What is VI design?

It converts the non-visual content of CI into static visual identification symbols, and carries out the most direct dissemination at the most extensive level in an extremely rich and diverse application form. A well-designed and scientifically implemented visual identification system is a quick and convenient way to spread corporate business philosophy, build corporate visibility, and shape corporate image. In today's brand marketing, for a modern enterprise, no VI design means that its image will be submerged in the sea of ??commerce, making it difficult for people to distinguish; it means that it is a money-making machine lacking a soul; it means that it is a money-making machine lacking a soul; Its products and services have no personality, and consumers have no attachment to them; this means team disorganization and low morale. VI design generally includes two major contents: basic part and application part. Among them, the basic part generally includes: company name, logo design, logo, standard fonts, standard colors, auxiliary graphics, standard printing fonts, prohibited rules, etc.; while the application part generally includes: signage flags, office supplies, public relations supplies, Environmental design, office clothing, special vehicles, etc. The role of an excellent VI design for an enterprise should be: A. While clearly distinguishing the enterprise from other enterprises, it should also establish the obvious industry characteristics or other important characteristics of the enterprise, ensuring the success of the enterprise in economic activities. Independence and irreplaceability; clarify the market positioning of the enterprise, which is an important part of the intangible assets of the enterprise; B. Convey the business philosophy and corporate culture of the enterprise, and promote the enterprise in an image and visual form; C. Use its own unique The visual symbol system attracts the public's attention and generates memory, so that consumers have the highest brand loyalty to the products or services provided by the company; D. Improve the company's employees' sense of identification with the company and improve corporate morale. Basic principles of VI design: VI design is not a mechanical symbolic operation, but a vivid expression with MI as its connotation. Therefore, VI design should reflect the company's business philosophy from multiple angles and in an all-round way. A. The principle of unity of style B. The principle of strengthening visual impact C. The principle of emphasizing humanization D. The principle of enhancing national personality and respecting national customs E. The principle of implementability: VI design is not the whim of the designer but requires Strong implementability. If it is too cumbersome to implement, or if it is too expensive to implement, no matter how excellent the VI design is, it will become a castle in the air and just talk on paper because it is difficult to implement. F. Principle of conforming to aesthetic laws G. Principle of strict management The VI design system is intricate and complicated. Therefore, during the years of implementation, we must pay full attention to the randomness of each implementing department or personnel and strictly follow the VI design manual. The regulations are implemented to ensure that they are not distorted. The basic process of VI design can be roughly divided into the following four stages: A. Preparation stage: Establish a VI design team to understand and digest MI, determine the basic form throughout the VI design, and collect relevant information to facilitate comparison. The VI design team is composed of people with different strengths. It’s not about numbers, it’s about being capable and focusing on practical results. Generally speaking, it should be the senior person in charge of the enterprise. Because this person has a more thorough understanding of the company's own situation than ordinary managers and designers, and has a stronger macro grasp. The other members are mainly people from various specialized industries, with artists as the main body, supplemented by marketing personnel and market research personnel. If conditions permit, professionals from aesthetics, psychology and other disciplines will also be invited to participate in part of the design work. B. Design and development stage: Basic element design Application element design After the VI design team is established, it must first fully understand and digest the company's business philosophy, thoroughly understand the spirit of MI, and find the integration point with VI. This work relies on full communication between VI designers and enterprises. After all preparatory work is completed, the VI design team can enter the specific design stage. C. Feedback and correction stage D. Research and correction feedback E. Correction and finalization After the VI design is basically finalized, a larger-scale survey must be conducted in order to test the VI design through information feedback from a certain number of research objects at different levels. Every detail. F. Why do companies need to pay attention to VI design when compiling VI design manuals? Visual Identity (hereinafter referred to as VI) refers to the use of graphic design and other techniques to visually identify the company's inner temperament and market positioning under the guidance of the company's business philosophy. The result of transformation and visualization; it is the most direct and commonly used information platform for distinguishing, connecting and communicating between the social existence of an enterprise as an independent legal person and the economic and social environment around which it operates and survives. Corporate Visual Image and Corporate Visual Identity (VI) are not the same concept. The former is an inherent objective element of an enterprise. That is to say, no matter whether a company formulates its VI or not, and whether the VI it formulates is successful or not, the corporate visual image of the company still exists, but it is just a good one. It’s just a bad difference, and an excellent corporate visual image undoubtedly depends on a set of excellent corporate VI design.

The role of an excellent corporate VI design for an enterprise should be: 1. While clearly distinguishing the enterprise from other enterprises, it should also establish the obvious industry characteristics or other important characteristics of the enterprise to ensure that the enterprise is in the economic activities. independence and irreplaceability; clarify the market positioning of the enterprise, which is an important part of the intangible assets of the enterprise; 2. Convey the business philosophy and corporate culture of the enterprise, and promote the enterprise in an image and visual form; 3. Use yourself The unique visual symbol system attracts the public's attention and generates memory, so that consumers have the highest brand loyalty to the products or services provided by the company; 4. Improve the company's employees' sense of identification with the company and improve corporate morale. Therefore, for a modern enterprise, the absence of VI means that its image will disappear in the vast sea of ????business, making it unclear; it means that it is a money-making machine without a soul; it means that its products There is no personality to the service, and consumers are alienated from it; it means team disorganization and low morale. The business scope of the British company Virgin includes aviation, tourism, audio and video retail, beverages, finance and insurance, etc. The span is so large that it is almost unrelated, but because the company has been very successful in its various business fields Strictly implementing a unified VI system has extended its brand image well. The good service experience you enjoy at the giant Virgin video store in New York's Times Square with flashing lights is likely to inspire you to stay in the beautiful Hawaii of Meiyan. The urge to buy a can of Virgin's weird-flavored cold drink on the beach. Starbucks, a coffee chain founded in the 1970s and prosperous in the 1990s, is unique in its reintegrated VI design style. The colors and Western fonts used in its logo design are in line with traditional Coffee shops in Europe and the United States are completely different. As a result, the company's operations in the United States have been successful, and it has also achieved considerable development in China, which has no coffee culture. In fact, perhaps the best example of the role of VI design in corporate business operations is in the sports fashion industry: in many cases, whether a consumer decides to buy a set of Nike or Adidas sportswear often depends solely on him or her. Do you like Nike’s hooks or Adidas’ three stripes? From a marketing perspective, the competition of goods in the 1950s and 1960s was mainly reflected in the price competition of goods; the competition of goods in the 1970s and 1980s was mainly reflected in the quality competition of goods; with the advancement of science and technology and the various production The increasingly close production methods of enterprises have made Lenovo and Golden Great Wall computers indistinguishable in terms of price and quality. After the 1990s, the competition of goods is mainly reflected in the competition of product design. Product design here includes products. Industrial design, packaging design, store promotion design and after-sales service design, etc., and all of these designs are actually based on the company's VI design, or they are all applications or extensions of VI design. However, to use a popular saying nowadays, VI is a double-edged sword: excellent VI design can certainly help enhance the image of a company and promote its development, but a failed VI design will definitely bring negative effects to the corporate image. Influence and hinder enterprises from reaching higher levels. The failure of a VI design is often manifested in: 1. The visual positioning of the company is unclear, making people feel specious or incorrect associations; 2. The visual effect is far from the business scope and philosophy of the company and even the essence of the corporate culture Even going in the opposite direction; 3. The designer’s graphic design skills are insufficient, and the works lack internal logic and external beauty; 4. Too much pursuit of fashion and lack of long-term vitality; 5. Copying others and self-copying. Give a few examples. Once, a foreign graphic designer friend who had just arrived in China asked if all banks in China were joint ventures, because the logo designs of several banks she had seen in China all had the shadow of a circle on the outside and a square on the inside. ! While we admire this foreign colleague's sensitivity to image, we are also embarrassed by our designer's lack of inspiration. It’s not easy for banks in China to emerge like “Guangdong Development Bank”, which finally jumped out of Brother Kong Fang’s category. But if you take a closer look, the bank’s standard font design of “Guangdong Development Bank” actually uses the general font design. A standard regular script with thin strokes that is only used when typesetting text! This not only makes the relationship between the standard font design in the logo design and the circular logo on the left seriously unbalanced, but also destroys the reliable, stable and steady image that the bank should have! The logo of "Taikang Life" has a similar problem: a square that was originally very stable was rotated 45 degrees and "stands up". Does creating such an unstable intention have any positive effect on the characteristics of the insurance industry in which the company is engaged? Any visual help? If we look at individual cases, the logos of "China Telecom", "China Mobile" and "China Post" can all be regarded as excellent works. However, (perhaps because they are all designed by the same design company) their extreme similarity in structure, fonts, and even colors (of the first two) makes them lose the most valuable quality in VI design at the same time. --personality.

There are people who plagiarize themselves, and there are even more people who plagiarize others: There is a well-known sports shoe brand in China, and its product logo is simply a combination of the logos of Nike and Adidas! At present, although some high-level works occasionally appear, the existence of a large number of shoddy works makes domestic VI design as a whole still a mixed bag, good and bad. There are two reasons for this situation: corporate decision-makers and designers. From the perspective of corporate decision-makers, due to the lack of professional understanding of VI design, many corporate decision-makers do not regard it as an important aspect for the development of the enterprise when planning and determining the corporate VI design system. system engineering, but hastily launched, perfunctory, or based entirely on personal tastes and likes and dislikes, giving excessive "guidance" and interference to the designer's proposal (in most cases, the designer in order to ensure that the design project is not lost Unprincipled succumbing to this kind of guidance and interference), thus leading to the production of very unprofessional or even failed VIs, which has an extremely negative (potential) impact on the company's operations and product marketing. It must be admitted that this impact does not seem to be obvious when our country's commodity economy is not yet fully developed (in our country's economic life, there are a large number of well-known and even successful companies and products with unsatisfactory VI systems. phenomenon, such as Yadu humidifiers and Wangli security doors), but what will the situation be like in the Chinese market after entering the WTO, when facing the brightly dressed foreign counterparts? It cannot be denied that entrepreneurs, as business operators or founders, grasp the concept of the business more accurately than designers. However, in the minds of corporate decision-makers, these concepts exist in the form of text or vague text. The reason why corporate decision-makers ask designers to design is simply to visualize the corporate philosophy in text format. The work of designers is extremely professional. Entrepreneurs generally will not criticize a technical solution proposed by a technical expert, because if it is not done well, it will make people laugh; so why should they criticize a design solution? I believe that a mature entrepreneur should be clearly aware that the design of VI is by no means dispensable or just to decorate the company. Its significance lies in converting the corporate philosophy in text format into the most accurate and effective form that is easy to be understood. A visual symbol system that people recognize, remember and accept; just as there are rules for grammar, rhetoric, etc. in the text format system, the visual format system also has its own independent rules and norms, and is not any A simple game that can be played by untrained professionals. "Design is a beautiful thing in life." However, when I look out the window at those gray and red buildings in Beijing that have been left over from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, they are lifeless, styleless, personalityless, and useless. , I thought again that a failed design is by no means beautiful; a failed design is even worse than no design: even a failed architectural design will not be replaced by people in a short time due to the huge wealth value it carries. It was demolished and rebuilt, and the ugly design will accompany people with its ugliness for a long time, polluting people's vision and damaging people's souls. Therefore, in a sense, a bad architectural design is a mistake or even a crime in terms of social wealth and culture! Failed graphic design seems to be able to escape this crime due to the relatively low cost of its carrier and the relatively short-lived effect. However, for an enterprise that pursues sustainable development, the establishment of the VI system is undoubtedly an important part of the enterprise's intangible assets. It can also be said to be a century-old plan for this enterprise, and it cannot be changed at any time. Therefore, an unsuccessful or poor VI design is also a crime for the company, the employees who serve the company, the shareholders of the company, the customers or consumers of the company. This is by no means alarmist, but a serious reflection that any socially responsible intellectual should make: let us all stay away from mistakes and crimes; let our entrepreneurs and designers maintain professional ethics and integrity while pursuing interests. Social responsibility, let professionals do professional things. VI design - corporate visual identity, is a problem that must be faced seriously. How to start with enterprise VI design Implementing VI strategy is a systematic project for enterprise information dissemination. The enterprise's visual identity system conveys the corporate philosophy and corporate values ??in an organized, planned, correct, accurate and fast manner through a static, concrete and visual communication system, and runs through the business activities of the enterprise. , so that the corporate spirit, thoughts, business principles, business strategies and other subjective contents can be alienated through visual Maida. This enables the public to grasp the company's information at a glance and create a sense of identity, thereby achieving the purpose of corporate identification. The corporate identity system should be based on establishing the identity of the corporate philosophy. In other words, the content of visual identification must reflect the company's business philosophy, business policies, values ??and cultural characteristics, and should be widely disseminated uniformly in the company's business activities and social activities, and complement the company's behavior.

Therefore, the primary issue in the design of enterprise identification system is that enterprises must position themselves from the perspective of identification and development, from the perspective of society and competition, and based on this, carefully organize, analyze, review and confirm their business philosophy, The business policy, corporate mission, corporate philosophy, corporate culture, operating mechanism, corporate characteristics and future development direction are transformed into visual symbols or symbol systems. Secondly, it is to design visual symbols or symbol systems with abstract characteristics into the basic elements of visual communication, and apply them uniformly and controlledly in all aspects of corporate behavior to achieve the purpose of establishing corporate image. In the design and development process, from image concept to design concept, and then from design concept to visual symbol, are two key stages. Once these two stages are grasped, the foundation for corporate visual communication will be in place. As far as the VI design and development process is concerned, the following steps can be followed: 1. Make a design and development power of attorney and entrust a design company to clarify the development goals, themes, key points, etc. of the VI design; 2. Explain the design and development essentials and formulate new policies based on the investigation results; 3. Discuss concepts and sketches of corporate logo elements, that is, discuss and formulate logo design concepts, and then select several representative logo patterns from the majority of conceived design plans; 4. Display of corporate logo design patterns; 5. Select design and test design plans, including conducting opinion surveys on design plans from external key stakeholders and internal company employees, and then select works with beautiful shapes and good reflections; 6. The corporate logo design elements are refined. 7. Carry out refinement work on the selected logo design plan, nourish the lungs in terms of shape, and review the application in order to facilitate development and design; 7. Proposal showing essential elements and systems. The development of other basic elements can be carried out at the same time as the refinement of the logo elements, and a plan will be proposed on the relationship, usage, and regulations between the logo, elements and other basic design elements; 8. Edit basic design elements and system manual; 9. Proposal for enterprise standard application system project. Carry out application design, including business cards, stationery, signboards, business names, etc., and establish an application design system at this stage; 10. Design and development of general application projects. In addition to the projects developed and designed in the above stages, a single application design project design and development will be carried out according to the development and application plan; 11. Carry out testing and proofing; 12. Start the application of the new design; 13. Editorial design application manual. Below, we use the "Design and Development Process" table proposed in the "VI Promotion Manual" by Mr. Kato Kunihiro from Japan to illustrate: As far as the content of visual identity design and development is concerned, there are two main categories: basic elements and application elements. The design of basic elements mainly includes: corporate brand logo, standard words, standard colors, spiritual slogans, corporate shapes, symbolic patterns and the combination design of basic elements.