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Brand: The Visual Story
What Makes A Great B2B Website?  Part 2 of 4

Arturo Perez, CEO - Kluge Interactive

In Part 1 of this four-part series, we addressed the importance of the three pillars to an effective B2B website: a connected effort between the Brand, Content, and User Experience (UX) — turning your company story into a lead generating machine. In this part two in the series, we focus on Brand.

Beyond the logo, the brand speaks of the company’s sense of self. Brand guidelines such as typography and color palette help to create a clean and consistent hierarchy of ideas.

Other brand assets that help B2B companies visually communicate throughout their websites include photography, iconography, videos, and super graphics.

To give you a better understanding on how brands can visually communicate their messaging, below are three key factors that we implemented on a corporate website redesign for TeleSign, a mobile identity solutions leader. The company sought us out to design a website that could communicate complicated technological ideas into simple solutions.
 

1. Less is More — Since simplicity was key, our typography choice included only one main typeface (Open Sans) and three font styles (light, semibold and extrabold). While our general color palette included five different color choices, we chose to stick primarily with blue, utilizing green for calls-to-action, and grey for contrast.

By choosing to use a single main color, and a single typeface, the Homepage was clean, and the call-to-action was easily recognizable.

2. Getting Clever with Photos — While the web site is primarily a combination of copy and icons, photography was a way to add warmth and personality. Rather than going through the expense of professional photo shoots, we created guidelines for utilizing stock photography.

Colored filters and low-poly textures, for example, enabled us to uniquely carry the theme throughout the site without losing the branded design.

In order to inspire potential employees to join the company, we used breathtaking landscape stock photography that showcased the various regions of the company’s multiple locations.

With a simple cascading style sheet (CSS) techniques to encircle the employee photos, we were able to turn simple photos into stunning testimonials.

3. Iconography, Infographics, and The Super Graphic — Icons and graphics are a powerful way to visually communicate your content.  The selecting of the style and type is based on the amount of content those key elements will be representing.  Early in the development process we decided that creating our own icons would be a necessary aspect to telling a better company story. For the Product Solutions, we went with “linework” icons, and for all other secondary messaging, we utilized “flat skinny” icons.

Core solution offerings received the linework treatment, which is more involved, telling a more complex story behind each solution.

“Flat skinny” icons helped to inject personality into the story and reinforce simpler messaging.

The Super Graphic is all about contextual layering in imagery. This technique is a brand asset that can personalize and add depth to your overall image story. If you look closely at the image you can see a geometric pattern, known as the “super graphic” that we built to add a layer of identity and personality to the company’s assets. The low-ploy treatment accentuates all key graphics throughout the website, allowing to tell an engaging story to users.

By building strong brand assets we were able to help the TeleSign marketing team tell a strong story aided by visual communication that reinforced the company’s leadership in the space, its understanding of Mobile Identity, and its core offerings.

In Part 3 of this four-part series, we address a content-first approach, in Content -- The Real SEO.

I welcome your comments, and invite you to share this information.

Arturo Perez, CEO Kluge Interactive

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