What is a corporate identity? More than a logo

Sometimes a conversation that starts with “we’d like a new corporate identity” turns out to be about a logo. That’s understandable. The logo is the part everyone can see. But it’s only one piece of a corporate identity, and not always the piece that’s broken. This post is about the rest: what an identity is made of, and how its rules get written down.

Here’s a short definition. A corporate identity is the set of visual rules that makes a brand recognisable wherever it appears: on a business card, a shop sign, a website, a phone screen. It’s the reason you can tell two things come from the same company before you’ve read a word on either of them.

The parts of an identity

In our projects, an identity has five parts. Leave one out and the brand starts to drift exactly there.

The mark, in every version it needs. A horizontal logo for wide spaces, a stacked one for narrow spaces and the symbol on its own for the smallest sizes. Taze Sepet’s guidelines list four: horizontal, vertical, the emblem alone and a version with the slogan.

Colour, written down. A colour that only exists in someone’s memory will drift. Taze Sepet has five: Fresh Green, Basket Red, Forest, Cream and Honey, each with screen and print codes, plus a ratio for how much of each to use. Pekin Yapı Market’s red has three codes, one each for screen, paint and print: #CA2027, RAL 3020 and Pantone 711 C.

One typeface, with rules. Taze Sepet uses Alegreya Sans for everything from headlines to the interface. Our own identity uses Lexend in four weights: Light, Regular, SemiBold and ExtraBold.

Rules that protect the mark. Clear space and a minimum size. At Kischla, clear space is one x on every side of the logo, where x is the width of the K’s upright bar. Taze Sepet’s horizontal logo never goes below 35 mm in print or 140 px on screen.

Touchpoints. The places where all of it is applied. For Pekin Yapı Market, that meant a business card, a letterhead and a flag, each delivered as a print file.

Guidelines: the system on paper

All five parts end up in one document, the brand guidelines. Taze Sepet’s runs from the brand essence through the logo’s construction, versions, backgrounds, clear space and misuse, then colour, type, photography, stationery, packaging, social media templates and a website draft.

A guidelines document does one job: it makes half of your next decision before you have to. When you need a new flyer, a new post or a new sign, the rules are already there, even if the people who designed the identity aren’t.

Why starting with the logo doesn’t work

Because a logo is a result. Before anyone draws anything, a brand has to know what it’s saying, who it’s saying it to and what sets it apart. We call that strategy, and every project we take on starts there. Design comes after those answers, not instead of them.

So when a brand comes to us asking for a new logo, the first conversation often isn’t about the logo. We look at how the brand communicates today, which of its assets still work and where it wants to go. Sometimes it turns out the problem was never the logo. It was the lack of any rules around it.

A quick check

Four questions will tell you whether your brand has an identity or just a logo:

• Is there a version of your logo for every space it appears in?
• Is your main colour written down for screen and print?
• Do you have one typeface, with rules for using it?
• Is there a rule for the space around your logo?

Every “no” is a decision you’ve left to whoever works on your brand next. Usually that’s the person designing the next flyer.

You can see how we approach corporate identity design and the identities we’ve built in our work.