Brand Design Experts: All-Encompassing Guide

Who are brand design experts?

Inventive specialists can be divided into two groups – individual self-employed creators that promote themselves on different platforms for freelancers and specialists from revamping companies that prefer to be a part of a team. They have an advanced skill set that covers more than just writing and painting. Apart from those activities, they ask questions, clarify details, do research and make decisions that turn a new leaf for a business.

Whether they deal with requirements from B2B or B2C markets, unique brand design experts have enough competency to evoke emotions that facilitate forming attachments to brand as well as help firms win attention of other businesses, digging to their essence.

Brand experts are defined by their deeds. They’re specialists who come up with a distinctive logo and naming that put a business in the best light, write a beneficial brand story that incorporates the purposes, missions and values of the business in captivating and compelling ways. Being creative, they at the same time show incredible results in strategic thinking, not only investing in beauty but greatly affecting people’s awareness and engaging with a brand.

Essential skills of a brand design expert

The skillset of a gifted specialist whose adeptness at branding helps business push their limits isn’t restricted to one or two competences as fields of their activity go above and beyond virtuosity in one sphere. It’s not enough to be a painter, or a writer to carry our branding project from scratch profitably. So, let’s dive into savviness the expert should be dexterous in:

Exceptional communication skills

The way a design expert that reshape businesses communicates with their clients, obviously should be polite, respectful and proper, yet even more crucial, it must be detailed. During discovery sessions they clarify the client’s objectives and in the situation if a business owner doesn’t have a determined vision of the project, a manager should pose suggestions to leave no stone unturned so at the end of the meeting both parties get the picture of it.

Extensive analysis skills

To decide on the strategy, conduct market research to shed light on the current situation and estimate whether a decision made goes in accordance with long-lasting trends or it will be outdated in the near future, brand managers must have not trivial insights into the process and possess awareness of the strategic side of branding.

Remarkable creative abilities

To ensure that data obtained from market investigation is properly implemented into designs and storytelling, an inventive brand designer completes a chain of assignment as choosing the colour scheme and fonts that aligns with the mood of a business, come up with striking words, encouraging people approach the brand and paint imagery that in some cases can seem simple while in the others it might be the state-of-the-art.

Proficiency in digital tools

Even being an artist with a thorough knowledge of different painting techniques and understanding what exact should be used in a particular case, a brand specialist might not fully uncover all the aspects of a brand without having literacy related to computer skills. Throughout every stage of carrying out a revamping project, professionals use a plethora of tools for digital branding.

Adeptness at adjustability

It’s common when artists love their works and protect them if they are criticised, yet in terms of branding such behaviour is considered as a weakness when their point of view isn’t data driven and is based only on inner feelings. Brand design experts can be fully immersed in one concept and insist upon it, yet in the case when it becomes obvious that a particular idea won’t work, they immediately approach another strategy, creating visuals that work.

Apprehension of business processes

Having done the main steps of shaping identities, an individualising specialist doesn’t step aside from the process, as after carrying out strategic and creative parts, it’s time to evaluate the success of conducting revamping. They possess comprehensive knowledge of how to monitor the indicators of brand performance and are familiar with CRO and ROI.

Tools and technologies used by specialist for brand design

Every single brand deliverable requires an extensive apprehension of special tools that they draw on to increase profitability and automate the undertakings, slowing down the obtaining of the results. Brand technology platforms help go the extra mile, accelerating the repetitive work that doesn’t demand too much creativity and strategic approaches.

Let’s glance at the technologies that help brand designers keep track of progress and developed up-to-date solutions:

• Brand strategy – since strategy incorporates a few different groups of tasks, every of them has their own set of tools. For example, to conduct market research, they use services like Statista and SPSS. Even though the influence of market insights is great, businesses often rate it too low.
  
  Carrying out brand audits, managers collect data, taking advantage of instruments called to ease surveying people such as Zoom, Google Forms and study the information with Google Analytics. To evaluate the competitors they benefit from the platforms like Semrush and SimilarWeb;

• Visual Identity – to ascertain that visuals are top-notch and are not only visibly appealing but are also usable in a wide range of cases, during crafting visual identity, a brand design expert has recourse to different products of Adobe – Photoshop, Illustrator and Spark. To simplify and accelerate the process, they get mileage out of Canva. As for imagery for website, Sketch is frequently use for this purpose;

• Verbal Identity – even though the verbal side of branding is about words, there are a bunch of instruments that help managers empower brands. First of all, using special AI assistants like Chat GPT they look for ideas and find stronger matches for the messages they need to form.

  As for improving the readability, tools like Hemingway editor and Grammarly aid them analyse the texts in the matter of grammar and style. On the contrary, when it’s needed they also can bring into service platforms like Winston to check the humanity of the materials to prove that they were written by people as well as examine plagiarism;

• Brand monitoring – to find out how good a brand performance is, brand design experts in London need to evaluate all the existing assets of it. To achieve this goal, they need to study plenty of tools like Google Alerts, Awario, Keyhole and Semrush. In addition to the mentioned tools, there can be exploitation of the kit that is supposed for forming a strategy;
  

• Project management – as to the process of creating a decent brand usually involves a few people and managing the activities effectively, they connect to platforms like Notion that gives the opportunity to create the tasks, share access to the resources and support collaborations.
  
  There are others similar resources like Monday.com or Trello, the true aid for design experts. Implementation of such platforms ensures well-coordinated work, quick response, easier closing the issues and complying with the deadlines;

• Communication – when it comes to discovery sessions, reporting and displaying the results, they have to be aware of different channels of dialogue, so clients could easily reach them out. Aside from messengers, they build contacts in Slack, know how to manage conferences on Zoom, Microsoft Teams. To provide regular updates for clients, they put notices on Miro.

What challenges do brand and design experts face?

Challenge 1: Insights into the future

Clients approach inventive specialists to pave the way for future advancement. According to these expectations, creators don’t follow temporary trends that occupy people’s mind now, but catch long-lasting flows so the brand they supply with strategic planning could stay up-to-date in the long run.

On this account, their biggest challenge for a branding design expert is to find out today what people will want tomorrow and how long this demand will exist.

Challenge 2: Accelerating the outcomes

Conducting branding related activities don’t usually provide immediate results since consistent brand assets benefit businesses over time. It takes a while for people to associate your services with certain qualities and characteristics as well as gain support. In some cases brand visibility growth will be noticeable after a few weeks or a month, but talking about big changes, individualising specialists assure their clients that it’s necessary to wait.

Choosing fast outcomes over consistency, might secure good indicators at the beginning, yet there won’t be durable effectuation in the fullness of time.

Challenge 3: Unifying of all the messages

Brand design experts in the UK should address the issues of absolute merging details like visual elements, messaging, mottos, narrative, colours and fonts to achieve the unity of all of them, so everything, even the smallest part, help a business express their missions and ambitions and brand personality be harmonious and coherent.

It becomes more complicated when a project is big, including globalisation that requires optimisation of visuals to make sure that they culturally fit and correctly convey brand messaging as well. Since a wide range of businesses may be part of one brand, it requires a significant amount of time to supply them with tools that help grow the brand and the business.

Challenge 4: Undervaluation of brand as an instrument

A significant amount of time a brand design expert needs to prove that their work isn’t only about designing a few pictures that will be stamped to the packaging and brochures, but creation of the assets that work for attracting people to a business, forming connections with them, boosting loyalty and awareness, identifying audience that will choose services and products of a firm based on its value proposition.

So, besides strategic insights, verbal and visual identities, they need to explain to clients how to take a full advantage of their assets, continue being appealing for customers and capture the market, doing confident and calculated steps.

Challenge 5: Realisation of client’s vision

Every adjustment a branding expert does comes from the client’s perception of their projects. To define all the outcomes they wish to get, the extent to which they expect to grow, inventive managers form the scope of work from intangible concepts as well as provide results that can’t be turned in someone’s hands to evaluate the quality.

It becomes especially challenging when a client doesn’t have any ideas of what mission their business has, how they hope to change the world and needs of what they try to satisfy, so sometimes it takes time to come to a mutual understanding of accomplishments as starting work without it might not lead to success.

Challenge 6: Interdisciplinary competences

Pulling together skills and tolls, we get an extensive list of demands to brand and design experts that with years only increases. As the tendencies change, they need to adjust quickly to new standards and study every day to be relevant in the industry. Except for mastering new software and trends, they also need to get themselves acquainted with the basics of different spheres, starting from hospitality and finishing medicine.

Despite implementing a plethora of technologies to their work, they still manage the lion’s share of tasks by themselves as there are no patterns of creativity since distinguishing requires finding new approaches and doing experiments instead of stepping on the familiar road.

Freelance vs. In-house experts for brand design in the UK

Some points of collaboration with freelancers and in-house specialists reflect each other, giving businesses the opportunity to choose amongst the answers that are both right. Yet, in some cases selecting a certain vendor you may fail if they don’t follow your requirements fully. Let’s see the key similarities they share and differentiates they have:

Looking for brand assistance?

Finding a designer for brand that will throw themselves into your project with dedication and commitment and will match your budget, experience and cultural expectation might be considered as a challenge and it’s indeed a question of a big importance.

If you feel uncertain while searching for a team to revamp your brand, have a look at our project calculator that will let you estimate the middle budget with inclusion of all branding services or a few, additional offerings in the form of SEO, Animations, Content Creation and so on.

Also, we recommend you to glance at the reviews we prepared about leading British branding agencies that supply businesses with revamping solutions for every call – luxury shaping, forming identities for startups, etc. The guides can be sorted by location, industry and type with inclusion of the best vendors, possessing expertise to make your business a game changer.