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Corporate branding is a method that corporations use to produce value through brand recognition.
One major aspect of corporate branding is logo design. We're all familiar with logos, as we see them all around us.
A logo is typically a graphical element that may or may not incorporate text.
The eBay logo, for example, is all text.
The Ubuntu logo, however, is just a graphic.
Finally, this Aeon logo has both a graphic and text.
Another function of corporate branding is corporate identity. This is the personality of a corporation and how it establishes culture and business practices among its employees.
One way that a corporation helps establish that identity is to use a corporate identity manual, or CIM for short. The CIM is a set of guidelines for precise reproduction of a corporation's logo, including fonts or any visual design elements relating to the brand.
Again, the CIM sets the visual identity that employees use as a guideline to communicate the corporation's brand. This would be the first thing a designer would look at before approaching a design with the corporation. These days, there is more than just a logo and some text involved when you're producing something to represent a company.
Corporate identity plays a huge role in how we perceive a company, a brand, and a product. Designers need to know a company's standards to effectively build a visual design language to communicate a company's intentions, culture, and place in consumers' lives.
All of these aspects are part of the corporate identity and are identified in the CIM. For instance, letterhead suite is an organized display of a letterhead on a correspondent's material.
Likewise, identity can be achieved through advertising or storytelling. This can help build an iconic symbol as a result of conditioning a brand over a long period of time. In other words, when people recognize a brand quickly and easily, the brand has achieved brand recognition.
Source: This work is adapted from Sophia author Mario Hernandez.
