Do You Recognise This Tea Flask? Transformation of brand-specific product identity through visual design cues

To create a recognisable and distinctive brand and product identity through design is a challenge for companies. What are the design elements through which users distinguish between products? What is the content of design that users employ to make this recognition? To explore this issue, a Master-level student design project was organised. In the project, design students first analysed the brand, identity, and visual form design of various car brands. The second task was to transform the brand-specific design elements to a wholly different product category. As a verification test, experienced designers later assessed which car brands the products could represent. The verification test showed that some products were more consistently recognised than others. The recognition was primarily based on visual qualities of the products, suggesting that some products presented stronger brand-specific elements carried by their visual design. The results of this exploratory project are presented and analysed in this paper. The paper aims to show an example of how a structured analysis of product brand essence can be employed in order to develop product design, which successfully inherits the core identity carrying elements of the brand, albeit in a wholly different product type and form design. The experiment shows that visual recognition of a branded product takes place both through explicit design cues and through merely implicit associations related to the brand and its products. The paper suggests that it is possible to intentionally develop the character of a product (and thus to channel user interpretation into a desired direction) utilizing design elements and features, which connote specific recognition and interpretation on various form levels.