Words: Matt Roundell – Design Director
Category(s): Branding, Content
Date: 17th March 2026
Content design today *dramatic sigh*. Too often, brands end up with content (be it a report, ebook, digital guide or something else) that’s a poor relation to their visual identity, or that requires a disproportionately large amount of effort to get right. I blame the process – or, more accurately, the fact that most companies treat brand design and content design as two processes instead of one connected process.
In traditional branding setups, at the end of the visual identity process, a client gets a set of guidelines, a toolkit and maybe a few templates (depending on the scope). This point – when the branding agency’s work is done – is often where a B2B marketing agency enters the picture. They’re enlisted to create content in the new identity. But both the branding and content marketing agency are set up to fail.
The visual identity is designed without an intricate understanding of content best practices and execution. Then the content marketers and designers have their hands tied by the functional constraints of the visual identity.
At Beneath, we prefer to lay the brand foundations ourselves. But as a full-service agency that works happily across both visual identity and content design, we’re no strangers to making a fashionably late arrival to the party, having worked with clients who’ve come to us after their visual identity has been created.
Because we understand both sides of the process, we’re able to anticipate how a brand will hold up when it’s applied to campaigns. And from this vantage point, we can proactively avoid classic pitfalls and obstacles.
To show you what I mean, here are five key lessons we’ve learned from content projects, which now shape the way we approach identity design – helping brands not only look the part but work effectively in action.
5 best practices for designing a B2B brand visual identity with content in mind
1. Ensure brand guidelines don’t leave designers with gaps
One of the most common situations we encounter at Beneath is working with brand guidelines that are still in progress. Usually that looks like a basic toolkit with logos, typefaces, colours and icons. Sometimes we’ll get lucky and have a starting point for content design, such as a vector-based hero style or a set of stock images.
While this is a helpful foundation, it’s not really enough to confidently build a full, sophisticated marketing campaign – over all the formats and channels that entails today. That’s why we focus on a comprehensive but flexible framework in every visual identity project.
We aim to cover all the bases, including layout principles, illustration styles, grid systems, hierarchy rules, texture or pattern usage, right down to outlining the use of white or empty space. We’ll show some examples of different applications, too. This equips designers with all the core elements they need, plus some inspiration to jump off from.
2. Extend the brand’s palette
Similarly, the most useful brand guidelines offer designers variety. Colour plays one of the biggest roles here.
A limited colour palette can be a gift, forcing discipline, consistency and recognisable visual cues. But in content design, a lack of range in your palette can curse every campaign and asset with looking the same, suffocating designers and prompting an unwelcome déjà vu feeling in your audience.
Colour can help distinguish topics, themes and formats, improving the user experience. That’s why we build a wider set of colour combinations and define a clear hierarchy, so the design system stays consistent but still facilitates the flexibility needed to produce varied content.
3. Give brand guidelines room to breathe
There’s a fine balance when it comes to brand guidelines. In our view at Beneath, they should offer clear, robust guidance for creating branded assets, but stop short of overly prescriptive step-by-step instructions. Allowing for a healthy dose of interpretation and imagination within guidelines helps designers approach projects with more creativity and ultimately deliver a more interesting (but still on-brand) campaign.
The best guidelines we’ve worked with strike this balance well. They make it easy to look at a design and gauge whether it falls within the brand’s boundaries, could be developed further within the scope, or strays too far from the original intent.
4. Make your visual identity move
Video is invariably one of the key deliverables for every content campaign we take on. Yet it’s still surprisingly rare to see brands factor motion into their plans.
It comes back to my earlier point. If your brand identity is built with flexibility in mind, creating a promotional video or even something as simple as a logo sting, shouldn’t be a heavy lift. But when there’s no foundation to work from, the process takes twice as long.
5. Consider data visualisation
In B2B tech campaigns, data and how it’s visualised comes up a lot. After all, thought leaders don’t want to parrot well-known industry stats back at their audience; they want to be the ones providing that definitive research. So brands need an original way of visualising data that’s effective but recognisably you.
Make a seamless link between visual identity and data visualisation, and you’ll reinforce your brand’s consistency while also making your data easy to digest. So we make sure our visual identities can translate easily into data visualisation.
That might mean using a core brand shape as a graphic element repeated across a chart, or applying a custom line style to bring a bit of brand character to a line graph. It keeps the brand present, even in the smallest details.
Find the visual identity x content design sweetspot
Visual identity and content design are their own disciplines. But handing each one to different agencies can result in a “prepare for trouble and make it double” situation. To spare yourself the disjointed process and the disappointing end results, get an agency that can do both visual identity and content design.