6 Key Components to Building a Powerful Visual Identity

Alexandra Cowen
6 min readJan 22, 2021

Your brand is the overall feeling others have of you conjured up through your storytelling, customer service and aesthetic value. In a design-driven world where our brain is capable of processing images in a blink of an eye, literally 600,00 times faster than the written word and within only 13 milliseconds of view, your visual identity is more important now than ever.

Mary Potter, an MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences mentions that:

“the job of the eyes is not only to get the information into the brain but to allow the brain to think about it rapidly enough to know what you should look at next. So, in general, we’re calibrating our eyes so they move around just as often as possible consistent with understanding what we’re seeing,”

In other words, our eyes act as a gateway to our attention, directing our gaze to the familiar and attractive whilst alerting us to danger. What does this mean for brands visual identity? That we need to become storytellers. To do this we must not only look at the messaging around our site but also imagery, logo size and colour palette. Which leads me on to….

What are the main elements of visual identity?

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Alexandra Cowen

Coffee fuelled Marketing and content strategist #Speaker #Neuroscience | Help Biz’s dig into the details, pull data apart and figure out the right story to tell