How Do You Want Your Brand to Feel?

We are emotional beings. We connect with the way something makes us feel.

So when developing your brand, it’s really important to consider not just its visual elements, but the emotional experience it creates.

One of the first questions to ask yourself is: How do you want your brand to feel?

Understanding Your Soul Clients

Identifying and understanding who your soul clients are is a key step in the brand design process.

This foundational work, which can sometimes be overlooked, is essential for crafting a brand that really resonates.

It’s not just about knowing who they are, but also about delving deeper into what makes your dream client tick and why they might choose your brand over another. We want to get really clear on their preferences, values, and emotions that resonate which we can then utilise to help to guide the brand’s visual design and messaging.

Defining Your Brand Personality

Alongside knowing your audience, it’s important to have clarity on your brand’s personality. This will most likely naturally align with the traits of your soul client, but it’s important to define your brand’s character independently.

Ask yourself: If your brand were a person, how would you describe them?

Choose 3-5 key descriptors that sum up your brand’s essence.

Choosing Brand Colours and Typography

Once you’ve defined the feelings and personality you want to convey, it’s time to select colours and fonts that reinforce these attributes. This isn’t about picking colours or typefaces you simply like, but about choosing those that tell your brand’s story effectively. Ensuring that your choices align with the emotional tone and personality you’re trying to achieve.

For example, bright and intense colours with a chunky sans serif font, wouldn’t be the right choice for creating a calm and reflective feeling in a brand identity, so you’d maybe opt for an elegant and timeless serif font paired with a colour palette that’s more soft and muted.

Selecting Brand Imagery

High-quality imagery is crucial to your brand’s visual identity. It helps bring your brand to life and reinforces the desired emotions. When selecting images, decide whether they align with your brand’s personality and the feelings you want to evoke. Again colour, intensity and image style is something to keep in mind here.

Crafting Your Tone of Voice

Your brand’s tone of voice should complement its personality and the emotions you’re wanting to communicate. Consistency in tone across your website, social and other brand touchpoints help to strengthen your brand’s identity and build a cohesive experience.

How does your brand communicate? Is it humorous, encouraging, playful, sincere, empowering etc?

The Brand Experience

Looking at your brand and the interactions that your audience/clients may have on their customer journey, can help identify areas where you can reinforce your brands emotional connection. Think communities, the content you’re sharing, a small gift after a project has finished, UGC (user generated content), supporting causes that align. There are many ways that you can create more of an emotional connection with your audience, it just needs to be right for your brand, so it stays aligned and doesn’t feel out of place.

Bringing it Together

When we look at out brands as a whole, do they convey the right feelings? Are the colours, imagery, and overall vibe energising/calming/grounded/(insert your desired feeling here)?

The question of how you want your brand to feel is one to keep revisiting as you develop and evolve your brand. By consistently reflecting on this, you ensure that every aspect of your brand—its visuals, messaging, and overall presence—aligns with the emotions you want to reflect.

This is what intentional design looks like. It’s not design for design sake, but guided by strategy and each choice is made from a place of knowing who we’re wanting to attract, the message we’re wanting to reinforce and the personality of the brand.

If you would like some help finding the right look and feel for your brand identity, do reach out, I would love to help you through the process.