Another factor many feel is holding them back from building a professional and memorable brand is resource restrictions. Inexperience and budget constraints certainly aren’t ideal but they aren’t an excuse for publishing and promoting poorly designed brand assets. This article will cover some basic but effective brand design tips as well as some free design resources.
Your Logo is Your Branding Foundation
The design direction of your brand is set by your logo. All too often entrepreneurs get a website developed first or simply buy a template and then slap a logo on it. Your logo shouldn’t be an afterthought. It’s the ultimate branding tool and visual representation of what your business sells and stands for. Before you design any brand asset make sure you get a logo in place that resonates with your core demographic. If you don’t have the resources to hire a design agency or freelancer you can use a free logo design application like Logo Creator. Whichever route you choose make sure you try lots of different logo concepts before finalizing. It’s also recommended to gather unbiased feedback from potential leads or other stakeholders.
Find the Right Brand Colors
With your logo in place it’s now time to think color scheme. Of course the main color used in your logo will also be your core branding color. If you were to only use one color your brand assets would start to look a bit boring and repetitive. Of course you want to repetition in order to enforce your brand color but it’s also nice to have a few accent colors in place that you can use to enhance your designs visually. These accent colors should complement your core color. Matching colors properly is difficult even for experienced designers. If you don’t have an eye for design try a free color matcher tool like Color Explorer. Colors aren’t just a tool to make your promotional material look pretty. Each color evokes a different meaning. Before you choose your core branding color during the logo process you should study what emotional responses different colors evoke. It’s crucial to use branding colors that resonate with your target audience if you are looking to build a memorable brand.
Create Consistency Across All of Your Brand Assets
Consistency is king when it comes to building a professional brand. If you only take away one thought from this article it’s to be very consistent in your design choices. Whether you are designing your website, business cards, social media posts or flyers make sure there’s a cohesiveness to them all. You can achieve that by implementing your logo in high-resolution format across all of your brand assets. In addition to including your logo it’s best practice to also add your core branding color. No matter where a potential lead discovers your brand they should always have the same visual experience. Don’t stop at your logo and brand color. There are other visual aids you can use to create further cohesiveness. Images, icons and fonts are all wonderful tools to not only elevate the quality of your design but to further strength brand recognition. The trick is to limit your choices and to use those items repeatedly. For example find a set of images you like and use those exclusively across your website, presentations and social media. With repetition viewers will soon start to associate those photos as part of your branding since they all have he same look and feel.
Leverage Free Design Resources to Help With Your Branding Efforts
With the tips highlighted above you are ready to take on your branding project. Building a memorable brand takes time and resources. There’s no substitute for time but luckily there are a lot of free design resources that you can leverage if you are dealing with resource constraints. Here are just a few to get you started on the right track:
• Free Images: Search professionally shot images and download in high-resolution format. You are granted commercial rights and can use any of their images for free.
• FreePik: FreePik offers over 80,000 free icons that you can download in PNG, EPS and SVG format. These icons are available for personal and commercial use.
• Urban Fonts: Fonts are another great branding tool. Urban Fonts offers a large database of free fonts that you can download in TTF format for instant use.