Branding. Arguably the most important aspect of any company’s visual presence. It’s the face of any business, large or small, it creates an instant impression, offers an insight into what you do and it’s what clients and customers will instantly recognise you by. With this in mind it’s easy to see why branding is considered such an important part of any business’ marketing strategy.

Constant development of new technology and coding languages make it difficult to create a website that has a life span of more than 2 – 3 years without it starting to look a little dated and printed literature is often time specific, relating to current promotions or events.

Successful branding however should be future proof, and when it is updated or tweaked, the changes should only be minor. Cue Google’s latest logo update…

Whilst Google’s latest tweaks (moving the second “g” one pixel right and the “l” one pixel down and to the right) may seem unnecessary to anyone who isn’t a typography nerd, it’s fair to say that they’re overall identity is a successful one. They have established one of the largest and most powerful companies of the modern age, and have only made minor updates to their branding since it’s inception, maintaining the original colour scheme and the same serif typeface from the very first logo. 16 years on they have one of the most recognisable commercial identities on the planet along with the likes of Coca-Cola, Nike and Apple, who have only made minor tweaks to their branding themselves.

ADOmedia are now well into our 9th year of business and before our recent branding overhaul we’d only made small tweaks to our logo since we were a small start-up business back in 2005.

We originally started with an icon that represented our three main services – branding, print design and web design. It had a modern and techy feel for the time and made us instantly recognisable to current and potential clients. We kept the typography simple and understated and established red as our primary colour.

As we began to grow, we started to offer more services and in 2009 we decided to drop the 3 circle icon from our logo, and use the original typography as our main identity.

Keeping the original type allowed us to progress as a business whilst maintaining our recognisable presence. Our new range of services began to grow and eventually we upgraded to a new studio space and were working on a new website that catered for our expanding capabilities as an agency.

New space felt like a new era and meant new stationery for the growing team and new vinyls for the windows. It was time for a little update.

We reversed the colours in our branding to make them more inviting, keeping red as our primary colour basis and began using an italic, secondary font that would be used throughout our new website for our strap-line. The latest updates to the branding proved to be our most successful and became the identity we are most recognised for.

It wasn’t until this year that we decided to have a full branding overhaul.

Our new logo is a fresh approach, more fitting to a dynamic and creative agency. We’ve updated our typeface to something a little more modern, reversed out the colour scheme and used lowercase type to create a simplistic, to the point feel. The feedback we have had so far has been fantastic and you can see our new branding on our new signage out on the Chestergate in Macclesfield.

Moral of the story: Branding is the most important part of any company’s marketing, especially small start-up businesses who are yet to establish a strong visual presence. Successful branding will help you to make a good first impression and will make you recognisable to new and existing clients/customers which will in turn help you to grow as a business, so it is important that you get it right.

Over the years we’ve got pretty damn good at this identity stuff, if your’e interested in our branding services don’t hesitate to get in touch with our business development manager Steven Taylor on 01625 612198 or email us at enquiries@adomedia.co.uk.