In 2025, branding is more than just a logo or colour palette, it’s your opportunity to stand out from the crowd. A brand can be a multi-sensory experience that defines how your audience perceives, remembers, and interacts with you. At Nurture, we work with brands every day to build identities that cut through the noise and truly resonate with their target audiences.
Here are a few of our thoughts on how to create a strong identity in 2025:
Think beyond the logo
A logo is often the first thing that comes to mind when creating a brand, but in truth, it’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s so much more to consider when building a cohesive design system that can be rolled out across multiple platforms, such as your website, social media, packaging, presentations, email signatures, and internal documents.
You’re aiming to create a consistent narrative through each design element, ensuring everything works together seamlessly to build your brand identity. It’s essential that your brand reflects your values and essence, while attracting the right audience or client.
There are several key elements to consider when crafting a visual identity. One of the most underrated being typography. The typeface you choose can set the tone for your entire brand. For instance, a clean sans-serif font might suit tech-forward brands, while more expressive serifs may work better for premium, editorial, or creative aesthetics.
A colour palette is another crucial component. It builds visual consistency, enhances recognition, and evokes the right emotional response from your audience. Your chosen colours should communicate your brand’s personality and values, helping people connect with and remember your business. A well defined palette ensures cohesive design across all materials, both digital and print.
Other visual elements to think about include illustrations, iconography, motion graphics, brand messaging, and many other tools you can use to tell your story. The most important thing is to look at the bigger picture, what message are you sending, and how clearly are you telling your story?
Design for a digital world
In 2025, your brand exists everywhere, including your website, social media platforms, printed materials, product packaging, merchandise and beyond. Each of these requires slightly different design considerations.
When building your brand, there are lots of things to take into consideration. It is a good idea to design so that your identity can easily be adapted for both horizontal and vertical formats, dark and light modes, and that works across all different types of platforms.
One common issue we see clients face before working with us is choosing an intricate, detailed logo that doesn't translate well across all platforms, especially on social media, where it often appears in tiny circular formats. In our experience, it's crucial to design a logo that maintains clarity at all sizes and on all devices. This can mean creating a simplified logo mark specifically for social media, or designing a fully responsive logo from the start.
And while we’re on the topic of digital design, it’s worth remembering that nearly every industry today is saturated. It’s never been more important to stand out. Brands with unique, scroll stopping visuals are the ones that stick in people’s minds.
Authenticity over aesthetics
We’re all for a trend, but when building something to last, trendy design isn’t always good design. The strongest brands in 2025 are rooted in authentic storytelling and emotional connection. More than ever, customers, clients and followers want to feel aligned with a brand’s values.
Key questions to ask yourself when building your brand are ‘who are we at our core’, ‘what do our customers need to feel when they see our brand’, and ‘how can we show our values visually’?
The answer to these questions might guide you to a more truthful visual identity, and may lead you to make different design choices than those led by trends. It could mean including photography of real customers, using imagery to reflect your values, choosing designs and packaging that are more sustainable, co-creating assets with your community, using hand drawn textures that reflect your authenticity, or a number of other things. The point is, design should amplify your message, not distract from it.
Inclusivity and accessibility
This one’s a biggie! An inclusive brand is always a stronger brand.
Inclusivity and accessibility in design mean creating experiences that are open to everyone, regardless of ability, background or identity. It’s about designing with intention, using readable fonts, ensuring proper colour contrast, and featuring inclusive imagery.
When you design with accessibility in mind, you show respect for all users. It’s not just the right thing to do, it also expands your audience, builds trust, and demonstrates a genuine commitment to representation and social responsibility.
Accessibility isn’t a design compromise, it’s a necessity.
Brand guidelines can evolve
Your brand is going to evolve, and your guidelines should too.
It is good practice to build dynamic brand guidelines, which are living documents that evolve with your company and allow for flexibility without losing consistency.
You could consider using interactive guides or manuals, use case libraries, a list of do’s and dont’s, editable templates and other resources that allow you to develop branding. This enables both in-house teams and collaborators to use your brand assets confidently and consistently.
Even the biggest brands in the world evolve and update, and this can be a good thing.
Building a strong visual brand in 2025 is about more than great design, it’s about strategic consistency, emotional connection, and cultural relevance.
Whether you’re a startup building from scratch or an established brand in need of a refresh, your visual identity is your most powerful communication tool.
At Nurture, we specialise in building brands that don’t just look good, but work beautifully across every channel. If you need some help designing your branding, get in touch with us for a chat!
by
Charlene Payne
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