Visual elements to tell your story

The rule of thumb for developing particular visual elements for your business includes three parts:

• Be simple. Branding should be easy to (re)produce.
• Be universal. The brand visual language you choose should fit every possible surface you may want your brand on.
• Be consistent. One can choose to be bright and showy or calm and steady, but one can hardly be showy and steady at the same time.

Your visual language should be practical for both online and offline communication channels. Digital communication embraces interfaces (website and its mobile version), banners, promotion activities ranging pages, images, and illustrations for your social media pages and possible blog posts.

The real-life experience is a bit of a different story, but it’s not less important. The information is perceived differently than on web. The contact time differs a lot. If your branding will be displayed on vehicles, people will need to identify it from various distances, angles, by day and night, whether it’s raining or slushy outside.

Let’s begin from the online version of your company.

App icon

An app icon is the face of your business. On one hand, it should be appealing to the potential customer. On the other hand, it has to tell about the very essence of your services. There are some “musts” for a good app icon.

• Recognizable. Your icon has to be immediately seen among thousands other app icons. Therefore being simple is a plus: the less tiny elements, the easier it is to percept. Try to simplificate the logo you want on the app icon until your reach the very border of being minimalist. Have a look at the app icons you like. Why do they catch your eye?
• Unique. Now you’re analyzing other apps, answer this question: How is every other app alike looking? Create kind of a matrix of icons that already exist in the category you plan to get into. Try to design your icon in different colour, characters and shapes.
• Scalable. Your app icon has to look nice on Google Play market, App Store, on laptop screens, in the Settings panel of various devices. Accordingly, it has to be simple enough, and keep its qualities when being scaled. It also has to look good on all the different backgrounds — choose the colors carefully.
• Consistent. We’ve already been talking about how important it is that your design fits the essence of your business. Same here: the app icon has to illustrate (even if in a very short form) the functionality of your app, has to match its style, has to tell people something about who your company is.
• Talking for itself. Ever seen Facebook using words on their app icons? Nope. In any interface, people will see the name of the app anyway. So don’t duplicate it.

Vehicle branding

First of all, you will have to decide if vehicle branding is something you want. Vehicles come in all sizes and shapes. Consider all possible regulations of how they can be branded and all peculiarities of branding a vehicle of a certain type and color.

Vehicle branding helps raising the recognizability of your fleet among the competitors. It will also help to make the business presence in your area really visible for the customers. You may use your company colors or plant the logo everywhere. However, in case you’re going to expand your fleet regularly and rapidly, the expenses for branding it should be kept minimal.

Other formats

There’s a plenty of other opportunities to use your brand language. Consider suits of your drivers for instance. Most clients trust taxi companies more when the drivers are dressed neatly — and recognizable.

You will definitely need to adapt your brand language to online: think of the banners, Facebook pictures, photos and texts you place on social media and your website. Same with offline communication: souvenirs you give your customers, billboards, posters, using branded production when participating in local events, branding referral coupons…

Uber: https://www.instagram.com/p/CI5Zg6sBpaG/  https://www.instagram.com/p/ByZji4tAwsf/ 

Lyft: https://www.instagram.com/p/BWqsUkpHtEN/ https://www.instagram.com/p/B6vuMl6ngRO/

An integrate style will help you differ from other peer-to-peer companies on all these channels.

No matter what formats you choose for expressing your brand identity, stay consistent, recognizable and clear. People will love your business 💛