Guide Your Brand with these Elements
“Find your creative voice, unify it across your platforms to deliver the same strong image to potential customers that they will remember.”
There’s a reason that branding is one of the most popular topics in business. Branding is so much more than just giving your business a pretty face; it gives your business character and a brand that shares your purpose and messaging.
Finding your creative voice, being able to unify it across your platforms, you give potential customers a strong image of your brand that they will remember.
I will speak about unifying your brand online, but also know when to diversify it. If you have various business focuses, try and meld them together to make your niche personal brand content—you’ll be surprised as to how many people fall in your bubble.
Separate your brands if they have wildly different focuses or you think you will have a surplus of one type of content. You can have your wellness personal brand image for all the things you love to share but if you’re also super into yoga, the gym, cooking, finance, journaling, etc, just any single thing; I would recommend making a separate brand just for that.
A Strong Logo
Your logo represents your brand to the world. It will be placed on your business card, your social media pages, your advertising, your website, and anywhere else you are active.
A strong logo should be simple enough to fit in with any other text or images you might have on hand, but it also needs to stand alone as unique and distinctive.
Your Colour Palette
Whether it’s a website or a brand, you can be certain you’ll need a reliable set of brand colours that represent your brand and will be used in all your visuals. Colours are the first impression that consumers get to know your brand with.
There are so many things to consider; What do the colours say about your brand? Are they unique? Will it be difficult for users to read or see what they need on your website? Are there too many colours being used? How should you mix and match them?
“It takes about 90 seconds for someone to form an opinion of a brand. Within that time, between 62% and 90% of decisions are influenced by colour alone”
I’m not a big fan of the colour yellow, yet it became one of my main brand colours. I started down a path with colours based on my personal preferences instead of what I wanted to reflect in my brand and they did not work.
Editing my pictures to fit the scheme was annoying and just 2 steps more than I wanted it to be. The colours I thought were my favourite and perfect for my brand were now just hurting my eyes and making me feel cold. They went together I thought, but just not with my brand image I guess.
Editing the pictures to match my site was getting annoying. So I went looking for pictures of similar colours I could match my site to instead. Turns out I have a lot of yellow and blue naturey pics. I found a series taken in a picturesque place that I could see being used as backgrounds or headers and uploaded one of those to Adobe Color.
Using that, I made a pleasant palette that was much more versatile for my brand needs. Without really thinking about the psychology behind it, I took my brand from a cold/sensitive/arrogant vibe to a energetic/innovative/intelligent vibe instead.
Image from Colour Counts: How to Choose your Brand Colour by How&How. Click image to read the full article.
If you already have a logo or mood board
Extract your colour palette from an image by uploading it into a free online generator.
I personally like Adobe’s extractor because it’s free, I can save palettes to a library, share palettes with clients to edit, browse uploaded palettes for ideas, and adjust my palettes to be harmonious in specific ways or improve the accessibility qualities of them.
Image from Brand Colors: How to Choose The Right Ones for Your Brand by Visme. Click image to read the full article.
Creating a colour palette from scratch
If you don’t have a mood board for your brand already I highly recommend you start a folder with a bunch of imagery that inspires your brand. Ideally you want to download them all to one place so you can reference them for your brand and possibly imagery you want to use.
When you put these pictures into one collage you get your brand’s mood board and can upload that into the colour extractor and start getting inspired. Use Canva or Instagram stories to quickly and simply collage your inspiration images into one mood board.
Upload the image of your mood board, or even a long screenshot of your website or Instagram feed. From the auto extraction, go in and play with the palette and tune it to your liking. I normally ignore shades in my main palette of 5 as they are easy to establish after and won’t stray far from black, white, and grey.
First rendition.
Pulling a new palette based on what the website turned out to be.
Final fine-tuned result.
Balance your palette with 2 dark colours and 2 light colours. Use that last 1 to be your extra contrasty or neutral colour, whatever you are missing. My thought process goes like this:
What is my main background colour?
So on top of that, what colours will my headers and body text look good in?
What is my bright alerting colour?
What looks good and compliments those 4 colours? Normally, another shade of an existing colour. Do you have one dark enough? Light enough?
Find Your Font
When you’re picking a typeface for your business, there are a few stereotypes that consumers use to judge typography by subconsciously. Some will be more suited to your brand than others.
Finding, Choosing, and Pairing Brand Fonts by Elle & Co.
First: take the time and think through what kind of feeling or message you want your brand to convey. Don’t just pick something because it looks cool or is popular right now. Take time to think through what will make your business stand out, and if it fits with the image you want to project.
What Different Font Types Mean & How To Use Them by Digital Synopsis. Lots of great infographics, check out the full article.
Second: Give each brand font a “job.” Choose one font for your headers, one font for your body text, and maybe one other accent font (maybe). This streamlines your brand by creating consistency.
Associated Imagery
These might be part of your mood board, or things you find/create afterwards. Cornerstone content pieces that embody your brand’s aspects (colours, fonts, logo, brand personality) to create image assets to be used on your social media, as header or footers on your website, print media, and more.
Image Assets
Social Media Assets
Have fun discovering your brand
Now that you know all about branding and how important it is to differentiate your business from competitors you’re ready to go give your brand a makeover. Today more than ever we are actually watching brands become more similar. Having branding that stands out and actually connects with customers has become a key factor in companies’ success.
If you've been struggling to figure out what your brands personality is, I can help! With my branding package we'll dive into the key aspects of what you think your brand is and what it should be for your customers. Let’s bring your brand to the next level.
