5 Tips for Building an Outstanding Brand Identity

A brand identity isn’t the logo. It’s what’s left in someone’s head after they’ve closed the tab — whether they can describe your business in one sentence, and whether that’s the sentence you’d want them to say. I’ve built brand identities for businesses ranging from a laundrette to a security firm to a restaurant, and the ones that actually work share the same handful of habits. Here’s what I look for before a single pixel gets designed.

Start with what’s actually different, not what sounds good

“Quality service” and “trusted by our customers” aren’t a brand identity — they’re what every competitor’s About page says too. When I worked on Protech Motors‘ identity, the useful starting point wasn’t a mood board, it was a plain conversation about what actually set them apart from the garage down the road. A brand identity built on a real, specific difference is easy to design around. One built on generic reassurance ends up looking like everyone else’s, no matter how much time goes into the logo.

Make the visual system survive outside the mood board

A logo that looks great on a white background in a pitch deck can fall apart the moment it’s embroidered on a uniform, printed on an invoice, or shrunk to a favicon. Before I sign off on any identity, I test it in the places it’ll actually live — signage, packaging, a social profile picture, a printed menu — not just a polished presentation slide. That’s where colour palettes that seemed fine suddenly clash, and where typography that looked elegant becomes unreadable at a small size. Metro Laundrette & Dry Cleaners needed a mark that still read clearly on a shopfront sign from across the street — a very different test to how it looks on a screen.

Say what you do in the words your customers actually use

Messaging is where most brand identities quietly fall apart, because the language a business uses internally is rarely the language its customers use to describe it. If your own team needs the tagline explained to them, a customer certainly will. When I rebuilt the identity for The Hollybush Bar & Restaurant, the brief wasn’t clever wordplay — it was making sure someone scrolling past on their phone, deciding where to eat tonight, understood exactly what kind of night they’d get.

Keep every touchpoint pulling in the same direction

A brand identity isn’t one asset, it’s dozens of small decisions that all need to agree with each other — the website, the social profiles, the signage, the email signature, the invoice template. The moment one of those goes rogue — a different logo file used on the van, an old colour surviving on a business card — the whole thing starts to look unmanaged, and customers notice inconsistency even when they can’t name what’s wrong. This is usually the point where a brand identity needs someone who can see the whole system, not just design the next asset in isolation.

Judge it by what it does, not how it looks in isolation

The real test of a brand identity isn’t whether you like looking at it — it’s whether it changes how people behave. Do the right customers recognise themselves in it before they’ve read a word? Does someone describe your business accurately to a friend, unprompted? A brand identity that photographs well but doesn’t shift either of those is decoration, not identity.

If you’re building or rebuilding a brand identity, it’s worth treating it as one connected system from the start — logo, messaging, and the actual website it all has to live on — rather than commissioning the pieces separately and hoping they align later. I cover the full process on my brand identity page if you want to see how that fits together.