An identity has to make your business recognisable wherever it appears. For a service business, that means the signboard outside your unit, an Instagram post, a quotation PDF and the small circle next to your name in WhatsApp. We approach brand identity design in Singapore as one working system for all of those.
What brand identity design in Singapore should include
A useful identity gives you, at minimum:
- A logo in several versions: full, compact and a standalone mark, each in colour, one colour and reversed out of a dark background.
- Typefaces for headings and body text, with licences that cover web and print.
- A colour palette with exact values for screen and print, and rules on which colours can carry text.
- A voice: how the business sounds, shown through examples.
- Templates and rules for the places you use the brand every week.
Voice and templates are the parts most often skipped, and they decide whether the brand still looks consistent a year later.
Designing the logo for small sizes
Much of the time your logo appears small, as a website favicon, a social avatar cropped to a circle or a watermark in the corner of a photo. Google asks for a square favicon that represents your brand and recommends one larger than 48 by 48 pixels. A long wordmark with a tagline won't survive that. We design a compact mark alongside the full logo and test both at the sizes they will be seen, before anything is final.
Typefaces and colour
The typefaces set much of a brand's tone, and a firm handling estate planning should not look like a spin studio in Tanjong Pagar. We choose type for character and for practicality: enough weights for headings and body text, good legibility on screens, and a licence that covers how you will use it.
For colour, the W3C's contrast guideline asks for a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text. Text that is part of a logo is exempt, but your website, menus and invoices are not. A pale pastel can look calm on a mood board and still be too faint for a paragraph, so a good palette states which colour pairings are safe for text.
Brand voice
A brand's voice covers word choice, sentence length, how formal you are and what you never say. A children's dental practice might be warm and plain-spoken; a corporate law practice, precise and measured; a fitness studio, short and direct. We write the voice down with real examples, such as a website heading, an appointment reminder and a reply to a complaint, so anyone writing for the business can match it.
The voice then carries into the website copy, and our guide to website copywriting for service businesses shows how.
Signage, social posts, decks and invoices
We plan the identity for the everyday items customers see most:
- Signage: legible from across a corridor or a car park, in the materials your fabricator works with.
- Social posts: templates for square and vertical formats that keep the logo clear of cropping.
- Decks and proposals: layouts your team can fill in without breaking them.
- Invoices and quotations: clean, printable in black and white, with your business and payment details in a consistent place.
- Email signatures and name cards: kept simple so they are easy to update when staff change.
When the identity and the website are designed together, they share one system from the start; our web design page covers that side of the work. If your site is already due a website redesign, that is a natural moment to refresh the brand as well.
Protecting your name and mark
In Singapore, trade marks are handled by IPOS, which explains that a trade mark can be words, a logo, colours or a combination of these, and that a registered mark is protected for 10 years from the date of filing. Check that the name isn't already in use before you commit to signage and print, and get advice on registration from an IP professional. This is general information, not legal advice.
If you already have a logo, colours you want to keep or a name you're settled on, mention them when you contact us, since tidying an existing mark is often enough. Whoever you hire, agree at the start that the final files are yours; our guide to choosing a web design agency covers file ownership, and the same questions apply to brand work.