Reading Response: Designing Brand Identity by Alina Wheeler

The best design identities are the ones that help advance the company' brand. The characteristics or ideals, ideals being: value, commitment, flexibility, authenticity, differentiation, sustainability, vision, meaning and coherence. An effective brand identity needs to bold, memorable, immediate recognizable, provide a clear consistent image of the company, work well across various media and can work both black and white and color. The designer's goal is to create an identity that positions a company for growth and change, and success.

Looking over the design essentials something that we need to keep in mind about towards our experimental type symposium theme and in branding it. The essentials are convey the personality of the brand, align with positioning strategy, create a point of view and a look and feel. Make it work across all media, demonstrate understanding of the target customer.

Some of the design imperatives are: seize every opportunity to manage perception, create a unified visual language, start thinking about the launch strategy ( in which he have started to develop through perhaps using postcards, a blog, etc) . Create a balance between consistency and flexibility, this I feel is very important since we will have various typographical experiments and the ones that we put on the symposium should reflect a balance of both of these ideas. Work on the highest-visibility applications first: this will allow us to obtain the most amount of attendees.

In regards to signage legibility, visibility and durability and positioning are important. The factors that effect visibility are distance, speed, light, color and contrast legibility.

I feel that the concept or (theme) that we develop needs to be : visible in applications, we need to examine the flexibility of the identity, express the coherence and consistency. We need to ask the questions: is it scalable, legible, work in different media, work on the internet, can it accommodate a tagline or even work in other cultures?

Testing the brand: through real scenarios, and real text application testing. Solicit feeedback from trusted colleagues, meaning everyone in class.