Turning Brand Identity into Visual Design: A Structured Methodology and Validation

Introduction

Visual design in products serves usability, information design, and brand expression. By abstracting a brand concept and mapping emotions to visual styles, the design process can be closed‑looped and iterated quickly.

Brand Definition

Since the product lacked a systematic brand narrative, data were collected through stakeholder interviews and user feedback word‑cloud analysis. A brand mental map was created to organise insights, followed by extracting a brand mantra across three dimensions: Brand Functions, Descriptive Modifiers, and Emotional Modifiers.

The resulting brand essence for the platform positions it as a professional, trustworthy information service.

Brand Mapping & Visual Style Construction

After defining the brand, a persona (male expert) and tone were established. The pre‑redesign copy style was analysed, then a new strategy was devised: use formal language, flat narrative, and unified sentence structures.

Visual style was derived from the brand mantra’s emotional and descriptive modifiers. Colour choices linked emotions to hue (e.g., green for professionalism, blue for sophistication). Shape guidelines favoured stable forms (rectangles, circles) and avoided sharp angles. Layout rules defined the positioning of people, objects, lighting, and background to maintain visual hierarchy.

Validation Design

A semantic differential scale was chosen to measure users’ emotional responses to the visual style. A seven‑point Likert scale balanced granularity and respondent fatigue. Adjectival anchors were aligned with scale points, and items were randomised to reduce bias.

Sample size was determined using qualitative research guidelines, resulting in a pragmatic number of participants for iterative testing.

Testing Results

First‑round testing revealed opposite emotional perceptions and usability issues, prompting a redesign of illustrations, colour application, and copy adjectives. Subsequent rounds showed alignment with target emotions and improved usability, culminating in a final visual style that met the design goals.

Remaining Issues & Future Work

Open questions include precise definition and application of the brand mantra, building a visual‑emotion semantic lexicon, and establishing baseline measurements for emotional testing. Further research will explore deeper emotional‑design mappings and refine the validation framework.

Authors: Design methodology & implementation – Zhang Peijun; Visual exploration – Wang Zheng, Wang Junyan.