Branding & web design: how they work together

A good branding process explores your core values, offering, target audience, and user needs to determine your use of imagery, fonts, colours, and tone of voice. However, your branding and website should complement each other, and while your brand project will likely come first, the two can also run in parallel to create perfect harmony.

Below we’ve explored six ways branding and web design need to work together to create positive user experiences.

#1 Brand colours & accessibility

When choosing your brand’s colours, it can be easy to think with tunnel vision based on your favourite pairing, the colour wheel of meaning, or what pops on paper. However, the colours you choose and their application across all mediums should be considered when preparing your brand guidelines, especially when it comes to accessibility.

This means you need to think about how your colours will work together in contrast and legibility. Accessibility is essential in web design and essentially ensures that those with visual impairments can still distinguish text from the background and navigate your website.

You should consider colour contrasts and pairings from a non-visual impairment standpoint too. Bright colours on top of each other may be eye-catching, but they can also be off-putting.

Learn more about the importance of brand.

#2 Whitespace

How you use ‘whitespace’, or negative space, on your website to break up areas of text and sections will be fed from your brand guidelines and vice versa. It’s crucial to ensure you outline how much padding or areas of empty space are acceptable and how much is too far. However, this will differ based on the website experience you want to achieve and even down to how premium versus budget you want your brand to appear.

#3 Imagery

When designing your website, you’ll want to consider how your imagery reflects your brand values, content and tone of voice. Whether you decide to use in-house photos, professional photography or stock images, the visuals you choose must be compatible with the content on the page.

You might also want to consider how you use your brand’s colours to accentuate images to create more of a visual impact and ensure that the focal point is centred to reduce the risk of cropping on different devices.

#4 Logo

When creating your logo and outlining its use in your brand guidelines, consider how it might look in-situ on your website. Often, we’re used to reviewing logos in isolation, but they’re rarely used in this way; instead, consider how it will look when resized and used alongside imagery and secondary colours.

Your logo’s placement on your website can also be strategic, it’s common to see the logo in the left-hand corner of a site, but consideration for your brand’s identity is key: do you want to conform to norms or break them?

#5 Audience

Your branding will consider your audience’s wants, needs and expectations based on stakeholder feedback and research. This information should feed directly into your website designs as part of a larger research piece.

Discover how to determine your target audience.

#6 Typography/Fonts

Not all fonts are available in web format. Therefore, you may want to consider whether your brand’s typography needs to be the same across all channels or if you will use a separate font for your website. Web fonts are available from places such as Typekit and Fonts.com.

Key takeaways

Branding is a crucial part of the web design process, but your visual designs should inform your branding. As a result, the two must work together to create a central brand guidelines document that addresses both your online and offline image retrospectively to ensure consistency across all channel and platforms.

If you’d like to discuss your impending branding or website project, please feel free to get in touch with our team. If you’d like to stay in the loop with the latest insights, please register for our newsletter.