Branding design is constantly changing these days. We see a new rebranding or logo remake at least every few weeks.
Most of these logo revamps and brand identity shifts are hit-or-miss situations. Some brands even had to roll back to their original designs after backlash from customers and fans.
The best way to avoid having to go through such disasters is to create designs that can grow with your brand. We call this method “scalable design.”
Today, we explore the topic of scalable design discussing why it’s important and how you can use this methodology to create better, future-proof branding designs.
What Is Scalable Graphic Design?
(Source: Behance / GraphicTheory)
Scalable design refers to the popular method used by businesses to create products that are flexible enough to meet increasing demands without compromising functionality or raising costs. This same methodology can be used in graphic design to create brand designs that are flexible and adaptable.
Scalable graphic design involves creating graphics for brands that you can use across multiple platforms and mediums without sacrificing quality. It also helps create brand designs that you can change, improve, and refresh in the future without having to completely remake the design.
Why Create Scalable Designs for Brands?
Technology keeps evolving at a rapid rate. The methods businesses used to market their brands ten or twenty years ago are no longer viable. As a result, over the past few years, brands had to go through multiple stages of brand redesigns just to keep up with the current trends.
Brands found a solution to this problem with scalable graphics, which ensure brand identity remains the same across all mediums throughout many years.
With scalable graphics, you can design a responsive brand identity that looks the same everywhere from TikTok videos to billboards. You will also be able to resize and customize the logos, packaging designs, stationery designs, and everything in between whenever you want.
This flexibility of scalable design allows you to create adaptable graphics that grow alongside the brand and business.
Main Principles of Scalable Design
Scalable graphic design consists of a few key principles:
Responsive Designs
The main concept of a scalable design is to create assets that can be used across multiple platforms without sacrificing quality. This includes creating things like logo designs that look great on large desktop devices as well as smaller mobile screens.
Integrating a responsive element into the design is how you achieve this goal. A great example is how designers have been creating responsive logo variants to make brand identities more flexible.
Vector-Based Formats
JPG and PNG are not part of scalable graphic designs. Vector graphics formats, especially SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) are the go-to choice for designing scalable graphics that can be resized, no matter how big or small, while maintaining quality at all times.
Simplicity
Keeping your designs simple is another important element to consider when creating scalable designs. Complex artworks and designs with vivid color palettes usually don’t look as great when you scale them down to smaller sizes.
Modular Design Systems
Creating modular design systems for your brand identities and styles is arguably the most important principle of creating scalable designs. Having design assets such as editable templates, UI kits, and color palettes that you can reuse and reconfigure will greatly help maintain your scalable designs future-proof.
Benefits of Using Scalable Graphics
(Source: Behance / Tamim Islam)
Using scalable designs brings many benefits and advantages, especially for brands and businesses. Some of the main benefits include:
- Flexibility: Thanks to modular design systems and vector formats, you’ll be able to easily customize your branding designs whenever you want
- Adaptability: Making your brand look great across all existing and upcoming platforms will be easier when you can easily adjust the brand identity to your needs
- Future-Proof Design: Ensuring your brand looks consistent on emerging digital platforms won’t be a problem when you have a scalable brand design
- Low Costs: With scalable designs, you won’t have to spend extra on design agencies every time you want to create a new marketing campaign for social media
How to Create Scalable Graphics
(Source: Behance / Ramotion)
There are a few important steps you should follow when creating scalable graphics. Start with these basics:
Step 1. Think Responsively
Responsive design is not just for website layouts. Approach every design with a responsive mindset. Create logos and logo variants that can be used on different devices with smaller screen sizes. Use fonts and typography that look great when scaled up and down. Use colors that work across print and digital platforms.
Step 2. Use Style Guides & Systems
To create scalable and consistent designs, you need to create design systems and style guides that allow your brand’s visual identity to maintain its look and feel across all mediums. These style guides and systems will not only make it easier for you to scale your graphics as you grow but will also make it easier to work with other design teams and agencies.
Step 3. Adopt Vector-Based Formats
Raster-based graphics are not appropriate for creating scalable designs. Adopt and switch to more flexible and scalable vector-based formats such as SVG for your design assets. And always maintain organized source files as well.
Step 4. Explore AI Tools
With the new AI tools available today, you can simplify and automate many parts of your scalable design process. You can use AI tools to scale and expand your existing graphics. As well as to generate different variations of designs, translate, come up with new concepts, and much more.
Step 5. Future Proofing Designs
Don’t just consider the current trends, look into the future as well. With some of the biggest tech giants such as Apple and Meta working on augmented reality technologies, the future of design will likely change in a dramatic way. Thinking ahead and adjusting your design strategy accordingly will play an important role in future-proofing your scalable designs.
Conclusion
In this post, we only talked about creating scalable graphics for brands. There are also many other areas in your brand design where you can apply the scalable design method. For example, you can use the same method for creating scalable websites, app user interfaces, stationery, packaging designs, and more.
Use this guide as a starting point to explore scalable design and look for ways to implement this method in your branding designs as well as future projects.
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