A Guide to Building Brand Identity in Appian

When we develop applications, we sometimes only focus on the “how”—how to build the processes, how to architect the data structure, and how to encode the correct logic. But for users, the "what" is their reality—and sometimes that’s overlooked during development. An application that looks and feels like your brand identity isn't just visually appealing. It builds trust, reduces cognitive load, and makes your application more enjoyable for your users.

Corporate design principles translate directly into business value. By leveraging Appian’s UI design capabilities, you can transform your application ecosystem into a cohesive extension of your company's identity.

• Reduced cognitive load. When an app follows consistent branding (e.g., when Submit buttons always look the same and navigation is consistent), users don’t have to constantly re-learn how to use your product—reducing frustration and helping them achieve outcomes sooner.

• Emotional connection. Customers who feel emotionally connected to a brand’s identity are three times more likely to recommend it to others.  

• Revenue growth. Companies that maintain brand consistency across their platforms see an average revenue increase of 10–20%.

With the benefits of a strong brand identity in mind, here are some important considerations when creating one:

• Coherence, not just consistency. Every interaction with your application should feel like it’s crafted by the same team. If a user moves from your onboarding portal to an internal site and suddenly encounters different navigation patterns, button styles, or visual cues, the experience loses its coherence. This can create cognitive friction and undermine trust in the system. 

• Scalability. Build your brand identity as a system, not a collection of individual design decisions, to make it easier to maintain consistency as the organization grows. A scalable brand is built from reusable design elements such as colors, typography, and components that work together consistently across applications. Brad Frost’s Atomic Design provides one such approach, organizing design elements from atoms (colors and fonts) to organisms (large components such as headers). With this structure in place, changes to a foundational element can be reflected across the entire application ecosystem.

• Functional colors. To be effective, symbols and colors should have a fixed meaning. If your main brand color is red and you use red for error messages, buttons, and links, the color can lose its specific meaning. Reputable design systems like IBM Carbon or Google Material recommend a semantic palette where specific colors are reserved for specific statuses.

As you build out your applications and your brand identity, consider the following helpful universal design best practices: 

• Establish visual hierarchy. Design interfaces should be easily scannable with an intuitive structure. Use clear structural containers like sections, tabs, and cards to organize information. Vary typographic size and weight across heading levels to create a clear hierarchy that guides users to critical details.

• Select components intentionally. A common mistake is using the wrong component for the wrong action. Use buttons for actions that change data (Submit, Approve, Delete). Use links for navigation and secondary actions (View Details, Open Document).

• Prioritize accessibility. A branded app must be usable for everyone. If using CSS, use color choices that meet WCAG contrast standards. 

• Maintain visual density. Your user interface needs white space to look professional and prevent user fatigue. Use appropriate margins and padding in columns and sections. 

• Design for multiple devices. Make sure your interface is responsive to different screen sizes. (In Appian, leverage a!isPageWidth() and the stackWhen parameter.)

Appian makes it easy to adhere to brand identity principles. With the Design Library, extending your brand identity across the enterprise is a simple drag-and-drop exercise. Whether you’re creating a seamless journey from unauthenticated portals to authenticated sites, automatically leveraging accessibility standards baked into the product, or defining custom functional colors, Appian provides the tools and guardrails you need. 

We’ll now walk through a brand identity exercise using a fictional company, InsureCorp. They already have a logo and core color palette and are building their first application—to collect and manage insurance quotes.

The steps below illustrate how InsureCorp translated those existing brand assets into a cohesive application experience. While your organization's needs, industry, and applications may differ, this example provides a practical framework for establishing a scalable brand identity before development begins. 

Before building anything, InsureCorp developed their branding guidelines. For inspiration, they looked at mockups of their applications and Appian’s SAIL Inspiration Page to find high-quality patterns and layouts that match their brand’s intent. They established clear guidelines for typography, capitalization conventions, button corner radius, and other visual design elements. 

Tip: The more design decisions you make upfront, the easier it will be to build coherent experiences. 

They then built a site for their quote generation team. After uploading their logo, they configured key brand elements, including accent colors, button shape and capitalization, header styling, input rounding, and dialog rounding. In Atomic Design terms, these foundational settings serve as the “atoms” of the experience, inherited by all the “organisms” (pages) of the site. 

At the same time, another team member worked on a public-facing portal (unauthenticated experience) where prospective customers can self-register to request a quote. 

As development progressed, InsureCorp realized they needed more granular control over the look-and-feel of their applications. The standard site branding configurations weren’t quite enough—they wanted to control exact font sizes, custom input padding, tooltip styles, and individual colors for error and success indicators. To achieve this, they used Appian’s new CSS profile properties. This major enhancement gives organizations the flexibility to tweak the micro-interactions of their sites and portals.

InsureCorp created a centralized CSS profile in the Admin Console and set it as the default for the environment. With a single click, both their internal employee sites and public customer portals automatically inherited these CSS properties. This ensured that all existing and future experiences align with the InsureCorp brand.

Appian also made it easy for InsureCorp to kickstart development of new interfaces. When starting from a foundation of record types, developers can choose from consistent templates as a starting point. These accelerators ensure design cohesion in record actions and views across your data fabric.

As InsureCorp developers designed and built out their interfaces, they used the branding preview to make sure each aligned with the company’s branding standards. By selecting one of their employee sites or public customer portals, the branding preview automatically pulled in all of the set branding configurations to make testing a breeze. 

As a part of this interface, InsureCorp built a header they can use as an example for other sites they create. The team lead added it to the Design Library so developers can easily reuse this component in the future. By promoting best practices directly in Appian Designer, InsureCorp can ensure that their style is applied consistently across teams in their organization in an easily maintained way.

Your brand is the sum of every click, hover, and submission a user makes. Having a compelling brand identity and design differentiates a tool from being something users have to use to something they want to use. In Appian, by starting with site object branding, refining the details with CSS Profiles, and governing the output with the Design Library, you can transform your application into a cohesive and trustworthy ecosystem. 

Ready to elevate your UI? Start by reviewing your existing applications and identifying where consistency can be improved. Use your corporate style guide as a lens to reimagine and refine the experience. Your users experience what you build—make sure the experience is intentional, coherent, and enjoyable.

Learn more about designing for your users.