A logo is not a brand: building an identity system that holds everywhere

一A logo and a brand: the difference

A logo is a sign. A brand is the impression left by all your points of contact together: the shopfront, the website, the Google listing, the card handed over at the end of an appointment, the invoice that follows. If each of these was made separately, by different people at different times, the client does not recognise a house: they come across a series of unconnected objects. The logo may be excellent, but it is not enough to hold the rest together.

This is common, and there is nothing shameful about it. A business grows, adds a medium when the need arises, and hands each one to whoever is quickest. The website uses the logo but picks other colours; the Instagram profile invents a third; the invoices come out of software in a default typeface. Each of these choices was reasonable on its own: it is their sum that blurs the picture, which is why the answer is not a new logo, but a system.

A visual identity system is a set of decisions made once, written down, and applied everywhere. It does not only say what the brand looks like, it says how it behaves: on a light background and on a dark one, large on a shop sign and tiny in a browser tab. It is what allows someone other than its author to produce a post or a page without betraying the whole. An identity that only holds together in the hands of the person who drew it is not yet a system.

二What an identity system contains

The content varies with the size of the business, but the framework stays the same. It runs from the most visible element, the logo, to the most discreet, the tone of the sentences. Each element answers a question that comes up sooner or later when producing a medium. It is better to have answered it once, in advance, than several times at random.

• The logo and its variants: a main version, a horizontal version for banners, a compact version, and a monogram or symbol for small sizes and the website icon.
• The rules of use: the clear space, meaning the empty area to leave around the logo, and the minimum size below which it is no longer used.
• The palette, with the role of each colour: which one serves as background, which one carries the text, which one highlights a call to action or a detail.
• The typography: most often one typeface for headings and one for body text, with licences that cover both print and the web.
• Photography and iconography: the light, the framing, the subjects, the style of the pictograms, what is shown and what is avoided.
• The tone of voice: how the brand writes, how formally it addresses people, which words it uses and which it forbids itself.
• Templates and the guide: ready-to-use models (posts, presentations, quotes) and a guide that records these rules, with examples.

The guide does not need to be thick: for a shop or a practice, a few well-illustrated pages are often enough, provided they answer real questions (which file for the printer, which colour for a button, which logo on a photo). A guide that is too long goes unread; a missing guide leaves everyone to reinvent. The aim: that a supplier, a colleague or you yourself can produce a correct piece without asking.

三Colour and lettering, put to the test

A palette is chosen on screen, but it lives elsewhere: on paper, on a shop window, on a phone in full sunlight. Three constraints put it to the test, and it is better to know them before growing attached to a shade. None of them rules out a bold colour; all of them require you to plan how it will behave.

Contrast, to be read

The web accessibility guidelines (WCAG) require a contrast of at least 4.5:1 between body text and its background, and 3:1 for large text. This is not a specialist's concern: it is what lets a tired reader, or simply someone on a poorly adjusted screen, read your sentences. A palette must therefore specify which colour carries the text, and on which background. A bright gold on a white background often stays below the threshold for body text: it suits a rule or an ornament, rarely a paragraph.

Screen and print

A screen builds its colours in RGB, with light; a printer builds them in CMYK, with ink. The conversion from one to the other is never exact, and it is bright shades and golds that shift the most. Hence the value of defining each colour in both systems, and of asking for a proof before a large print run. If the gold really has to shine, hot foil stamping is a different technique, applied by the printer with a metallic foil: more expensive, it gives what no ink can.

Typefaces and their licences

A typeface is a piece of software, and its licence says where you are allowed to use it. A licence for print does not always cover use on a website, and the reverse is also true. Before adopting a pair of typefaces, check that they can be used on all your media: the website, documents, posts, the shop sign.

四How a system is built

We build an identity in an order that owes nothing to chance: understand, draw, then test. Drawing too early produces an attractive logo that knows nothing about the business. Testing too late produces a system that breaks at its first real use. Here are the steps, as we follow them for every house.

1. 一
   Understand

   What the business does, for whom, what sets it apart, what its clients say about it. We also take stock of every existing medium, from the rubber stamp to the email signature.

2. 二
   Check availability

   Before growing attached to a name or a sign, check that it is not already taken: in France, in the INPI trade mark database, and for the domain name too. Registering the trade mark then protects it.

3. 三
   Draw the family

   The main sign, its compact version and its monogram are drawn together, so that they read as one family.

4. 四
   Set colours and typefaces

   Each colour is given a role, each typeface a use, and the contrasts are checked at this stage already.

5. 五
   Test on real media

   The system is applied to a shop sign, a business card, a website page, a social media profile and a browser tab, at their real size. Whatever does not hold is reworked now.

6. 六
   Record and deliver

   The guide is written, the templates prepared, the files exported in every useful format and filed so they can be found again.

Testing on real media is the step most willingly skipped, and the one that costs the most when it is. A logo that looks superb large on a desktop screen can become a smudge in a browser tab, or be cropped by the circle of an avatar. A few mock-ups at the right size are enough to see it. This work, applied to real houses, can be seen in our gallery.

五The files to deliver, and why

An identity system is also delivered as files, and that is where the seriousness of the work shows. Receiving a single JPEG of the logo means being condemned to see it blurred on the sign and framed by a white rectangle on coloured backgrounds. Here is what you should have in hand, and know where to find.

• Vector files (SVG, PDF): they scale up without loss, from the business card to the shop sign, and they are what printers and sign makers ask for.
• PNG files with a transparent background, to place the logo on a photo or a colour without a box around it.
• A version for light backgrounds and one for dark backgrounds: a black logo vanishes on a night photo, a white logo on an invoice.
• The website icon (favicon): Google recommends a square image whose side is a multiple of 48 pixels; it is the icon shown next to your site in search results.
• Avatars for social networks, designed to be cropped into a circle, as profile pictures often are.
• The colours in RGB and CMYK, with their codes, and the typefaces or the link to their licences.

六Keeping the system alive day to day

An identity does not wear out with age, it wears out through exceptions. A flyer made in a hurry, a colour "a little brighter just this once", a typeface found on a colleague's computer: each departure seems harmless, and the whole quietly comes apart. The remedy is simple, but it takes consistency: ready-to-use templates, an accessible guide, and one person who keeps watch.

Small formats are the most revealing. Our seal, 空 (emptiness, the air), is the monogram of the house: it serves as the website icon, as a stamp on our documents and as an avatar, and it holds up on its own at 16 pixels, the size of a browser tab. This is the test we apply to every brand: if the most compact sign is still recognisable at that size, the rest of the system rests on solid ground. If it turns into a smudge, it has to be redrawn before going any further.

A system also serves where nobody lingers. For the cookie window on our website, which everyone closes as fast as they can, we kept the same palette of lacquer and gold, a tray and a bowl repaired with gold (consent itself is the subject of a separate article). The same rules apply to the photo on your Google listing, your email signature or your quote templates. And a consistent Instagram grid is nothing other than the patient application of a system.

七Evolve rather than start over

There comes a time when the identity looks dated: the colours have aged, the logo drawn for print copes badly with screens, the media have multiplied without rules. The temptation is to wipe everything and start from scratch. It is rarely the right choice for an established business, because its clients have learnt to recognise it: a colour, a shape, a name written in a certain way. Starting over means asking them to recognise you a second time.

Kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken ceramics with gold, shows another way: the repair is not hidden, it becomes part of the object's history. It is the spirit of the bowl in our cookie window, and a good image for evolving an identity. You keep what clients recognise, redraw what has aged, and add what was missing.

• Keep what is recognised: the dominant colour, the overall shape of the sign, the way the name is written.
• Redraw what has aged: strokes too fine for screens, a typeface that has become commonplace, shadow or embossed effects from another era.
• Add what was missing: a monogram for small sizes, a version for dark backgrounds, templates.
• Record it all in a guide, so that the evolution does not come undone with the first flyer.

A complete overhaul is sometimes necessary: a change of name, a merger, a positioning that changes entirely. In other cases, a well-run evolution is rolled out faster and asks nobody to learn who you are all over again. That is how we approach our identity discipline: as a system that must hold everywhere, for a long time, and in hands other than ours.

A brand is recognised by what stays the same from one medium to the next.