If you’re only recently dipping your toes in the waters of freelance businesses and, as a direct consequence, of brand design, I’m sure you’ve started hearing of terms like brand, branding, brand strategy, brand design. Maybe you even wondered why designers use so many terms to describe what seems to be the exact same concept.

So: what is branding?

According to Wikipedia, branding is referred to “a name, logo, slogan, and/or design scheme associated with a product or service”.

Basically branding, in a design field, is the complete list of graphic elements (starting from the main course like logo and submark, with a side of illustrations, fonts, colors, patterns and textures) associated to and representing your brand. But not just that: branding includes a fundamental strategic component based on the study of the brand and his ideal clientele/audience.

Branding, then, is the perfect balance of design and strategy. It proposes a set of graphic elements representing your brand, helping it getting noticed and communicating its message with its ideal clients.

Personally I like to add an empathic component to the mix: after all branding means communicating and to efficiently communicate you’ve to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and talk to his values and ideals directly. Branding means identifying yourself into your client, spotting a need and translating it into marketing actions, or, in design, specific and coherent graphic choices.

The difference between brand and branding

You might then wonder: is there a difference between the terms brand and branding? The answer is immensely yes!

If branding is the act of putting the brand on the market with specific marketing strategies and a studied brand identity, the brand is all that’s hidden behind. It’s the whole of values, goals, feelings, scents, memories and actions your business (or blog, creative space, shop or project) is able to provide your clients with. It’s your why: why you founded your business, why you believe in it, why you feel people need it. It’s that empathic component I was talking about earlier, what makes you business simply unique and truly yours.

Now that you know the meaning of brand and branding, all that’s left is finding your ideal designer, with the style that best represents you, and start giving your idea a proper face.