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by Brian Dove
May 16, 2024
In our more than 12 collective years supporting businesses through graphic design, we’ve seen a common thread emerge. A company has a strong visual brand identity (logo, colors, typography, etc) that’s been in place for years, yet there is a disconnect across their creative assets. The graphics on their website, social media, and other platforms don’t align in execution or tone, leaving them with a disjointed visual language and weakening the company’s ability to efficiently communicate with their audience.
Your company’s visual identity is one of its most important assets. Strong, consistent branding creates trust and loyalty, helping you find and retain customers. As a business owner or marketing professional, this is nothing new. Still, what a lot of folks can lose sight of is what inevitably happens to a visual brand when there are multiple freelance designers, some non-designers using Canva, or no creative director managing visual output.
If your visual identity seems to have lost its focus, it might be time for a visual brand audit.
Basically, a brand audit is a checkup that evaluates the quality and consistency of your company’s visual assets. Oftentimes, without a creative director or senior designer managing visual assets, the look and feel of your creative output can become disparate and misaligned with your brand strategy. The audit process not only analyzes the inconsistencies in your creative output, but also how the look and feel of the brand relates to your goals and audience. Think of it as the intro to a brand refresh—we’re not changing the logo (unless it really needs it) but we are taking a good hard look at what is working, what’s not, and how to improve the overall look and feel of your brand.
Many companies tend to think that if they are using the fonts and colors outlined in their brand guidelines, then whatever they’re producing must be “on-brand”. Developing and maintaining a strong visual language is much more than following a rigid set of guidelines. It’s also about how those assets are used, what sort of illustrations and iconography they’re paired with, how the fonts are used, the pacing and music of your video assets…the list goes on and on.
Free graphic software like Canva can be a great tool, but knowing how to use those tools to create an image isn’t the same as knowing how to design imagery that fits within the existing visual narrative. As inflation has risen and company budgets have decreased, we’ve seen more teams push the role of asset creation onto folks with no background in design, simply because they can do it. Not only are you wasting the valuable time of someone on your team, you’re putting the face of your brand in the hands of someone who may not have the eye to keep things in line.
We get it, budgets are tight and a lot of companies don’t have the resources to hire an in-house designer. And frankly, many companies probably shouldn’t hire in-house. If there’s no room for growth internally, that designer will naturally move on to a new company, leaving you in an endless cycle of hiring new (often junior level) designers with no Creative Director, further tangling the mess of inconsistent creative assets your company puts into the world. Hiring a more experienced freelance designer or Fractional Creative Director may be a better fit.
But before you get there, a visual brand audit is a great place to start.
Our brand audit process begins with getting to know your business better—what your goals are, who your audience is, and how those things relate to your business strategy. This allows us to establish a framework of what does and doesn’t work in your company’s visual toolbox.
From there, we collect as many of your creative assets as possible: logos, display ads, social
media posts, packaging, email newsletters, marketing materials. Anything and everything that is a public facing visual and represents your brand falls under the brand audit.
We then review thes materials both in reference to each other (identifying inconsistencies) as well as the strategic goals and target audience we established in the beginning of the process. For example, we may help you identify what styles of illustrations are working, what styles are clashing with one another, what style of brand assets are oversaturated in your field, or what sort of visual language isn’t speaking to your target audience.
At the end of the 4 week process, we present our findings to you in a meeting and provide a PDF for you to hold on to. Our goal is to give you an up to date, thorough understanding of how to utilize your brand’s visual language in a consistent and effective way that aligns with your goals. With these takeaways, meeting your goals becomes that much easier.
At the end of the process you’ll walk away with a detailed report of how to create more strategic consistency in your creative assets. We’ll include designed mockups relevant to your business, showing concrete examples of how the visual brand should look and feel.
If you don’t have a designer to execute this refined direction, our Fractional Creative Director services would be a great fit. With that service we act as both creative director and production designer, ensuring thoughtful, consistent creative assets that support your business goals.
If a visual brand audit sounds right for you, get in touch to get the process started.
