A picture paints a thousand words – and never was this truer than in the world of branding.

Visual suggestions and cues - from colours, shapes and typography to illustrations and photography – all shape a consumers’ perception of your brand.

That starts with being noticed –and remembered. Just look at Rolls Royce, Mercedes or BMW. All have instantly recognisable and iconic badges.

It ends with being trusted; and for one or two very special brands, loved. These brands not only have high recognition, they enjoy highly active owner clubs and associations that are literally dedicated to the brand.

If you think that sounds unobtainable, think again. People are almost certainly dedicated to your brand just as passionately – you simply need to find them and a way of communicating your brand.

It’s here that investing in good brand design really can make a difference to your effectiveness, and your ability to draw customers to your organisation through an accessible and emotive visual identity.
 

Do it yourself?

The main point is not to do your own design work unless you’re a professional designer. Trust us on this.

Instead, enlist the pro bono/discounted help of a design professional – which is nowhere near as difficult as you’d think.

Here are some helpful tips:

Logo

Keep it simple and preferably no more than two colours. The logo needs to be clearly visible as small as 10mm high, and it needs to be readable coming out of a variety of backgrounds – especially white. Avoid complicated designs with multiple elements.

Colours

Use bold, high-density colours for your identity, and again no more than two. Look at the colours of your main competitors…and choose something different.

Typography

Choose a sans serif font (The Guardian style) rather than a serif font (like The Times). This is important for not-for-profits, where accessibility – i.e. the ability of disabled people to read and understand your communications – is a very serious issue. For this reason you should never use anything less than a 12-point font size.

Photography and images

Avoid clichés and taking the easy route. Stock photography is generally expensive and over-used but one very inexpensive route is to buy a royalty-free CD that contains hundreds or thousands of images. Even better, there are now some very cheap websites out there (such as Istock Photo) which are continuously updated and enable you to download from an immense library of images for less than a fiver.

Accessibility

This stretches beyond the size and shape of type mentioned above, to issues like word count (the number of words per page) and usage of tints and overlaid images.

The Central Office of Information offers one of the best sets of accessibility guidelines for the third sector.