The logo is the masterpiece of a good corporate image. However, the logo is not alone in that image constitution: brochures, graphic advertising, packaging, and the whole visual material environment representing your company make up the group led by the logo that comes to represent your company before the public and the group where your corporate image rests. This group of visual elements must hold a strict visual coherence in order to work properly.

What does visual coherence mean? Visual coherence is respecting certain design parameters according to which all graphic elements representing your company and making up your corporate image will be developed. Heterogeneity in your visual advertising material is by no means advisable because it only causes confusion among the public, weakening the design identification power with a brand or company. Therefore, it is advisable to preserve homogeneity throughout the various designs used for different advertising visual material, so that when the public meets with any graphic element composing your company's corporate image it can notice through the designs that this is your company and not any other.

Of course, there will be a starting point, an element the first design will come from, the element setting up the parameters to be followed. This graphic element, founder of the criterion to follow is not any element; that is, we cannot set up a design pattern based on an unsteady, low-standard or ephemeral element, on the contrary, we must set up our pattern based on the strongest, most lasting and most important element among the group of graphic elements composing your company’s corporate image. The most lasting, strongest and most important element among the ones composing your company’s corporate image is the corporate logo, and the design of all the other items must be standardized from it.

Although we must make something clear: the logo must not work as a tyrant over the other items, it must only establish a considerably broad criterion. As we have already said, the logo must stick to the simplicity rule, it must be memorable and lasting. These are not features your other designs must follow; they will just have to avoid contradicting what the logo is conveying.

The color palette (combination of colors in the different designs) is the feature most easily entering into potential customers’ subconscious. This is the aspect the designer team must dwell more on when creating a visual criterion for the visual items composing your company’s corporate image. Taking up the aforesaid regarding the logo not working as tyrant over the other designs, we will say that the fact that a logo must be simple and without many colors does not force the remaining designs to delete colors. All those visual item designs composing your company’s corporate image, other than the logo, can represent a color range portraying the company in each design, a particular color combination that will be another distinctive item of your company. The choice of this color combination, to be distinctive, must be lasting and kept throughout all the designs your company carries out: in your brochures, graphic advertising, labels, etc.

What does the logo establish, then? The logo does not establish the color combination or the austerity in design and in certain cases, it does not even establish the typography used, since your company can be identified by a typography different from the one used by your corporate logo. What the logo establishes is the image your company wants to convey.

For example, if your corporate logo is single-colored, simple, using a specially designed typography and referring to traditional values, your other designs do not need to be necessarily single-colored or simple but they must indisputably refer to traditional values because the design pursues not a combination of graphic features independent of sense but, on the contrary, a combination of graphic features having the meaning what your company wants to transmit. Then, it does not matter how different your logo design is from the design of the other advertising graphic material as regards design, what does matter is that, although the designs may be very different, they should always convey the same message.

And this counts for the logo and the other designs. We do not advise, under any circumstance, that the design of the graphic items other than the logo should be very different from each other; the important thing is their homogeneity. There it is the visual coherence allowing the public to recognize immediately your company through its design.