How to create visual branding for your software: a guide Bucharest

How to create visual branding for your software: a guide
Bucureşti
Bucharest, Romania

You’re starting off a new business, just getting it off the ground and still working on its concept. You want to develop either a web app or mobile app, and you know what it should do, what goals it’s supposed to fulfill, but you have no idea what it’s going to look like.

Businesses need branding: branding makes you stand out, it makes you recognizable and sets the tone for what your business does. It makes it easier for people to remember you especially if it’s something unique, that’s clearly your business.

Branding defines what your business stands for and what you actually do through simple visuals. Once you’ve set up your visual identity, you can head into creating multiple products that very clearly belong to the same suite. This saves time down the road in terms of UI/UX and frontend development, as the designers you hire can use your existing branding to create design systems.

So in this article, we’re going to explain why visual branding is important for your software and why you should build software with this element already in place.

What is visual branding?

Visual branding puts together the visual identity of a company or brand: logo, colors, specific fonts, icons and/or illustrations. These elements are made to go together and to form visual content that defines a particular company. Put simply, the fonts and icons or logo marks will be made to go well together.

When launching a new business, having at least a logo is very important - this makes it clear your business has ground to stand on, is a registered company and not just a concept you’re still thinking about, and it’s ready to launch something people can use. Especially if you’re starting off with software - your app will need a logo, unless you’re cool with just a random icon your designer picks. But do you really want that?

You might be familiar with a lot of big companies’ branding without even thinking too much about it: the classic M Mc
Donald’s logo and their shades of green and yellow which symbolize greens and burger buns, Apple’s minimalist bitten apple logo, or Google’s colorful logos kept consistent across their suite of apps. When you see visual elements made by these companies, you just know it’s them.

What visual branding does is setting your voice, making you recognizable and giving visual hints at what you actually do. Sleek logos and fonts & shades of gray go great with serious businesses in the financial industry, while colorful, illustrated logos and thick fonts with rounded corners go great with entertainment or travel apps.

Source: Svetlana Kolpakova on Dribbble. This is a good example of sleek branding for a banking app. It’s not too punchy and colorful as we’re dealing with something more serious.

With visual branding, you get to make it clear who your audience is. The more sleek and colorless, the more serious your audience is. Bright colors and fun animations don’t go too well with
- type companies. But if you’re dealing with a young audience, fun visuals, funky designs and pretty colors makes it very clear you’re targeting them correctly. In other words, a big part of creating your visual identity is knowing what your audience is - and making sure it’s pretty specific.

So what can you include in a visual branding pack?

Why do I need visual branding for my software?

Visual branding is especially important if your software is
- facing. Before we get into that, let’s talk first about whether or not you need it for
- used software. If you’re on a low budget, you need to launch a product fast and the functionality matters the most, you can stick with just a stylized piece of text as a logo, which your UI/UX designer can make in minutes, and a few colors you let them choose for you just to build your app. And maybe, down the line, if your business grows and you want to invest in a redesign, you can focus on doing proper visual branding then.

But when launching a
- facing software product, visual branding is essential in setting your product apart from your competition, and it also sets the foundation for your product’s design system. When you give a UI/UX designer a visual branding pack, you’ve saved them many hours in coming up with styles for your app. They won’t have to create your visual branding for you.

Like we’ve already mentioned, visual branding gets you closer to your target audience: colors, fonts and visual elements overall can be used to express what your business does, what kind of industry you’re in, if your tone of voice is serious or playful, and if you target younger or older audiences.

Source: Sumit Choudhary on Dribbble. This travel app concept uses fun colors and illustrations which can create excitement for its users, and it’s clearly targeted towards a young and energetic audience.

In terms of the software building process, many development companies - such as us, here at UPDIVISION - go for a
- first approach. This means that we go through an entire product discovery process, outlining all user flows and creating
- fidelity designs for all pages the app will have (or at least the MVP). The design will then be used as a reference by the development team in creating estimates and coding itself. Instead of going in visually blind, just based on some user stories, the developers would have a proper design to go off of when coding the app. We talk more about this approach in our article about why
- first development is better than
- first.

So in such a situation where your software product development process starts with design, having a
- made visual branding guide can save a lot of time for the UI/UX designers. They’ll use your branding to quickly set up typography, color palettes and key components such as buttons, menu items, header and sidebar menus.

A big element of whether or not you need visual branding is your budget. If you have plenty of funding and money is not a problem, we highly recommend creating a proper visual branding pack for your software, containing the elements we named earlier. But if money is tight, a logo and two colors should suffice.

How do I create visual branding for my software?

There are 2 main approaches you can take here. You can create something quickly,
- house, especially if your team already contains a UI/UX designer. Since they’re designing your software anyway, and will most likely create a design system for your app, they’ll automatically create your visual branding as well. This would work similarly if you’re hiring someone else to build your app - their designer can create your visual branding from scratch based on what you tell them about your business and concept.

If you choose to hire someone to create your visual branding, this doesn’t mean it’s fully out of your hands. The designer you hire will need to get a good understanding of your business model in order to come up with an accurate visual identity that you’ll also be satisfied with. Sit down with this designer and tell them who your audience is (in terms of age, habits, hobbies, needs they have that you might be trying to fulfill, career and/or types of routines), what your business really does, what kind of tone you want to give off (serious, happy, intense, calm) and any branding you’ve seen that you like and might work for you.

What different colors represent, psychologically. Use this as a reference when picking your software’s color palette. Source: https://www.pyperinc.com/blog/the-psychology-of-color

If you choose to work with your existing team and come up with your visual branding yourself, here is how you can start:

Once you’ve gone through the steps listed above, you should have managed to figure out the foundation of your software’s visual identity. Deciding what your audience, tone and identity are will help you pick visual elements that define your business and the software you’re going to build.

Now that you’ve figured out the basics of your branding strategy, what’s next? Here are a few steps you can take:

Additionally, you can pick an icon pack and/or illustrations, if you’re very sure about what your visual branding should be. These, along with the other elements we’ve talked about, will create the basis for your software’s design system. You’ll save time for the UI/UX designer who will work on your app’s design, and if you decide to do marketing materials you also have a basis for those visuals. Both your software and marketing materials will look consistent.

Overall, visual branding is an important part of starting a business, especially one based on software. Having a clear branding strategy and building good software that solves real problems efficiently will help you stand out among your competitors. And starting off with a visual branding pack, as we’ve mentioned, is a great basis for a design system which you can use to build entire app suites.

Looking to use your visual branding to start building an app? Contact us and let’s see what we can do together.

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