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Brand Design vs. Graphic Design: What's the Difference?

Brand Design Vs Graphic Design

The main distinction between brand design and graphic design is its comprehensiveness. Brand design is formulated from business strategy, brand strategy and establishes a cohesive verbal and visual identity for a company. Graphic design focuses on creating pieces of communication visuals. At GreyBox Creative, we deliver world class branded solutions across all business touchpoints. Our team features experienced brand and graphic designers, writers working together on a comprehensive strategy and creative execution.

What Is Brand Design?

Brand design involves assessing, defining, and designing brand identities for businesses. Experienced designers can also redesign or update existing brand identities to increase recognition and performance and propel an organization. The goal is to create a cohesive and recognizable visual face for a product or company. This includes logos, color schemes, typography, and visual style. The designers translate a company’s mission, vision, and goals into visual aspects of the brand.

What Is Graphic Design?

Graphic design involves assembling images, typography, and motion graphics. The products of graphic design are used primarily for published, printed, and electronic media. Examples include brochures, advertising, social media graphics, flyers, web design illustration, packaging, and animation. A graphic designer takes brand identity guidelines from a brand designer and converts them into visuals to support your marketing efforts.

How Are They Different?

At GreyBox Creative, we use both brand and graphic design to deliver branded solutions. Brand and graphic design have a lot of overlap because they express the corporate identity of your company in a visual way. Graphic design is communication design, which involves creating visuals that communicate a company’s message effectively. Branding is much more complex or comprehensive, as it involves creating a recognizable identity across all touch points setting the tone for all communications moving forward. Here are three main differences between brand and graphic design:

1. The Brand Comes Before the Graphics

Companies must define their brand identity first before creating compelling visuals and graphics. A brand designer creates a suitable identity that distinguishes the company from competitors. Branding affects how customers perceive the business and products and ties back to its overall business objectives and operations. The design defines all the brand elements, including logos, color schemes, typography, shapes, and other visual elements. Graphic design comes after a brand identity has been created. The graphic designer’s work is to execute the visual solutions for the brand development process based on what has been established in the brand guideline or style guide.

2. Graphic Design Creates Visuals for the Brand

Graphic design is the process that creates high-quality visual representations of a company’s brand. Most graphic designers need guidelines to develop graphics consistent with the brand identity. The brand designer provides specifics for the visual and stylistic elements. Graphic designers then use the information to develop marketing and advertising graphics and color schemes to deliver a memorable consistent brand across all touch points.

3. Brand Designers Define, Graphic Designers Execute

All branding designers have graphic design knowledge, but graphic designers don’t necessarily have the conceptual talents or experience to engage in branding design. A branding designer sets the foundation for the company’s identity. Once the brand characteristics are described, a graphic design team executes them. Graphic designers focus on delivering tangible products for your sales team to attract customers while brand designers conceive the ideas to establish core materials and establish a foundation for all other communications to come.

Professional Brand Strategy & Brand Design Services in NYC

GreyBox Creative offers professional brand design and graphic design services in NYC. We’re a reputable brand design agency that delivers world class branded solutions to help companies attract their ideal customers over and over again. Our team comprises experienced designers and writers ready to provide comprehensive brand strategies and creative execution that prioritizes your sales process.

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