Build a Strong Brand Identity: Tips & Tricks from an OBM

Your brand as an interior designer is one of the most important aspects of your business. Before everything else, your brand is what clients see and what pulls them into your project process, onboarding journey, and client experience. If you’re reading this, you might have a brand identity you love but need to refine, or maybe you’re just starting out and looking for some guidance to kickstart your interior design business. Either way, as an OBM, I see a lot of brands and help designers define their brand and mission to make their business stand out in the industry. Here are my tips and tricks for building a strong interior design brand identity. 

What is Your Brand?

Your brand is the visual and emotional representation of you as a designer. A brand is seen across all platforms—from your process to your project management software, to your client experience documents and, of course, your marketing. Using fonts, colors, photos and graphics, verbiage, mission statements, and more, you build a brand that reflects you as a person as well as the personality of your business. 

To build a brand that feels authentic and approachable you need to start with some simple branding principles and foundational aspects. The first of these is simple: your brand should match your design style and specialty. Keep that in mind as you develop the rest of your brand identity through these tips and tricks.

Tips & Tricks for a Strong Brand Identity

Start with Words

Branding your business often starts with your mission statement, brand words, and clarifying your values as a business. A 1-3 sentence mission statement that summarizes your goals, values, and purpose helps center your business both for your own purposes and for your clients.

For example, Etsy’s mission statement is as follows: “To keep human connection at the heart of commerce.”

Maria Adams Design simply says: “It’s not about us, it’s about you!” 

Gather some brand words, and determine what your purpose is as an interior designer; is it to reduce overwhelm? Do you want to create havens? Are you determined to bring high fashion to everyday homes? 

Try it: Take a moment to write out some words you immediately associate with your business, your vision, yourself, and the impression you want your business to make. These will be your brand words. Save these for later, you’ll need them.

From there, craft your mission statement, establish a tagline, and pick five words that you want to use across all platforms consistently to establish a cohesive message no matter where clients look for and find you. 

Choose Your Images

The biggest thing to remember here is that images used for your business should match, in some way, your design style. If you specialize in oceanfront properties, you won’t want to use images or a color palette that reflects dense forests or mountain living. 

Humans are intuitive and emotionally driven. Any imagery that suggests the opposite of who you are or what you put out into the world will feel misleading and lead to disappointment or confusion. 

In the same vein, using photos and graphics that bolster your brand would mean choosing images that reflect and help communicate your mission and personality.

Try it: It helps to browse Pinterest or stock photo sites (Haute Stock, Unsplash, etc.) and search for some of your brand words. Curate a “look” from the photos that pop up and use those as inspiration for the style of photos and graphics you use on your website, social media, client-facing documents, etc.

Colors, Fonts, & Consistency

As with images and words, you’ll want your color palette and fonts to stay consistent across the board. Nothing is more jarring than a huge variety of fonts—ranging from big and bold to extra fancy and unreadable—being thrown at you. Additionally, a consistent color palette keeps the viewer, reader, and potential client in the universe of your brand from first glance to final Thank You card. 

These things may seem minor, but they let your clients know that you are confident in who you are as a person and brand, you know your identity and purpose, and can be trusted to guide them in the design process. 

At the end of the day, consistency’s role in your brand identity is to inspire confidence and prove the legitimacy of your business. Especially as a designer, it is vital to have a solid grasp of the “design” of your business identity, otherwise it might be difficult to trust your expertise—no matter how wonderful your home designs are.

Brand Board

Once you have some of the basics like images, brand words, your mission, color palette, and fonts, create a brand board. Head into Canva or another graphic design software—maybe even Pinterest—and create a brand vision board. 

Include the images that inspire your brand’s identity, any words you want to use or emotions you want to convey, a simple color palette, etc. All of this should be together in one place so it can be easily referenced and even sent out to professionals to use for logo inspiration, social media graphic creation, media kits, and more. 

Flexibility

Another key aspect of a brand identity is flexibility. Be flexible not only to allow your brand to adapt to different platforms, but also adapt alongside you as your business grows. Sure, your brand may change as your company grows and changes, but a well established brand identity will only need small tweaks instead of major overhauls.

A Final Note

Your brand is important, and it may take a lot of work to find the perfect balance between your vision and what appeals to your target client demographic. However, perhaps the best piece of advice I have for you is to keep it simple. Find some things that you really like and use them as a starting point. Because, at the end of the day, authenticity is king. Additionally, a brand identity is of no use if you aren’t able to practically implement it. Starting from a place of overwhelm and too much information will only lead to heartache. A simple brand identity is easy to keep clear, concise, approachable, and genuine. 

Need help implementing your brand vision across all aspects of your business? An OBM might just be your key to success! 

Find out how I can help you center your messaging and build a better brand!