Investing in brand design is something very often overlooked by young startups who are just starting their journey in the industry. Building a strong, unified brand, however, provides a number of advantages on all stages of your company’s life — from improved organic presence in media to increased interest of customers in your other products and services, after they buy or use one of them.
What’s also important, is that great brand design impacts positively multiple groups related to your business.
- CUSTOMERS
Consistency in the presentation of a brand across all channels can increase the revenue of business by up to 23%.
60% of millennials expect the brand to be consistent across all channels.
- INVESTORS
Brand strength importance is growing among limited partners (86%), CEOs of target companies (84%), investment bankers (65%), and lenders (65%).
- MARKETERS
75% of marketers believe that brand values and positioning always have to be considered when making major commercial or organizational decisions.
67% of marketers think that their company's senior leadership doesn't fully appreciate the role of a good brand.
But how to get your brand aligned on all levels, both internal and external?
Hiring branding designers is the answer.
Branding designers job description — what do they actually do?
The main job of branding designers is to deliver you a unified and recognizable brand look that fits your target audience. To accomplish this, they work in multiple fields and cooperate with various other teams and experts at your company and beyond it.
The main responsibilities of branding designers include:
- Designing branding proposals according to a brief.
- Maintaining communication with the client during the branding creation process — in order to make sure the final results fit the client’s requirements.
- Designing various elements of the brand, from logo and email signature to social media templates and overall website design.
- Making sure that the brand is unified on all marketing channels the brand uses.
- Aligning the company’s internal and external brand design.
Additional note: while on smaller projects branding designers often work alone, in bigger companies they usually need to be helped by other designers or copywriters. In such situations, branding designers take the role of the brand’s design manager and assign specific jobs to others while supervising the process to make sure the brand is aligned across all channels.
The crucial skills that make the best branding experts great
What makes a branding designer stand out from the crowd? We collected the most important skills of the best branding experts below.
- Customer research skills
To build a brand that targets the right audience. Customer research can include data analysis, automatic A/B tests, manual tests, heat maps reviews, and more.
- Understanding of channel differences
To get the right content on the right platform.
- Experience with web and mobile design
Both websites and mobile apps are what engages customers nowadays. Your branding designers will surely end up working on them so you need someone who already knows the best practices.
- Leadership skills
To manage well other people involved in the branding process and be confident when assigning tasks.
Assessing the portfolio of your brand designer
A portfolio is the key to understanding how your candidate works and whether they fit your needs. What should you remember about when the time of portfolio review comes?
- Ask for all the portfolios your branding designer candidate has — from slide decks and PDFs to own websites or Behance profiles. The more you have, the more complete your assessment will be.
- Look for your candidate’s work by yourself. Check LinkedIn, Facebook, or just Google their names in order to find examples of their work they haven’t shared in their portfolios.
- Look for proof of your candidate’s ability to work on multiple channels. If their portfolio only covers website designs, for example, they might be a good web designer, but not necessarily a comprehensive branding expert.
- Look for proof that your candidate has already worked commercially.
- Even if you are not a design expert yourself, don’t hesitate to have a subjective opinion. If you don’t like the projects of a specific candidate, you probably won’t get along with them when you start working together.
- Ask for an additional review at least one professional designer — they will give you a different perspective on your candidate’s projects.
Look for perfect branding designers match
Best branding experts for your company might not necessarily be the ones who have the best designs in their portfolio, but those who truly match your business.
Your candidate's portfolio allows you also to assess this kind of match in an important area — the industry fit. Hiring a branding designer with previous experience in working with companies within your niche means acquiring a talent that already understands at least part of your target audience. This results in both the research and creative processes being accomplished faster.
You should also take into account the company culture fit. Consider the values that drive your business, such as the project management style, how employees can give feedback to each other, or whether your work environment resembles more a startup or an enterprise. Then look for the best branding experts who also share these values. Such fit will result in establishing a connection between your new branding designer and other people in the office, and therefore, power innovation.
Asking the right questions
A portfolio is also a key tool when finally running an interview with a branding designer that caught your eye. Unlike, for example, developers or data scientists, branding designers cannot be simply tested from a technical point of view - you can’t ask them to write an algorithm or build a small app for you. Instead, just like branding experts are creative, you also have to creatively approach interviewing them.
What questions can you ask your candidate with their portfolio in hand?
- Which channel do you enjoy creating content for the most? Why this one?
- How do you approach researching the target audience of the brand you are working on?
- How would you design the interface of an elevator in a building with a thousand floors?
- If you could choose only one tool to work with while redesigning a brand, what tool would you choose and why?
- Tell us about a branding project you worked on that went wrong. Why did it go wrong out and what did you learn from it?
- Which of the projects you worked on would you call your favorite? Why?
- What is your favorite brand from a design standpoint? Why this one?
- How would you approach convincing a decision-maker to change something in the initial brand design brief given to you? Have you ever had this kind of situation?
- What is a brand that you like but you think their brand design could be improved? How would you improve it?
Finally, think of any questions that came to your mind when you looked at your candidate’s portfolio and ask them. Get as deep as possible to understand their work ethic.
Leveraging your great brand design
Investing in great branding designers is one of the first steps to making your offering more recognizable by your target audience. But in order to make sure your customers think well of your brand after they try your products and services, you need to make sure these products and services are of the highest quality.
Whatever type of IT talents you need to accomplish this, Ideamotive can help. We run a leading network of top tech professionals looking for new career opportunities. Whether you are looking for expert web developers, data scientists, IT project managers, or agile coaches, we can connect you with the right people, matched with you according to your business profile, product specification, and any other requirements you might have.
Get in touch with us today and build a strong brand with quality products.
