Visual Identity
BRINGING YOUR BRAND TO LIFE
Humans have used images to make sense of their world since they first stood upright. From Lascaux to Leonardo, visual art connects us to our ancestors across thousands of years, and there's still no more immediate way to communicate than the image. Catchword will bring your brand to life through rich visuals that map beautifully to your strategy and resonate with your audiences. By integrating design considerations into every step of our branding process, we create fully realized brands that make an impact.
Logos & Wordmarks
We’ll start with a discussion of the finer points of logos, wordmarks, badges, and symbols, before evaluating your competitors’ visual landscape. We’ll then develop a range of thematic concepts to illustrate different iconography, shapes and forms, visual rhythm and flow, and use of negative space. Finally, we’ll pick up our (digital) paintbrushes and deep dive into a color exploratory that yields the perfect chromatic expression of your brand.
Style Guides
Once we’ve aligned on your new logo or wordmark, we’ll develop a style guide for your new brand identity. Style guides serve as the foundational blueprint for a brand’s visual and verbal expression, and typically include specifications for logo usage, color palettes, typography styles, and the tone of voice for written content, ensuring that your brand is presented coherently and professionally in every context.
Identity Systems
The visual identity system is an easy-to-understand and easy-to-apply guide to using your logo or wordmark consistently across business contexts. Beyond color palettes and typography, the guide may include specifications for secondary graphics, often used as background or textural elements on websites, sales materials, presentation templates, and other applications.
Templates
To help ready you for brand rollout and everything that comes after, Catchword can create icon libraries, templates for presentations and reports, marketing collateral, signage, and just about any other brand touchpoints you require.
Selected Work
Tivly
Denim
Lumerate
When you love what you do, it shows in the work.And people notice.
MUSE Creative Awards | 2019–2022
Corporate Identity
X6
Clutch | 2019–2021
#1 Branding Agency Worldwide
X3
Transform Awards | 2018–2022
Naming Strategy
X5
Influencer Marketing Hub | 2020–2022
Top Branding Agency
X3
FAQ
Creating visuals that communicate your brand beautifully while mapping to strategy isn’t easy, and isn’t something even seasoned marketers do every day. Our two decades working and thinking about brand and visual expression have yielded some wisdom, which we share below and in our Insights & Resources. If you don’t find what you’re looking for, reach out. We’re happy to chat.
Visual identity is typically part of a complete branding package including brand strategy and naming, though we are happy to offer it as a standalone service. Although the visual identity step is last in the full branding timeline, design considerations are part of our thinking from the start and rely on the research, positioning, and creative development from those steps.
For a standalone project, the process includes:
- Discovery (brand immersion through interviews and review of materials)
- Visual Stylescape (defining the visual world the logo and other visual elements will inhabit)
- Logo/Wordmark (creative development of multiple concepts and narrowing to the one)
- Corporate Identity System and Templates (optional)
- Brand Style Guidelines (creating detailed guidelines for how the visual identity lives in the real world)
Although projects can vary in scope, we generally allot 4 weeks for the visual identity phase of a full branding project. More time is needed for standalone projects to allow for the initial brand immersion and strategy work
Yes! Though it’s most common for our design work to be part of a full branding package, clients who come to us with an existing name that they want to bring to life visually can expect the same thoughtful, creative, client-centered experience.
Visual identity fees depend on the scope and complexity of the project as well as the level of client management and other considerations such as an accelerated timeline. Contact us so we can scope your project and provide you with an accurate estimate.
At this time, Catchword focuses on visual identity services only. That is, we can provide you with just about any branding-related design you need that relies on traditional graphic design expertise alone. Services that require other skillsets, such as website design and development, are outside of our wheelhouse, but we’re happy to recommend creative partners you can talk to.
First, we aren’t lawyers! That said, we can offer some thoughts. When most people talk about trademarking something, they mean registering it with the relevant government body/bodies in order to protect it from being used by a competitor. In the US, that body is the USPTO, and you can register a word, phrase, symbol, or image with them to communicate your brand. We recommend every brand register its mark formally rather than rely on common law trademark (the little ™), particularly in highly competitive spaces
