A brand’s visual identity is more than just an aesthetic choice. It’s the foundation upon which its presence in the world is built. From the first impression a logo makes to the consistency of its applications across various platforms, strong visual branding plays a critical role in defining a company’s identity and ensuring it’s memorable.
Whether you’re developing a brand from the ground up or refreshing an existing identity, the process of designing a logo and crafting a style sheet is both a creative and strategic journey. Explore the essential elements of logo creation and style sheets, from the initial design process to the final implementation, and how they work together to ensure a cohesive and recognizable brand presence.
What Goes into a Style Sheet?
A style sheet is the practical, high-level guide that answers a simple yet essential question: “How should this brand look and feel?” This guide ensures consistency across every touchpoint, whether it’s for your internal team or external partners. It’s not just about aesthetics — it’s about building a clear visual language that aligns with your brand’s core values and message.
A typical style sheet includes:
- Primary and Secondary Logos, with clear usage rules to maintain brand integrity. Nothing screams “unprofessional” faster than your logo looking stretched or pixelated.
- Color Palette, including exact values (CMYK, RGB, HEX, Pantone) to ensure uniformity. Why? Because your brand’s signature blue needs to be the exact same blue everywhere, not just “kinda close.”
- Typography System, with a hierarchy of fonts that reflects the brand’s voice and attitude. It’s about making sure your brand speaks (and shows up) consistently, whether it’s a headline or a footnote.
- Sample Applications that show how the brand looks on print, web, social media, etc.
For brands with multiple teams or external partners, a full brand guide will dive even deeper into messaging, voice, tone and additional visual treatments like photography style, collateral templates and more. The goal is to provide strategy-built tools that are usable and repeatable.
The Importance of Color & Typography
When designing a brand, color and typography play a significant role in conveying emotion, personality and even functionality.
We choose a color palette based on the emotional response you want to evoke. For instance, blue is often used for calmness or professionalism, while red can invoke energy or urgency. It’s essential to consider both the psychological effect on your audience as well as accessibility, like ensuring color combinations are suitable for users with color blindness.
On the other hand, typography is about legibility and attitude. The fonts you use help define your brand’s vibe. Serif fonts, with their high contrast, often feel more traditional, while sans-serif fonts offer a modern, minimalistic approach. The right type pairing can make your brand feel approachable, serious, sleek or bold, depending on the desired tone.
Together, your brand’s color palette and typography create a cohesive visual identity that can scale across digital, print and physical environments while staying true to your brand’s core message. 
A Logo is More than Design
A logo is a representation of where your brand is today and where it’s heading in the future.
Competitor research is a powerful tool for understanding industry norms, not for imitation, but for gaining insights into what’s expected. By analyzing competitor logos, design teams can determine whether to align with current trends or purposefully differentiate from them. For example, if many brands are using dark, moody branding, the design team might opt to stand out with a lighter, brighter approach — or embrace the moodiness, but execute it more effectively.
When 1905 New Media designs a logo, we always ask:
- Where is the brand now?
- Where does it want to be in five years?
- What are the potential pitfalls we need to avoid?
This helps ensure the logo will resonate not only today, but also tomorrow, maintaining relevance and flexibility as your brand evolves.
The Logo Design Process: A Blend of Creativity & Strategy
Designing a logo is no simple task. It’s a process that blends creativity with strategy, and every step plays a critical role in making the final product successful. Here’s how we do it:
- Discovery: We dive deep into understanding your business, goals, audience and competition. The better we understand you, the better we can represent your brand visually.
- Positioning & Mood Boarding: This is where we start to explore the visual space your brand wants to own. What kind of vibe do we want the logo to communicate?
- Sketching & Concepts: Now, the real fun begins! We start brainstorming ideas and concepts, both on paper and digitally.
- Refinement: We narrow down the strongest concepts and test them in real-world applications.
- Presentation: Here, we show how the logo will look in real-world settings — whether it’s on packaging, websites or signage.
- Feedback & Finalization: We collaborate with you to finalize the logo and make sure it aligns perfectly with your brand vision.
Common Logo Mistakes & How a Style Sheet Fixes Them
A strong logo is one that stands the test of time. Yet, many businesses fall into the trap of using logos improperly.
Inconsistency is one of the biggest pitfalls. Logos get stretched, skewed, or used in low-res formats, causing confusion and diluting brand trust. Sometimes, businesses try to force one logo to fit everywhere — like using a horizontal logo as a social media icon, when it just doesn’t work in that medium.
A style sheet eliminates these common logo issues by providing clear guidelines for logo usage, including:
- Clear space and minimum sizing
- Do’s and don’ts for logo treatments
- Alternates for different media, such as horizontal or vertical variations for applications
The Evolution of 1905 New Media’s Logo
As a company with a rich history, we didn’t take our logo redesign lightly when our 120 years came up. Our updated logo reflects more than a century of growth, with a refreshed, dynamic design that is still bold but feels more refined and aligned with our current identity.
Key logo changes include:
- Breaking out of the box: The old boxed version was limiting. We wanted our logo to feel open, flexible and aligned with our forward momentum.
- Refined alignment of the numbers: The alignment of “1905” is now more balanced and clean, enhancing the overall design.
- Reimagined our pillars: Those dots you see in the logo represent our four pillars (Digital Marketing, Branding, Print and Web). We reimagined their layout so they now visually echo the structure of an actual pillar — stacked, strong and upright.
- New font choice: While the original “1905” typeface remains, an intentional nod to our print origins and newspaper heritage, we transitioned from the soft humanist sans-serif font “Bliss” to the modern geometric sans-serif font “Figtree.” It’s more accessible, professional and fully adaptable across all platforms.
These updates symbolize our evolution, reflecting who we are today and where we are headed.
Align Design with Brand Vision for Long-Term Success
From the foundational decision-making behind your logo to the meticulous guidelines of a style sheet, every element works together to build a brand that not only looks great but performs even better. Remember, in a noisy marketplace, clarity and consistency are your secret weapons.
At 1905 New Media, we’re proud to carry forward our story with a logo that reflects our legacy, our evolution and the exciting future ahead.