Corporate design

What is corporate design?
The visual appearance of a corporate brand, consisting of name, logo, imagery, colors, fonts, illustrations, pictograms, layout principles, animation principles and secondary design elements. Corporate design also includes spatial experiences, sound and moving image style. In combination, all elements ensure a distinctive appearance and thus recognition. 

What is the purpose of corporate design?
Corporate design conveys a coherent and intuitive experience and transports the positioning of the corporate brand. But a good corporate design can do even more: thanks to its system capability and the resulting standardization, it reduces costs. At the same time, it increases value by sparking interest, making the brand desirable and thus enabling a price premium.

What is the basis for developing a successful corporate design?
The basis for developing a successful corporate design is the positioning of the brand, derived from the business strategy. Each brand is positioned differently, depending on the strategy. A transformation strategy requires a different positioning than a growth or cost-reduction strategy.

What makes a modern corporate design?
A contemporary corporate design is created “digital first”. It is modular and agile and adapts flexibly to all content and formats. In a modern corporate design, it is no fixed sizes, dimensions and specifications that count, but maximum recognizability in the smallest of spaces: how well can the brand be recognized – even without a logo? Another key factor is radically simple implementation that allows even trained laypersons to create “on-brand” assets.

What is the difference between corporate design and corporate identity?
In practice, the two terms are often used synonymously. However, corporate identity includes not only visual elements but also strategic elements such as positioning (brand idea or brand promise, brand story, brand personality), tone of voice and core messages.

What are some of the most common mistakes made when developing a corporate design?

• Generic imagery. Good corporate designs have a unique visual style and imagery content that is exclusive to the brand, to ensure recognizability.
• Lack of system capability – especially when the design idea is derived from a single advertising campaign. In this case, relevant design elements and scaling capacities, such as imagery, website, event design or signage, are often missing or not thought through integrally.
• Inconsistency between corporate design and marketing communication: the corporate design must form the visual basis of marketing communication to ensure recognition and strengthen the brand.
• Focus on specifications. The crucial factor is not the calculated distance between the logo and the edge of the format, but the overall effect and the interplay of the elements.