Design tip #2 - really know your branding
Welcome to our Design Tips series. There’s more to graphic design than ‘simply’ creating beautiful posters, flyers, logos, websites, and infographics. We’ve written these posts to help you enhance your designs. If you consider these tips when creating your designs, they will look and perform better.
In this post, we’ll uncover how well you know your brand and give you some top tips for how to really know your brand better. Why does it matter? Knowing your brand like that back of your hand will help you to create better content, more consistent content, and content that is noticed by and appeals to the right people.
It’s more than a logo
If you run a business, the likelihood is that you either:
1. have a logo, or
2. are considering getting a logo
but have you considered more than that?
Your brand goes way beyond your logo and can weave its way into even the tiniest of details in the content that you make and share.
Ensuring that you know every aspect of your brand really well, will help you to create the best content for your business - be that social media posts, flyers, website content, presentations, booklets, reports, etc.
A Crafted Colour Palette
Do you know your brand colours? Are you happy with them? If you don’t feel excited or inspired by your brand colours, you may find that you don’t use them consistently and often add in splashes of other colours here and there. The problem with this, is that your brand gets watered down by an ever-changing colour scheme.
Instead, it’s better to revisit your colour palette, list your colours, and stick to that list.
Did you know that your colour palette can include a wide range of colours? If your brand is a colourful one, there’s no reason to restrict yourself down to one or two colours.
You can put together a list of primary colours - these are the one(s) you use the most, the main colour(s) - as well as a list of secondary colours. Secondary colours are the ones you’ll add every now and then, perhaps to highlight particular information, quotes, icons, or stats.
If you’d like to strengthen your brand further, you can make a note of where you will use each colour and where it’s inappropriate to do so, such as: “we use our bright yellow to highlight over dark text but never use yellow for text on a white background”.
Familiar Fonts
What fonts do you use for your business? Have you got one or two that you stick to, or do you pick and chose fonts to suit the content you’re creating? As with changing colours, if you’re always picking new fonts, your visual brand and the designs you create become weaker.
It’s better to choose your brand font(s) and stick to them, so that they become familiar to your audience.
We’ve shared some top tips for choosing fonts in our previous Design Tips post:
1. Check your main brand fonts aren’t so popular that they’re over-used
2. Try to have no more than 2 fonts in 1 design and experiment with different pairings
3. Choose your fonts wisely so that they can be read easily
Ideal Imagery
We’ve covered your logo, your brand colours, and your fonts, but it doesn’t stop there. Think about the content you create for your business - social media posts, presentations, your website, anything you get printed. Are you using images? If you are, what do these images look like?
Images can help you to convey your brand message, so it’s a good idea to consider the types and styles of the images that you share.
Think about the tone of your images - how do people feel when they look at them? E.g. happy, welcomed, inspired. What about how the images look? E.g. are they edited or natural, in colour or black and white, do they contain a particular colour or subject matter?
Make a note of the types and styles of the images you will share, and refer back to it every time you create something new until you know it like the back of your hand.
Diving Deeper
We’ve spoken about a few different aspects of your visual branding that will help you to create better, on-brand, consistent content that appeals to the right people. But it doesn’t stop here. Some other ways you can really know your brand are:
Know your tone of voice - you can use Chat GPT to help you get started with defining your tone of voice if this isn’t something you have done before.
Know about all of your extra assets (GIFs, templates, icons, etc.) and organise them into folders you can easily access when you need to use them.
Know your brand story
The more time you spend getting to know your branding, the more naturally it will come when you need to use it.
Bloom Creative is a design business based in Kent who support local and national businesses with a range of services that enhance their brand and get them seen and remembered, including: quality digital content, eye-catching print design, and bespoke branding & brand refreshes.
If you’re interested in our services and/or getting to know us better, you can book in a virtual coffee break call with founder Amy Walters.
