Brand Design vs Product Design: Key Differences

Everything that we look at when making buying decisions or deciding upon the product to choose involves design. However, there sometimes comes perplexion when trying to distinguish the difference between brand and product design. The product design vs UX design is also often taken as different concepts, though it is not really so.


This article sheds light on different design types and explains how they differ or supplement each other. Also, it explains brand designer vs graphic designer challenges and principal tasks. By going through this article, you will learn more about brand product design marketing in detail.


Differentiating the concepts in design and marketing is essential for your business. A clear understanding of the difference between brand and product within a digital approach will help you to create deliberate and effective marketing strategies. As a result, the quality of your products along with the awareness of your brand will get more advanced.

Differences between brand and product visual concepts

To make things clear, let’s start investigating the parts of each term before plunging into in-depth analysis of the differences between product and brand design. So, let’s draw out a basic idea of brand or branding and product as an item developed by some establishment.

What is a brand?

Very often the brand title is associated with the name of the company it belongs to but that might not always be the case. One company may develop several different brands so that each of them would be associated with it.

Typically, a brand is a collective concept that usually refers to a combination of text, visual representations, and ideas combined. The concept of a brand is very profound as it includes such notions as brand image, brand awareness, brand identity, etc. However, the main purpose of each brand is to carry the idea to its audience via textual, symbolic, and visual representations.

What is a product?

When referring to a product, items of different types ranging from common things like shower gel to autumn coats or cars come into mind. Thus, a product is an item you can buy in stores or on online e-commerce platforms.

What is brand development?

Creating a brand is not enough to make it widely recognizable and respectable on the market. To increase awareness of a brand, especially an emerging one, there is a need for extensive marketing activities. One of those is brand design, involving various specialists that develop its visual representation and the message it carries.

Most brand development activities take place online these days, involving digital marketing approaches. You can either reach larger audiences by posting on social media or find relevant blogs promoting your brand there.

What is product development?

The process of product development is tightly associated with industrial design which consists of several stages. Creating a product is always a complex thing, so you should properly think of its purpose to users first, then start developing, and decide on how to promote it further.

Unlike brand development, making a product refers to a specific item that serves definite purposes. Meanwhile, brand development automatically includes the promotion of several products manufactured under a particular brand.

The right processes will make sure that your company stands out from the competitive crowd and establish you as a reliable brand. Business owners are often looking for a reliable product design and development service to outsource their work and take professional help. This gives them peace of mind and frees them up to concentrate on other key aspects of their company.

What is brand design?

After having explored in detail what a brand is and how it is developed, it would be easy to figure out what brand design is. So, the elaboration of textual and visual concepts for a trademark or company is called brand design. Those are usually graphic designers and UX designers that work on the creation of the brand image.

What is product design?

Unlike brand design, the product creation process involves a considerably larger scope of professionals. Product design requires the effort of architects, designers, programmers, market analysts, and other specialists depending on the type of the product.

The difference between brand and product design

Granulating each of these concepts has made it possible to derive the difference between the product and brand design. Thus, when it comes to the creation of new items, the product design comes in handy. When we need to increase awareness of your company and its trademarks, then the brand design is used.

The latter concept is a more broad one as it refers to a series of products manufactured by the company. Meanwhile, product design is narrowly focused but more complex at the same time.

The role of research and development in brand and product design marketing also varies. For instance, it might play a fundamental role in product design and might not interfere to brand design at all.

Product design vs UX design role for branding

The development of a brand involves several stages that refer to product design and UX design for sure. Both of these concepts are also interrelated and can be used together for accomplishing definite purposes. However, these notions are not interchangeable as they represent completely autonomous operations.

What is UX design?

As we have already discussed in detail what product design is, there is a need to explore the concept of UX design before initiating a comparison. It is also important to mention that UX design is tightly associated and often comes along with UI design.

To make things clear, UX design stands for user experience design that takes care of all user interactions and impressions on digital platforms. This notion is commonly used in the digital world rather than in traditional marketing approaches as it refers to websites, online platforms, social media, etc.

When it comes to UX design, it is impossible not to mention the UI design as well. It stands for user interface design and focuses on digital graphic elements. The UI design determines how the web page would look like, what colors would be used, what elements would be presented, etc.

User experience and user interface design notions are tightly interconnected only with the difference in the particular things to pay attention to. Each UX designer needs to make sure that a user will feel comfortable within the digital instance, while a UI designer is primarily focused on the construction of graphic elements.

What is the difference between product and UX design?

When comparing these terms, let’s observe product design vs UX design in the digital world. In fact, UX design is existent primarily in the digital sphere, while product design is also widely present in the offline environment.

To begin with comparison, product design in the digital world is complex as it starts from the development of the website or application architecture to its extensive testing. Product design involves UX and UI design as one of the stages of the product development and testing. Thus, it is safe to say that UX design could be a part of the product design but those concepts are not equal in any case.

Brand designer vs graphic designer principal tasks

It is also crucial to mention specialists who are involved in those different types of design compared. In particular, the roles of brand designer and graphic designer are of special interest.

What does a brand designer do?

A typical brand designer is a creative professional specialized in visual communication, marketing, art, and other similar disciplines. Such a professional is involved in the development of visual products and messages that represent a brand.

The most common task of a brand designer is the creation of logos using dedicated graphic tools. Those should match the brand style and convey the brand idea in the form of a visual message to the target audience.

Very often, a brand designer also occupies the creation of templates for emails, social media, and other digital platforms of a company. When accomplishing those tasks, a brand designer needs to make sure that the visual components represent the brand idea.

What does a graphic designer do?

A typical graphic designer may include a wider range of tasks than a brand designer. Apart from concentrating on the company’s brand identity visual elements, a graphic designer might be also responsible for product packaging, advertisements, photo editing with the help of different services like PhotoRetouchingServices.net, illustrations, and other elements that may not refer to a specific brand.

Graphic designer vs brand designer differences

To better understand the difference between those two types of professional creators, you should observe brand designer vs graphic designer work examples. However, it is also necessary to mention that both of those professionals focus on product design marketing without any doubt.

Final thoughts

This article has discussed in detail and compared various design concepts as well as design creator roles. Thus, it is now clear that the concept of design refers to multiple spheres and tasks.

When talking about brand design, product design, and UX design, it is necessary to note that all of them are separate notions though interrelating with each other. Thus, brand design involves the creation of visual concepts carrying the company’s message. Product design focuses on the full-stack development of digital or manufactured products, which should correlate with brand design. Meanwhile, UX design could be a part of the product design process as well as brand design focusing on the user experience through visual elements.

To make design concepts embodied, those are brand and graphic designers responsible for that. Both these roles are very similar, intending that a design creator makes visual and graphic components. The difference is that a brand designer primarily focuses on brand identity elements, while graphic designers may have other tasks that do not obligatorily refer to branding.