Finding your space in a saturated online market can be challenging. Here is how you can use your brand design to position your business uniquely.
Brand Design is the visual part of your brand identity that attracts your audience and Dream Clients. From your social media posts to your logo, how you present your brand design is important to ensure that you position yourself as someone offering a unique service to others in your industry. Here are my tips on how you can use brand design to position your business.
Colour Palette
Cadburys had a good reason for trademarking their "purple". We recognise a brand's colours before we read any content - think Coca-Cola's "red" and IKEA's iconic "blue and Yellow".
Your colour palette needs to be consistent with the exact hex colour and ensure they are used across your entire brand: from your Facebook header to your uniforms (if you have them). I use 3 main criteria and combine them to create a unique colour palette for my clients:
1) What colours represent your personality?
2) What colours are your audience attracted to?
3) What colours represent the impact you want your brand to have?
Typeface & Fonts
Many people don't realise that Typefaces (e.g. Bookman Old Style, Gill Sans, Arial) and fonts (e.g. bold, italic, thin) are designed. There are some very talented people out there who create typefaces for us all to use. And like design work they are all different dependent on your brand. A brand that wants to denote the feeling of legacy and longevity may use typefaces such as Playfair (KLC's heading Typeface), while a brand that wants to attract a younger audience may use Comic Sans.
Choosing your typeface and fonts for your brand design can be as important as your colour palette or imagery. My tips for choosing are:
1) Always choose a web-safe typeface in addition to your main typefaces (because not everyone may have your beautiful script typeface on their device).
2) Use Script typeface sparingly - the harder things are to read the less likely people will engage in you.
3) Not all typefaces are free! For many of them, you need to pay a license which varies dependent on what you want to use it for and where you want to use it. You can get free typefaces (my fav place is Fontspace) but be mindful that not all the characters may have been created (think your exclamation marks and currency icons) and make sure "Commercial Use" is selected.
Images
Imagery enhances the feelings and emotions you want to create when your audience interacts with your business. Whilst getting your brand photography is a great way to get the images you wish (and if you need some recommendations I have some fab ones I can put you in contact with!) if stock imagery is what you can afford right now here are my tips:
1) Photographers also create feelings and emotions in their imagery - from the subject matter to the colours and lighting.
2) If you work with people you need to have people in the images you use. As consumers were like to see that you work with people similar to us.
3) Product business? Show your products being used: how low does the bag you create hang? How big are those earrings in your ears? What does ink look like when you write in the notebook you've created?
The Important Part!
All of the above areas of your brand design are created by focusing on the strategy of your brand. This includes your origin story, tone of voice, content pillars and brand attributes. This is what makes your brand unique and is the foundation for positioning your business properly.
By working on your brand design you can uniquely position your business to stand out online. However, to get the structure of your brand design in place you must first focus on the brand strategy. If you need help with this check out my services.