Your Visual Vocabulary is an essential tool in your
business’s brand identity toolkit. It is made up of all of
the graphics that supplement your logo, forming the graphic
“face” of your business and anchoring your brand identity.
Think of your logo as the “superhero” of your brand, and
the Visual Vocabulary elements as its “sidekicks”; in many
design applications and finished materials, your logo won’t
appear by itself. It will have the help of all of these
Visual Vocabulary elements to accomplish its job of
communicating and connecting with your target market.
Your Visual Vocabulary can include design elements such as:
• Font styles: You should have a small collection of
typefaces, font weights, and styles that you use regularly
in your materials. Consider fonts for both print and web
use, and specify styles for headlines, subheads, and body
copy in each case, at minimum. For each style, you should
specify the font to use, the color it should be, and its
paragraph alignment: whether it should be centered,
left-aligned, or justified (where the text lines up with
both sides of the column).
• Colors: Creating a color palette for your business can
add flexibility to your materials and give you an easy
resource to go to when choosing colors for illustrations,
graphics, or any other part of your Visual Vocabulary. If
you keep your colors consistent and limited, then you’ll
develop a more focused palette that will be easier for your
audience to associate with your business.
• Shapes: The shape that you use for your bullets, callout
boxes, color-blocked areas, and even borders in your
materials can create a strong visual component that will
contribute to your memorability.
• Layout: The layout of a piece is how the different
elements are laid out on the page. This covers elements
like the number of columns and the placement of all of the
other Visual Vocabulary elements.
• Backgrounds: Using background screens or shapes, or even
a specially designed watermark, can give your materials an
extra bit of flair. You can also develop a special
background that will make your materials stand out.
• Photographs: Photos can add a lot of personality to your
materials and really help you to make a connection with
your target audience. You can purchase stock photography
inexpensively these days; buy a few shots that are
compelling and really match the rest of your Visual
Vocabulary. Make sure that you buy the highest resolution
and largest size that you’ll need for materials down the
road.
• Special textual treatments: For very special text that
you want to highlight, such as your tagline, marketing
bullets, sidebars, or bullets that detail your specialties,
consider specifying a special face, size, and color to use
in all of your materials.
• Paper type: Printing your materials on a special type of
paper can make them look even more interesting. Papers come
in different colors, textures, and thicknesses that can
contribute to your material’s uniqueness.
To create a Visual Vocabulary for your business, you should
create a set of specifications for the types of design
elements you will use in all of your marketing materials.
Once you have laid out the set of “rules” for your Visual
Vocabulary, use the same elements consistently throughout
your materials. When trends change, or when your business
grows or your materials become stale, you can simply change
some or all of these elements to create a new, fresh look.
Specifying the qualities of these design elements and using
them consistently throughout your marketing materials will
have many benefits, including:
• Increasing your brand’s memorability: A Visual
Vocabulary gives your marketing materials more designed
visuals. Adding more visuals makes your materials, and your
company, more memorable.
• Making your brand designs more flexible: A Visual
Vocabulary can provide you with a set of visuals that are
more loosely tied to your business than your logo, which
means that you can exchange and recombine those visuals for
different campaigns, service offerings, or products. You
can also redesign your Visual Vocabulary elements during
the lifecycle of your business, updating and refreshing
your materials as necessary, while still backing them with
a solid logo and brand identity base.
• Adding to the consistency of your marketing materials:
When you use your Visual Vocabulary across all of your
marketing materials, the repeated elements add to your
visual consistency.
• Making your business’s materials stand out from the
competition: Your Visual Vocabulary can add a lot of
personality to your materials, differentiating them from
your competition’s marketing pieces. It can also add visual
information to your materials, to help tell your business’s
story.
• Making a small business look larger: By expanding your
brand design with more surrounding graphics, you’ll expand
your designs and make your small business look like a
bigger business.
A Visual Vocabulary provides a powerful key to your target
market, helping it to better understand your business: what
you offer and how you work. It also contributes to your
business’s memorability.
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Erin Ferree is a brand identity and marketing design
strategist who creates big visibility for small businesses.
Through her customized marketing and brand identity
packages, Erin helps her clients discover their brand
differentiators, then designs logos, business cards, and
other marketing materials and websites to reflect that
differentiation, as well as to increase credibility and
memorability. http://www.elf-design.com
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