SILBERBAUER SAYS:

A Brand Is Not A Logo...  

Klaus Silberbauer / Tuesday, April 24, 2007

- and a brand is not a style guide.

To most professionals these are obvious statements. But definitely not for a lot of website owners who still think that online branding is all about Flash and nice graphics, and forget that branding is in every aspect of the site: The choice of features, the tone of voice, the response time, the ease of navigation (or lack thereof), the feeling of real value. And, of course, the looks.

I've even heard the top 120 pixels of a web page declared as "the branding area". BS! Online branding is about using the web medium the right way - it's not just about putting the right logo and the right colors on some out-of-the-box web solution.

You can't limit your branding effort to a isolated part of the page - it's an ongoing process. Your website oozes branding from every pixel, so you better in control of what kind of branding it's oozing...

Your brand strategy must govern your web strategy and affect all important decisions in the design process - but on all levels, not just on the visual one: A website which doesn't provide the user with any real value but only wastes the user's time (or downright annoys the user by being stupidly designed or coded) is bad branding - no matter how beautiful and by-the-styleguide it is.

Now grab 10 minutes of nice, visual branding fundamentals and remember that they all apply to the web too.





Source: http://www.slideshare.net/coolstuff/the-brand-gap