Visual identity: why it comes after your first customers

A visual identity does one job: it makes what customers already think of you easier to recognise and remember. It does not create that opinion. The opinion comes from the product, the service and the people, and the identity carries it.

Apple is the usual example, and it makes the point well. The company's first logo, drawn in 1976 by co-founder Ronald Wayne, was a drawing of Isaac Newton sitting under a tree. It was replaced a year later by Rob Janoff's rainbow apple, as Creative Bloq's history of the Apple logo sets out. Neither logo made people think of quality and design. The company did that, and the logo came to mean it.

A founder once told Aziz, our chief executive, that his brand was finished: logo, colours, the lot, from an overseas studio, for ten thousand dollars. Aziz asked how many customers he had. None. They had not launched. Paying for the identity had made the company feel real, but there was nothing yet for it to reflect.

When designers talk about a complete visual identity, they usually mean these parts.

• The logo, in a full version, a short version and a mark that works at the size of an app icon.
• Colours, with exact values for screen and print, and rules for which colour leads.
• Typefaces, for Arabic and English, chosen to sit well together.
• Photography and illustration: what your pictures look like, and what they never look like.
• Templates for the things you make every week: social posts, proposals, presentations, email signatures.
• A short guide that a new designer or a printer can follow without calling you.

The last two matter most and are the ones most often missing. An identity that only exists as a logo file gets applied differently by every person who touches it, and within a year it no longer looks like one brand.

A useful rule: prove the business first, then pay for the picture of it.

Once you have customers, a good identity is worth what it costs. It makes everything you have earned easier to spot, from a shopfront to a proposal sitting in a buyer's inbox next to three others.

• Will you start from my customers or from a mood board? The answer tells you whether the work will reflect your business or someone's taste.
• Does the Arabic get the same care as the English? In the Gulf, an Arabic logo that looks like an afterthought is noticed at once.
• What do I receive? Editable files, the guide and the templates, not only a set of images.
• Who owns it? The identity, the source files and the rights should all be yours on final payment.

Design is one part of marketing, and it works best inside the rest of it. In our design and video work, identity is built after the strategy, so the look follows what the business is trying to win. If you want to see where your own marketing is leaking first, the two-minute diagnostic names the pattern.

For the wider picture of what has to be decided before any design starts, read what a digital strategy should include.