborn spaces, and a clean little icon that becomes your app badge or favicon. If the mark falls apart at 24px or disappears on a dark photo, it’s asking you for makeup every morning. You don’t want that kind of relationship.
Typography next. Think of type as your brand’s voice before it speaks. Some fonts enter the room wearing sunglasses at night—great for headlines, terrible for reading. I like pairing a confident display face for the “hey, look at me” moments with a calm, literate text face that can carry a thousand words without complaint. If you’re working bilingual (hello Morocco/MENA), the real trick isn’t matching shapes—it’s matching rhythm. When Arabic and Latin feel like two musicians keeping the same tempo, the reader stops noticing the switch. That’s when harmony turns into trust.
Color? Color’s a spice rack. One or two main spices define the dish; neutrals do the daily cooking; an accent is that squeeze of lemon right at the end. When everything shouts, nothing speaks. I ask every color to get a job: are you the CTA, the background, the text, the hover state? If a color can’t hold decent contrast for body copy, it becomes an accent. We’re not running a charity.
Layout is the quiet hero. Grids and consistent spacing are like a tidy studio—people don’t comment on it, but they feel it. When the brand uses the same spacing rhythm across web, decks, and social, it gives this subtle “we have our life together” energy. Sprinkle two or three signature moves—a distinctive crop, a cozy corner radius, a habit of using oversized numbers—and suddenly your content has a silhouette. People recognize you from across the feed.
Images and art direction: stock photos can smell like stock photos from three scrolls away. I’d rather see one well-lit, real photo than ten “business handshake” clichés. If you use illustration or icons, give them rules: line weight, corner radius, range of motion. Nothing worse than an icon set where the arrows look like they came from three different universes.
Motion? Keep it intentional. A 200ms lift on a card can make the entire brand feel more premium. An attention-seeking parallax for no reason makes the brand feel like it just discovered JavaScript. The question is always: does this movement help me understand, or does it steal the moment?
Accessibility is the unsexy superpower. It’s not a tax; it’s free reach. Good contrast means more people can read you in bad light on old devices. Reasonable sizes mean your copy survives on that intern’s 13″ laptop and your client’s monster 4K screen. Alt text is how you speak to people who can’t see the image—and how search engines understand what’s going on without being creepy. Premium shouldn’t be hard to read.
Because we’re in the real world, I do a dress rehearsal before opening night. Not a fantasy billboard on Mars—actual places the brand will live: website hero, mobile nav, LinkedIn banner, invoice, a quick sticker, maybe a pull-up banner with cruel lighting at a crowded event. If something breaks, the system fixes it—not a late-night Photoshop patch.
And then we make it easy to use. A brand that requires a 45-minute explanation will be politely ignored by a busy team on a Wednesday morning. So I like “guidelines humans read”: short, visual, and opinionated. “Do this. Not that. Here’s why. Here’s the file.” Deliver assets in tidy folders, label them like a good librarian, and include a one-page Quick Start for whoever’s opening the brand for the very first time. Remember: clients don’t buy files; they buy confidence.
If you’re wondering where to start tomorrow morning, start small and honest. Open your current identity and ask three questions:
- If I remove the logo, would someone still know it’s us?
- Do our Arabic and Latin look like they’re in the same band—or two karaoke nights fighting for the mic?
- Which color is the CTA, and does it still work at 2 a.m. on a cracked screen?
Fix one of those and you’ll feel the improvement everywhere.
When we do this right, the identity stops being an outfit you wear for a photoshoot and becomes a language you can speak on any stage—website, packaging, emails, roadside banner, tiny favicon. Same person, different conversation, consistent character. That’s when branding stops costing you time and starts saving it.
Want me to pressure-test your current identity against this thinking? Book a short discovery call, or grab my Brand Style Guide Quick Start—it’s the cheat sheet I wish I had years ago.