The four ‘Superpowers’ of brand identity

Logos have been described as ‘the gateway to the brand’, because of all the associations they evoke in the minds of consumers. For this reason the way they are crafted is extremely important. In this post we explore the ‘superpowers’ inherent in effective logo design, and the contribution they make to building successful brands.

I don’t think I’m unique in saying that, from my early childhood through my years as a design student and even into my early professional life as a designer, I never truly valued my design talent. Having been educated in an academically oriented school, I had no confidence in art or design as something worth studying at a tertiary level, or pursuing as a career. Even though art and design were the only things I wanted to do. Nor did I fully understand the contribution my obvious design skills could bring to human life, until much later. And that’s because I’m the product of an education system and a culture that, for various reasons, prioritised subjects like science, maths, languages, economics, history and even literature and music, over art. And I think this is true not just of my background in the United Kingdom, but across many cultures worldwide. 

The late great educator Ken Robinson, in his excellent TED Talk ‘Do schools kill creativity?’ said that “Every education system on earth has the same hierarchy of subjects. Every one. It doesn’t matter where you go … At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and at the bottom are the arts.” He then proceeds to describe how creatively oriented students like me get steered away from subjects we were good at like art, because “You‘ll never make a living out of that”, as our well-meaning but misguided parents and teachers said.

Ken Robinson goes on to say “Truthfully, what happens is, as children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads. And slightly to one side … the consequence is that many highly-talented creative people think they’re not, because the thing they were good at at school wasn’t valued, or was stigmatised.”

This TED talk happened about a decade ago, but it is still bang on the money today. Despite our growing understanding of cognitive science and the profound impact of aesthetics on human perception and well-being, secondary education systems worldwide prioritise the hard sciences and anything that supports modern industry, the professions and commerce, while deprioritising creative subjects like art and design. The result is that human society underestimates the economic and cultural value of creative endeavour.

This is reflected in Asia where I have spent the majority of my career, where Asian parents if their children have any artistic talent and want to become an artist or designer, tend to dissuade them favour of the professions, which are considered to be more respectable and income generating, and will provide a more reliable career path.

This cultural bias not only stifles individual creativity but also impacts how society values design, from the education system down to the marketplace. The result is that clients and decision-makers may view logos and brand identities as necessary in terms of looking professional, but not as strategic assets of enormous value, that they should cultivate and leverage for business success.

This situation is perhaps not as supported as it could be by the current content of design courses in our design schools. Because assuming that you have stubbornly insisted on pursuing a design career against the advice of your parents or teachers, while design schools may provide excellent training in basic design skills, I’m not sure any time is given to explaining why art and design are so vital, and what these creative pillars contribute to human life. Nor is much formal education given on why the aesthetics of logo design, for example, are so central in building a brand identity.

The result is that design students — beyond being driven by the creative urge, their egos, or the need to get a good grade — don’t understand the vital contribution their logo design skills are making, or could make if they knew what they were doing, in the bigger picture.

In my experience, this is something that design students only figure out when they start working on real branding projects, and start interacting with brand strategists. It’s the strategists who — as part of their work in defining the Brand DNA® of a brand — also define the brief that the logo designers need to answer in their creative work. To use a football analogy, it’s the strategists who build the goalposts that the strikers (aka logo designers) need to aim in the right direction and score their winning goals.

It’s only at this connecting point with brand strategy that designers start to join the dots and realise that logo design is not a platform for their egos, but a strategic asset in service to their clients that needs to symbolise the essence of the brand or product it represents. And by brand essence, I don’t just mean what the product is and how it performs, but also its personality, values, and unique positioning versus its competitors. 

So my purpose in this chapter is to help designers understand how important their talent and craft skills as logo designers are, and how crucial it is for logos to visually express — as accurately as possible — the underlying essence of a brand. So that in the competitive environment that all companies and their brands face, where they not only have to stand out from the crowd but do it in a way which is authentic to who they are, and compelling to their target audiences, we designers are helping companies do that job as well as possible.

Because at the end of the day, it’s customers who build brands, in their heads, not we designers. Our job as designers is to provide all those visual cues that build the right image of a brand, and hope that people pick up those cues and read them in the right way. 

That’s why we designers need to make sure that the visual cues we create are as faithful to the brand as they can be. Because when they are true to the brand, logos have incredible power to capture everything a brand stands for in customer’s minds and build growing brand loyalty, over time. 

I will drill down much more into these issues in a moment. Meanwhile, this explains why good logo design is so necessary, and therefore, how important our job as brand identity designers is. 

So what do designers bring to the table? What difference do we make in the branding process? What are our unique superpowers, if only we realised our true potential? I could describe our unique powers in four ways, as follows:

1. The “Super Power” of recognition
2. The “Super Power” of differentiation 
3. The “Super Power” of connection 
4. The “Super Power” of articulation 

The “Super Power” of recognition

The first and most important role a logo plays in branding is identification. In this sense, nothing much has changed since the days of branding cattle with a hot iron. Logos are the primary way to help people recognise a brand, and distinguish it from its competitors. All the other stuff that goes on behind a logo to brand a product is secondary to this role, because the logo creates the foundation upon which the entire brand identity and brand story is built. Colours, fonts, and the visual language – all of this is driven by the story you’re trying to tell, and the logo sets the stage for this story.

As the late design guru Milton Glaser, the designer behind the world-famous I ❤️ NY logo, put it, “Logo is the gateway to the brand.” By this he means that when a consumer sees a familiar logo, it’s not just a mark of ownership; it’s a gateway to a world of associations and memories in the consumer’s mind. And why is this? First of all, in one sense a logo is a brand’s face, and like the human faces of people we know well, it gets imprinted on our minds. Think of any famous brand out there. It doesn’t matter which you choose – Coca-Cola? Lululemon? Gucci? Tesla? — whichever brand it was, I can guarantee that their logo was the first thing that popped into your head. And if you’ve had any experience with those brands, the logo comes freighted with all those experiences, good or bad. So already we can begin to see how important a brand designer’s role is in the whole branding process. 

But how does this happen — why is a logo so important? Well, it’s all about the science of perception, and what it reveals about how people recognise and interpret sensory stimuli. What we learn about perception is that the human brain ‘reads’ and remembers shapes first, because they’re so much easier to recognise and memorise than words. Colours are second in the sequence, and they trigger an immediate emotional response. Moreover, if the colour is unique (like Tiffany Blue), it creates a direct brand association. Only after first reading the shape, then the colour, does the brain read the name. Visual shapes and colours, along with their associations, can be recognised and understood immediately, while words are decoded in a linear sequence, making them much harder to process and remember.

Research conducted by 3M has shown that our brains process visual information 60,000 times faster than text. Dr. Lynell Burmark, an expert on visual literacy says that “words are processed by our short-term memory where we can only retain about seven bits of information … Images, on the other hand, go directly into long-term memory where they are indelibly etched.”

All of the above has an evolutionary basis. The brain processes shapes and colours first because our visual interpretive system is built for rapid pattern recognition. Back in the mists of prehistory, survival for our hunter-gatherer ancestors depended on quickly recognising and reacting to the world around them. The ability to instantly identify shapes and hues — like the outline of a predator or the significance of colour — was crucial for determining safe from dangerous, or edible from inedible. This rapid shape and colour recognition allowed early humans to react swiftly, enhancing their chances of survival in a hostile environment.

So the ability to process shapes and colours is hardwired into our brains from pre-history. While written language and words came much later in evolutionary development, only in the last 10,000 years. Understanding this evolutionary wiring helps explain why simple, bold shapes — like those found in logos — can be memorable and effective.

It says a lot about the power of brand identity that you only have to see a small fraction of a logo to know what brand it is

But what does this mean for logos and their designers? Well, two things. Firstly it’s important to realise the power we have to shape perception — when you design a logo, you’re not merely creating a pretty symbol to make a client look nice, you’re tapping into a fundamental aspect of human perception that has been honed over millennia. A simple, bold logo with clear shapes and striking colours has the power to be recognised, remembered and communicate complex meaning, almost instantaneously. 

Secondly, bearing in mind this power to instantly shape perception, if the first encounter we all have with a brand is its logo, it’s vitally important that the logo creates the right visual cues, that faithfully represent what it is all about — what we call the brand ‘essence’. Because logos form expectations of a brand or a company, and if those expectations don’t accurately reflect the essence of a brand, the logo will fail in its first job. For that reason alone, logo designers must pay careful attention to the power of shape and colour, and of visual ideas that express the brand essence (like the hidden arrow in the FedEx logo), to create the right ‘first impression’ of a brand. Because as we all know, first impressions matter, especially when it comes to branding.

The amazing thing is, if we have done our job correctly and craft a stand-out logo that aligns with the brand essence, after a while, people will not only recognise the brand instantly without seeing the brand name (like the Nike swoosh), but they will only need to see a tiny fraction of the logo to know what brand it is.

That is why logo design, and all of the aesthetic qualities that govern its execution that we mentioned in parts 1 and 2, are so important. But it isn’t enough just to make a logo aesthetically pleasing, and create recognition, it also needs to make a brand stand out from its competitors. This brings us to the second power of logo design, which is the power of differentiation.

The “Super Power” of differentiation

As designers, we can sometimes adopt an ego-centric approach to logo design, and make it all about our own self-expression and aesthetic preferences, and not about what the brand stands for, or its target audience. Or we make the mistake of making the logo reflect the category the brand operates in, rather than what makes it unique, within that category. In doing both we are completely missing the point. The power of our talent is the ability to make the uniqueness of a brand visible. 

There are lots of pretty logos out there that don’t differentiate the brands they represent. One classic example of this was Pepsi, which was invented about 15 years after Coca-Cola. When it came out in 1898, they thought it would be a great idea to brand their drink just like Coca-Cola. It took Pepsi a good five decades and a declining market share to realise that they had made a huge mistake, and rapidly needed to do something different. 

From its establishment in 1898, Pepsi increasingly mimicked the style of Coca Cola’s logo, until 1941 when they radically changed direction. Meanwhile the Coca Cola logo has remained pretty much unchanged from when it first appeared in 1887 till today

In one sense, logo design isn’t art — it’s a strategic tool in which our creativity as designers is harnessed to the needs of our clients, to enable their brands to stand out in a hugely competitive marketplace. And especially, to differentiate them from their peers. 

And how do we do that, as designers? We do it by gaining a deep understanding of the uniqueness of a client’s brand and making sure that our logo design captures that uniqueness in some way. To highlight what makes it special, by crafting distinctive visual elements that reflect the fundamental essence of a brand. The idea is to create a visual signature that sets it apart. 

A lot of this is about discovering the authentic story behind a brand, or what it delivers, and giving it a voice. The design guru Michael Wolff put it like this. He said that a brand designer’s job is about “finding the personality of a company, and giving them what they would give themselves if they knew how to do it”.  He went on to say of his work that “my aim has always been to help organisations express themselves, in their particular way, for the benefit of anyone they’re involved with. And the key to what I’ve attempted to do is in those words “in their particular way”. I don’t have a view of how things should look. I try and find a way that a company should look because that’s how it should look.” Exactly.

This means that before working on any ideas, as designers we need to fully understand everything about our client’s brands, and the environments in which their brand identity will be seen, or experienced. It also means researching everything we can about our client’s competitors and how they brand themselves, so we know how to position our clients differently. For example, what kind of symbols, colours, imagery or language are already ‘owned’ by them? How do they position themselves? What kind of visual trends can we perceive within their industry? What opportunity spaces could we help our client occupy?

Finally, it also means researching our client’s customers and their perceptions of the brand, to understand what they do or don’t like about it. Only when we are armed with these kinds of insights can we understand how to differentiate our client’s brand and highlight its unique strengths, so that it stands out from the crowd… in a way that connects with their target audience. Which brings us to the third superpower, the superpower of connection.

The “Super Power” of connection

In my previous blog post, I talked about ‘self-image congruity’, which describes the point at which we realise that a brand we’re considering is our brand – that there is an alignment between our sense of who we are, including our values, and the brands we like. Well, a crucial aspect of this self-image congruity is the emotional component of it. In other words, with the brands we like, we usually feel an emotional engagement with them — they excite a kind of visceral connection. And normally the trigger for that connection is the logo for that brand. And there are two reasons for this — the first being the associations and memories the logo immediately evokes of past experiences of that brand. The second is the style and idiosyncrasies of the logo itself, and the unique way it embodies the essence of the brand. 

Both reasons are rooted in the appearance of the logo, and highlight the importance of the aesthetics and craft of logo design as the core component of brand identity. Nothing captures the essence of the British brand Marmite and the cosy feelings it evokes in those who love it, like its unique label, and bottle design. Similarly, all the values and feelings we associate with Mercedes, Apple, or a luxury brand like Armani are all captured in their logos, despite their simplicity and absence of embellishment.

All the values and feelings we associate with traditional brands like Marmite, or luxury brands like Mercedes, Apple, and Armani are captured in their logos, no matter how simple they are

The American designer Michael Bierut makes the point that what makes logos interesting “is that they get invested with meaning”, and much of that meaning is about the feeling and emotions a brand excites. He describes the capacity of logos to instantly evoke emotion and memory as “the highest state that a design can get”, going on to say that there are.brands that we feel almost compelled to buy simply because of the emotional impact of the branding. For me, that was how I got hooked on Levi’s jeans.

As I pointed out earlier, the first role of logo design is to facilitate recognition, but recognition leads to familiarity, which are essential factors in building consumer trust and loyalty – which is about emotion. When consumers encounter a familiar logo of a brand they like, they feel a sense of comfort and reassurance that they have made the right choice. And how does this happen? Well, it’s all about tapping into how the brain processes shapes and colours, which as I discussed before, has an evolutionary basis. Our brain is wired to read shapes and colours, and their meaning, immediately and unconsciously. 

So logos and symbols can and should be designed to evoke specific associations and emotions. Every component of brand identity including the logo and supporting graphics, colours, typography and imagery, should be carefully selected and articulated to build a consistent visual personality. When consumers see these visual cues, they subconsciously ‘read’ what the brand is about, and attribute the right qualities to it. We have to make sure that we as designers get all these visual cues right so that they accurately represent what the brand stands for.

Speaking of all the components of brand identity needing to express a consistent visual personality, we come to the fourth and final power of the brand identity designer, the power of articulation.

The “Super Power” of articulation

In the hands of a designer, a well-crafted logo has enormous power to build a brand. But no matter how good it is, a logo can never tell the whole story. It needs to be supported by a whole visual and experiential language, pulling together secondary graphics, colour, typography, imagery, packaging, environments, online & offline communication styles and service delivery, to communicate a single coherent brand. It will also include verbal, physical and kinetic qualities, such as how a brand speaks, how it sounds, how it moves, how it feels, and sometimes, even how it tastes and smells. 

The City of Melbourne brand identity, designed by Landor Associates in 2009, is a prime example of a ‘well articulated’ brand. It remains a very recognisable and consistent brand identity despite having a remarkably fluid and diverse visual language

This is the power of articulation — all the elements of the brand language should be intentionally designed to build the brand identity, with every component playing its part and working together as a whole, to create one unified voice. Here we’re talking about the brand identity system, which is about making a brand totally consistent in everything it does. When it’s working well you should be able to cover up the logo, and still be able to identify the brand, because its visual language is so distinctive.

As Wally Olins said, “The most successful brands are completely coherent. Every aspect of what they do and what they are reinforces everything else”. What coherence delivers is that all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle fit together in a way that feels seamless to the customer. 

Customers crave consistency. When customers consistently see the same visual language employed across multiple channels, and have the same brand experience at every touchpoint, it not only conveys a sense of professionalism and credibility, it also builds a coherent understanding of what the brand stands for, and what they can expect from it. This consistency builds trust and confidence in the brand, reassuring customers that they made the right choice – because it consistently delivers on its promises. That is the ‘superpower’ of articulation.

Conclusion

So to summarise what I’ve shared above, as designers we need to appreciate the power we have in our hands. In a world where consumers form impressions of brands in their minds in a matter of seconds, a well-designed logo isn’t just art—it is a strategic asset that shapes perceptions, builds loyalty, and differentiates a brand in a crowded marketplace. 

By harnessing the power of identification, differentiation, connection, and articulation, designers can build lasting brands that create growth and stand the test of time. 

For that to happen, our task is to translate a brand’s essence into visual cues that are both authentic and compelling, ensuring that our work not only meets our own creative standards, but also drives real-world success. Embrace these superpowers and we will discover that our design talent isn’t just about making things look pretty — it’s about helping brands succeed, and making a meaningful impact on the world.

Build your brand identity with us:We understand the challenge of creating a compelling brand experience that is both authentic to who you are, and resonates with your customers. With our unrivalled expertise in brand strategy and identity design, and working with brand owners across Singapore, SE Asia and the Middle East, we are able to create inspiring brands and a holistic brand experience, across all channels. If anything in the blogpost above strikes a chord, and you need our assistance, do get in touch with us here.