Designing Brand Identity: A Complete Guide to Creating, Building, and Maintaining Strong Brands (Hardcover)

by Alina Wheeler (Author) "Since the beginning of time, the need to communicate has emerged from a set of universal questions: Who am I?..." (more)
Key Phrases: audit readout, brand identity process, brand identity system, Wolff Olins, United States, Landor Associates (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
"...the new edition of this well-regarded book is a joy...an inspiring and powerful toolkit" (The Marketer, May 2006)

Product Description
This innovative approach -- blending practicality and creativity -- is now in full-color!

From translating the vision of a CEO and conducting research, through designing a sustainable identity program and building online branding tools, Designing Brand Identity helps companies create stronger brands by offering real substance. With an easy-to-follow style, step-by-step considerations, and a proven, universal five-phase process for creating and implementing effective brand identity, the book offers the tools you need, whether a brand manager, marketer, or designer, when creating or managing a brand. This edition includes a wealth of full-color examples and updated case studies for world-class brands such as BP, Unilever, Citi, Tazo Tea, and Mini Cooper.

Alina Wheeler (Philadelphia, PA) applies her strategic imagination to help build brands, create new identities, and design brand-identity programs for Fortune 100 companies, entrepreneurial ventures, foundations, and cities.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 2 edition (March 10, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471746843
• ISBN-13: 978-0471746843
• Product Dimensions: 11 x 8.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (45 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #15,469 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

110 of 121 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars It's about identity, but not about the brand process, October 20, 2003

By	AJ Kandy (Montreal, Quebec Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Designing Brand Identity: A Complete Guide to Creating, Building, and Maintaining Strong Brands (Hardcover)

This *is* a great book when it comes to showing how to put together a coherent, soup-to-nuts identity program. But the title of the book is misleading - there's very little in this book about actually creating, building or maintaining strong brands per se. This wilfully confuses the logo for the company behind the logo. As Paul Rand once said of his logo for the ABC television network, it wasn't a matter of whether his logo lived up to the network, but whether the network lived up to the logo! The brand process involves a lot of non-graphical thought regarding the spirit or essence of what that organization is all about. "Is that an IBM thing to do?" The brand identity is, at best, only the surface expression: the brand is the idea of the company in its customers' minds. In that sense, creating and maintaining a strong brand is really about having clear direction, consistent policies and actions, and understanding that markets are conversations, not about whether the carpet matches the business cards and the Web site.

52 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The title of this book might mislead you, May 20, 2004

By	"mromiti" (Sao Paulo, SP Brazil) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Designing Brand Identity: A Complete Guide to Creating, Building, and Maintaining Strong Brands (Hardcover)

When I put my hands on this book, I thought I would be adding one more point of view to my knowledge about brand identity, but this didn't quite happen.

This book isn't really about designing brand identity itself, but mostly about materializing brand identity into the visual identity of a company, limiting its whole concept. Furthermore, it is known that mere visual identity doesn't make a brand any stronger, as the title suggests.

Anybody with some previous brand identity knowledge in the marketing sense might get a little frustrated, had this person expected deep explanations about the creation of a brand identity plan (for that I would recommend Aaker's work).

On the other hand, if you are a designer willing to understand how to develop a visual identity linked to a brand identity, this book could be very useful.

33 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars almost a 5, January 5, 2005

By	MVDM (Shanghai, PRC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Designing Brand Identity: A Complete Guide to Creating, Building, and Maintaining Strong Brands (Hardcover)

This could have been a 5star rating. The thing that held me from making it one is the print quality of the book. Honestly, I've got books half this price that are on better paper, and in full color. A book that is printed on two different types of (cheap) paper, and offers only 4 color pages just doesn't impress me. Not at this price. I felt dissapointed for sure.

Now, about the title: it could have been a better one. While it states "designing", it is more about "constructing" and "rationalizing". If you want a book that shows you how to design a logo/trademark, this is not it. The value of this book is that it will explain and deconstruct every single aspect about the total brand identity process, and how it can then apply. The later has visual examples - though as mentioned in extremely low quality bw print. But again: these visuals serve only to underscore the process.

If you need a book that will explain every process, theory and element of brand identity, click ad to shopping cart. It is an easy read, short and to the point paragraphs for us time (or attention spam) challenged people. It is a must-have and must-know for anyone in advertising, marketing or design, regardless of being creative.

If you want a book that depicts and demonstrates how a trademark has been thought of, worked out, presented, fine tuned, etc., this is not it.