When does your company need a rebrand?

Open three things your company sent out this month: a quotation, an Instagram post and a page from your website. Put them side by side. Do they look like they came from the same company? In many companies the answer is no. Each employee designed their own quotation, the website was built by a vendor years ago, and the posts are made by a freelancer using colors that are only roughly right.

Customers do not analyze this, but they feel it. A consistent identity makes a small company look bigger than it is.

What are the signs that your company needs a rebrand?

• The logo cannot be read at small sizes, or it disappears on dark backgrounds.
• There is no high-quality logo file, so print shops get whatever someone finds in their email.
• Colors on screen come out different in print every time.
• You are expanding into a new market and need an identity that works equally well in Arabic and English.
• Your business has changed, and the identity still describes the old company.
• Every designer or supplier asks you about colors and fonts, and you have no guide to send them.

Should you refresh your brand or rebuild it?

If customers know your logo and associate it with you, do not throw it away lightly. It can be cleaned up, its proportions adjusted and its colors defined precisely, and then a full system can be built around it. That way you keep what you have built and fix the mess. Rebuilding from scratch suits cases where your business or audience has changed, or where the logo itself is the cause of the problem.

We went through this at Visual Innovate ourselves. The logo stayed, and what surrounded it changed: a color palette taken from the logo, two matching fonts for Arabic and English, a new tagline that describes what we do today, and templates for presentations, contracts and letterhead.

What do you receive in a full branding project?

The last item on the list matters most. A guide saved as a PDF that nobody opens changes nothing. Ready templates in Word and PowerPoint are what let every employee produce a consistent document without having to think about it.

What is different about an Arabic brand identity?

Arabic type needs more line height, and it does not tolerate letter spacing. Arabic also has no capital letters, so all-caps styling has no equivalent. A logo that reads from the left can look backwards next to an Arabic heading if nobody tests it. That is why we choose the two fonts together and test headings and the logo in both languages side by side on real applications before approval.

Who should be involved in a rebranding decision?

One person who owns the final decision, with a small circle around them who know the customers well, such as sales and customer service. The larger the decision group, the longer the project takes, and the logo drifts toward a compromise that pleases everyone and sets the company apart from no one.

Gather opinions at the start, when the problem and goals are written down, because new opinions arriving at the color stage send the project backwards. Ask everyone who comments to tie their feedback to customers or to real use, for example saying that the logo cannot be read on the stamp, instead of saying they do not like it. For tests that help with this decision, read what makes a good logo.

Where does your brand appear today?

Before any design work, list every place your name and logo appear. The list is usually longer than you expect, and it determines the size of the project and the order of work.

• Print: business cards, letterhead, invoices, stamps and the company profile.
• Premises: signs, storefront, vehicles and uniforms.
• Digital: website, social media accounts, email signature, Google Maps business profile and apps.
• Everyday documents: quotations, contracts and presentations.

Photograph a sample of each item, or save a copy of it, in one folder. That folder shows you how messy things are right now, and later it becomes your task list when you start applying the new identity.

How do you launch a new brand identity without confusing customers?

Start with what customers see most and what is easy to change: the website, profile pictures, email signatures and presentation templates. Then move on to things that take manufacturing time, such as signs and vehicles.

You do not have to destroy all the printed stock in one day. Set a date after which you stop ordering printed items with the old identity, and use up what you have for internal purposes. Anything that goes straight to customers, like quotations and contracts, should switch quickly so that no customer receives two documents in two different styles in the same week.

If the logo has changed noticeably, tell your customers with a short message or a post showing the new logo next to the old one, so nobody who remembers you by your logo gets confused. Update the logo on every account and on your Google Maps profile on the same day, because a customer may see several of them in a single search.

What about your website and apps?

Today an identity lives on screens more than on paper. So we turn it into a digital design system: colors, spacing and components ready for development, which keeps the website and apps consistent with the printed material. That is what we did with this website.

Read about our branding and design service and what determines the cost of a branding project, or send us three samples of your current material and we will tell you whether you need a refresh or a rebuild.

Questions our partners ask

Written by the Visual Innovate team, the people who build, host and follow up systems, websites and apps for our clients in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Egypt.