Verbal & Visual Identity Design

A verbal identity consultant defines how a brand speaks: the architecture of its names, the hierarchy of what it says and to whom, and the voice that makes it recognizable in a sentence with no logo attached. We design that alongside the visual system rather than after it, because a customer meets a color and a sentence in the same moment. Vivaldi has built verbal and visual identity systems since 1999, for companies including McGraw Hill and Lufthansa.

• Since 1999brand architecture and identity systems
• 200+published case studies
• 10 officeson four continents
• 5xWirtschaftsWoche Best of Consulting, Strategy and Innovation
• Brand Leadershipco-authored by our founder

When companies bring us in

Identity work is bought by a CMO, a brand director or a head of design, and the trigger is almost never a scheduled refresh. It is a gap between what the company has decided it is and what the market can actually see.

• The strategy moved and the expression did not. A new position is agreed, and the brand still looks and sounds like the company it was before. McGraw Hill arrived this way: the strategy had turned toward digital and the identity still read as a print publisher.
• Growth by acquisition has produced identities with no shared logic. Several marks, several voices, no rule that says which one speaks for the group or how a newly acquired business is absorbed.
• The company is entering a category it has not credibly played in. The identity is the fastest available signal that something has genuinely changed, and the slowest thing to fix if it is wrong.
• Consistency is eroding and nobody can say why. Guidelines exist, teams are following them, and the output still drifts. That is usually a governance problem rather than a design problem.
• A subsidiary or a product brand has to carry the parent position in its own market. Lufthansa’s catering business needed a brand identity and a message architecture that worked regionally without breaking the group logic.

Why identity projects fail after the launch

The standard process is defensible. Research, a position, a creative brief, routes, a presentation, a launch, a set of guidelines. Most of that is sound. It fails at the same two points nearly every time, and both failures happen after the work has been approved.

• The decision criteria were never written down. Without them, a review meeting becomes a preference contest, and the route that survives is the one the most senior person in the room liked. That choice cannot be defended six months later, because the only argument behind it was that somebody liked it.
• The system was built for the launch, not for the thousandth asset. Guidelines that display finished pieces rather than explain the decisions behind them have no answer for the first genuinely new situation: a product the brand did not have, a channel that did not exist, a market with different conventions. Teams improvise, and consistency erodes from the edges inward.

There is a third failure that is newer and getting more visible. Identity systems built for human recognition are now also parsed by machines that summarize, retrieve and recommend. Branding has been moving from signals to systems for some time, and a brand whose distinctiveness lives entirely in a mark is thinner than it looks when the mark is not what does the retrieving. What survives being described rather than seen is the verbal system.

What our verbal and visual identity services include

Five bodies of work. They are sequenced, and skipping the first is the most reliable way to make the other four expensive.

1. Settling what the identity has to carry

Before anything is designed, the brief has to be specific enough to argue with: the position stated with its exclusions, so the identity knows what it is not saying; the audiences and the situations the system has to work in, including the awkward ones; and the written criteria a route will be judged against, agreed before any route exists. If the position itself is unsettled, that is brand strategy work and it comes first.

2. Verbal identity: naming, messaging and voice

How the brand speaks, defined as a system rather than a list of adjectives.

• Naming: the architecture of names, the rule for how a new offer gets named, and what a name is not permitted to do
• Messaging hierarchy: what the brand says first, second and third, by audience and by situation. For McGraw Hill this became an audience-specific messaging architecture that different divisions could run without renegotiating the parent brand
• Voice: syntax, rhythm, vocabulary, and the specific words the brand uses and refuses, with worked examples rather than adjectives
• Microcopy standards, because most brand contact now happens in interface text rather than in campaigns

3. Visual identity and distinctive assets

The visual system, built for extension rather than for the reveal: the core assets of mark, type, color, layout logic, motion and image direction; distinctive assets chosen deliberately, so the brand stays recognizable when the wordmark is cropped out; behavior in the constrained formats nobody designs for first, including small screens, third-party marketplaces and partner co-branding; and accessibility treated as a design constraint rather than a compliance pass at the end.

4. Guidelines, components and templates

The handover is where most identity projects quietly end. We write guidelines that explain the decision behind each rule, so a new situation can be resolved without a phone call, and we deliver components, templates and files in the tools the teams actually work in. A PDF is a record of a project. A component library is a system the organization can run. Where the problem is application rather than design, that work continues as brand playbooks and tools.

5. Governance that keeps the system consistent

Someone has to be able to decide an edge case, and the answer has to get written back into the system. Without that return path, every unrecorded decision becomes a local precedent, and a year later the brand has four versions of itself that each had a good reason at the time.

How an identity engagement works

1. Frame. Leadership and audience interviews, an audit of the existing verbal and visual estate, and a review of where the expression and the strategy disagree. The output is a brief with the judging criteria written down and signed off before any route exists.
2. Design. Verbal and visual routes developed together, by one team, and tested against the criteria rather than against the room. Naming and messaging architecture run in parallel with the visual system, not after it.
3. Build. The core assets, the distinctive assets, the voice specification with worked examples, extension rules for the constrained formats, and the components and templates in the tools the teams use.
4. Embed. Rollout, training, and the governance route: who decides an edge case, on what grounds, and how that decision gets written back into the system.

Verbal and visual identity results

McGraw Hill: a messaging architecture and a visual identity for a digital-first brand

McGraw Hill is moving from traditional textbook publisher to a digital-first global education brand, and Vivaldi has been a trusted partner on that journey since 2016, working with the C-suite on brand portfolio, brand architecture, positioning, product branding and visual and verbal identity. We led the development of the new brand narrative and visual identity, built on months of qualitative research validated by quantitative metrics. The new master brand positioning was translated into a messaging architecture that brought the repositioning to life for each key audience, and into a visual identity that made the iconic Red Cube more relevant within a shifting education landscape. The brand was then rolled out to the Higher Ed level and down to the product level, including rebrands of Connect and ALEKS and the launch of new product brands such as McGraw Hill GO. Read the full story: From traditional to digital-first: McGraw Hill’s digital transformation journey.

Lufthansa: a brand identity system for LSG Sky Chefs, adapted by region

Lufthansa needed to reposition its airline catering subsidiary, LSG Sky Chefs, as the category shifted from efficiency-driven supply to service-driven solutions. Our Brand Identity System guided the work of defining the brand’s new identity against that market reality, and we then promoted its regional adaptation. To secure internal acceptance, we ran workshops with marketing and sales teams to jointly develop brand message architectures relevant to specific regions and business units, and formulated a value proposition around functional, emotional and self-expressive benefits validated against proof points. The activation included translating the new identity into a visual identity, and the resulting brand strategy was rolled out worldwide. Read the full story: Lufthansa’s branding transformation for growth.

Why companies choose Vivaldi for identity design

Three reasons come up repeatedly in the briefs we win.

• The words and the pictures are designed by one team. Firms that treat verbal identity as a copy deliverable at the end produce a visual system with a tone of voice appended to it, and the two drift apart within a year.
• The identity is briefed against a position, not against a mood. We do the strategy work as well, so the system is built to carry a decision that has already been made and written down, including what it rules out.
• We hand over a system, not a presentation. Components, decision rules and a governance route, because the value of an identity is realized in the assets nobody has made yet.

How to evaluate a verbal identity consultant

Worth asking of anyone on your shortlist, including us.

• Ask how they will judge the routes. If the criteria are written and agreed before the work is presented, the review is a decision. If not, it is a taste test, and taste tests are why identity projects run long.
• Ask who writes the words. If naming, messaging and voice sit with a different team on a later phase, you are buying two projects that will have to be reconciled at your expense.
• Ask to see the distinctive assets rather than the logo. A strong system stays recognizable with the wordmark removed. Ask which assets do that work and how they were chosen.
• Ask what the identity deliberately gives up. Every real position excludes something, so an identity carrying one should be uncomfortable somewhere. An identity that pleases everyone is usually carrying nothing.
• Ask what happens after launch. A firm that hands over a PDF has finished a project. A firm that hands over components, decision rules and a route for resolving edge cases has handed over something you can run.

Identity consultancy, design agency or in-house brand team?

Related work

Identity design rarely arrives alone. Four connected pieces:

• Brand strategy if the position the identity is meant to express has not actually been settled.
• Corporate brand positioning if the question is the field of play the identity has to work across rather than the expression of a known position.
• New brand development if the offer should not sit under the existing brand at all.
• Brand playbooks and tools if the system exists and is not being applied consistently week to week.

This work sits inside our Brand, Innovation and Experience practice at Vivaldi, and connects to 360 degree branding strategy when consistency across many channels and markets is the constraint.

Verbal identity consulting in the US and worldwide

Our identity work runs out of ten offices on four continents, with the US team in New York. Verbal identity is the part that does not travel by itself: a voice specification written for US English will not survive translation into German or Spanish unless someone has decided which qualities are fixed and which are allowed to adapt. We make that call explicitly and write it into the system, so regional teams are adapting against a rule rather than guessing. Lufthansa’s catering brand is a worked example of that: one identity, adapted by region, developed with the people who had to use it.