Touchstone Brand Designs: Impactful Inspiration to Design a Brand

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Given the power of design, not using it to design a brand can turn out to be an unaffordable mistake.

Today designers are making the type (words) talk in ways like never seen before; the same goes for graphics. You could see the letters ‘a,m,a,z,o,n’ typed somewhere and instantly relate it to a smile with an arrow that completes the Amazon logo. 

This is because visual identity elements (such as typography, images, symbols, graphics, lines, etc) can be leveraged to stir pre-decided emotions in your target demographic. Thus, increasing brand awareness, brand loyalty, profits, and inevitable growth. 

Be that as it may, all these advantages of visual identity elements can be leveraged at their best only by aligning them to your brand and designing a rock-solid brand design. To get you started with designing your brand, we have handpicked the best brand designs that serve as standards for brands across industries. 

1. Dropbox

With the unorganized clutter around us – from aggressive advertising to some website pop-ups – the growth of minimalist design has proven to be going extraordinarily well. Dropbox is a perfect example to convey that even with limiting visual identity elements, you can design a brand that never goes out of style. 

However, Dropbox also did not shy away from making changes to its brand design when they were needed the most. Its 2017 rebranding included an image-heavy and colorful brand design. Dropbox’s rebranding conveyed a well-decided message to its customers: endless possibilities to evolve over time using the Dropbox toolkit. 

Read more about the Dropbox logo design: Exceptional Evolution of The Iconic Dropbox Logo

You must have noticed that these changes are also device-friendly. For convenience purposes, Dropbox uses different shades of blue for its desktop and mobile-centric branding. This also helps the brand stand apart from the rest of the applications we have on our devices. 

2. Glossier

Known for simplifying beauty products shopping, Glossier shows its inclination toward simplicity through its clean and appealing brand design. One of its proud aspects is its people-centric photography. It gives a welcoming and credible tone of voice to the brand, which represents the quality of the shopping experience they offer.

Many are surprised by the fact that this beauty powerhouse was first launched only as a blog. With that into consideration, Glossier has its website as well as brand design all in check. It is a perfect example that shows every brand should put equal attention to website design as they do to social media designs. 

Glossier holds pride in its sustainable business practices and starts with minimal packaging material and design. The cherry on the cake is its consistency across platforms; Glossier speaks in the same tone over all the communication channels through its design. 

3. Casper

Casper has been enjoying the fruition of its hard work which shows in its sleep products quality (beds, mattresses, and many more) that positively disrupted the industry. 

Along with hard work, Casper leveraged the common ‘work smart’ advice to its advantage with an excellent and well-known brand design. Known mostly for its content and content marketing, Casper’s brand design is all about conveying the message with the least amount of words that takes the least amount of users’ time. 

As unusual as it may sound for a retail company, Casper has its quarterly print magazine under the name Wolly. This certainly strengthens the brand’s content marketing and brand awareness. 

This brand focuses on providing you quality sleep through its products. Thus, its brand design elements include a soothing blue and beige color palette, a light-hearted tone, and overlapping shapes. 

4. Coca-Cola

One of the most consumed beverage brands, Coca-Cola does not only shine in terms of its beverages but also in its design. 

With its number of marketing campaigns such as The Polar Bowl and Share a Coke, Coca-Cola has shown the world that the role of brand design is not merely for corporation purposes, but can also be used to make a change in the world. 

The brand awareness of Coca-Cola and the increase in loyalty of its customers are beyond many of its competitors. This is highly based on the brand design of this brand. For perspective, 94% of people around the world can recognize Coca-Cola’s red and white logo design. 

This success of Coca-Cola is no coincidence; the brand directed its brand design (from website to Coca-Cola product packaging design) towards encouraging people to engage with the brand, and we all did. 

5. Little Wolf

This American coffee roastery is widely known for its strong visual identity. The spotlight feature of Little Wolf’s visual brand identity is its touch of personality embedded into brand design. 

Aligned with its animal-centric brand name, you will see that Little Wolf’s website is quite engaging and playful via illustrations of wolves on a very clean yet energetic (blue and white) color palette. The brand design strongly attaches itself to every platform in a consistent yet unique way. You can find its brand design’s strengths everywhere, from its merch (cups, flasks, t-shirts, caps, etc.) to its visual assets (such as business cards, website, subscription bags, etc.). 

Designed by a Tennessee-based graphic design studio, the brand design is described as ‘one part science and two-part storybooks’ by the studio members. This certainly calls attention to the importance of getting your brand designed by professionals who have solid credibility. 

6. DesignBro

As an award-winning design crowdsourcing platform, we hold pride in all our designs. Nonetheless, our first step begins with DesignBro’s founder, Christiaan Huynen who comes from a long lineage of graphic designers in his family.

To keep quality in check, we only select the top 5% of graphic designers worldwide. Therefore, it is no surprise for us that our brand design is immersive and engaging. 

With a very wide range of designers, their portfolios, their rankings, and reviews, DesignBro realized the need to have a user-friendly font. We pair it with a smooth UI, easy-to-navigate website design, and quick-to-understand icons and graphics. 

Honorable Mentions

There are numerous brands that are working on their brand design in every possible way. Based on its effectiveness, we handpicked the 6 above-mentioned brands which have excellent brand designs. 

However, this list of brands with well-crafted brand designs would be incomplete without the following mentions. 

Though the following mentioned brands are very well-known, we would like to quickly highlight the brand design strategies of the same and hope you analyze what could work for you in the best possible way, and allow us to embed that into your design requirements. 

Uber

Uber calls its brand design elements ‘system’ and not ‘assets,’ as they are usually known, which says a lot about how focused Uber is on its brand design. Its globally consistent design has been paying off as we recognize its logo and bold color palette. 

Airbnb

Representing its services, Airbnb’s brand design includes imagery of an active lifestyle. As the brand is mostly about people and their living experiences, Airbnb has vastly worked on its creatively meaningful logo evolution and people-centric design which is not only relatable but also increases the brand’s credibility. 

Mailchimp

Using a funny winking monkey as its logo is a bold move when an email marketing company does it. Nonetheless, now that monkey is a mascot known by professionals across the globe. Mailchimp is the best example that teaches other brands not to shy away from going out of the box when it comes to their brand design. 

Headspace

Color psychology is an aspect that brands have started focusing on now. It is not surprising that a meditation application leverages its understanding of color psychology and uses a very calming color palette across its designs. 

Conclusion

These brands have set themselves apart from the crowd by the means of brand design that represents who they are and encourage their users to put trust in them. By doing so, these brands have now set brand design standards for every brand that follows. 

If these brand designs inspire you to improve your brand design and strengthen your brand’s visual identity, then we hope you proceed with the best design elements. 

Lastly, we would like to highlight the importance of being authentic while designing your brand, taking inspiration from other brands does not necessarily have to overshadow your brand.