Your company’s CVI – corporate visual identity – is an important building block for your company’s branding both outwardly and inwardly in your organization. But as such a corporate visual identity is a broad concept that is used and misused and often creates as much understanding as it creates confusion. And that’s because most often visual identity guidelines are inadequate.
A corporate visual identity is not enough
A CVI is not enough. For how much or how little does a CVI contain? And does your staff comply with all the guidelines contained in it?
Guidelines and designs are often devised by an external design agency and therefore does not always match the actual everyday life of your employees. And often the CVI is basically a collection of (often printed) PDFs that only the graphic team in the company know exists and understands.
CVI and branding
Giant companies like Coca Cola have known it for decades. They cultivate their image and branding all the way down to what it sounds like and smells like when you pop open one of their fizzy drinks.
Coffee brand Nescafe has been working for years on not only the smell, but the whole feeling and sensation of taking the lid of a new can of instant coffee.
And that applies not only to producers in the food industry. Just think of Abercrombie and Fitch. The brand uses half-naked photo models and tons of perfume in their stores, so you never have to question which store you’re in.
CVI – part of a greater design cycle
Your CVI contains basic guidelines for what your company’s visual identity looks like in all it’s simplicity. A CVI is in essence your logo, fonts and colors. Therefor you have to see your company’s CVI in a much larger perspective. Because a CVI is a must – but it can’t stand on it’s own anymore.
Your brand story and design cycle
When we create your visual content at Levende Streg we always take your entire design system into consideration. This way your visual content will integrate seamlessly with your overall corporate branding, brand story, tone of voice and design style.
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Test your design
Today it’s easier than ever to test your design and visual communication. That means that it’s pretty simple to keep tweaking your design or your visual style until your customers love it. For instance Facebook has a great A / B test toolkit that can give you great insights into what resonates with your target audience.
That way, your design system becomes a living organism that you can develop and tweak to perfection.
Design cycle must be online
It is recommended that your entire design system is to be found digitally and online in one form or another – and supported by videos and image material and not just dusty PDFs with a lot of descriptions of how your logo will be used when it’s letterhead in a document.
3 easy steps to get started
- Use Facebook’s splittest tool to test your content, design, images, graphics or videos. This way you get a hands on experience as to what content your target audience likes the most and what content gets the highest level of interaction.
- When the results from your split test are ready – reuse the best result and create new content to split test against it.
- This way you can easily tweak your visual communication and make it better and better – to make the best impact.