If you’re starting a new business, there’s quite a bit of planning you need to do. From planning your product/service to doing some napkin maths on the business model and how profitable it might be, there’s a lot to be mindful of and hopefully a lot to be excited about, too.
One important aspect of your new business to consider is branding. While not the number one priority, it should be something on your to-do list. Branding isn’t reserved only for big companies, but even small businesses should have a fairly uniform style of branding and marketing that gradually makes your business more and more recognisable.
Specific parts of your business branding can and should differ (a little, or a lot) from competitors’ and your style choices are ultimately up to you, but one thing that is highly recommended is to have a branding guide set up as you go along so that you have a point of reference for all media – digital and print media – going forward.
Here are a few quick tips to set up your branding guide:
Colours do play a role in psychology, perhaps not as much as some hype them up to be, but they are still impactful regardless. Your brand colours should reflect the type of product/service you offer and the type of aesthetic you want to convey.
Do take some time to fidget around with different colours. Start with, say, two core colours and two secondary colours (so, four total). This will come in handy when designing a website, for example.
While you don’t have to be an expert on colours, give Canva’s colour guide a quick read and play with their free calculator tool to see complementary and other colour combinations that might work.
Fonts (or technically, typeface) also play an important role in conveying the “feel” of your business. Some fonts are fun and exciting, some are elegant and classy, others are minimalistic, still others are plain and “normal.”
Try to settle on two fonts, one main font for the logo and headers of content you’ll produce, and a “normal” font for body text. There are plenty of guides that can assist you with choosing good font pairings, but play around with a few before settling on your preferred fonts.
Designing a logo is easier than ever today, but getting the logo just how you want it? That can still be fairly difficult and you might need to play around with graphic design software or hire a graphic designer to get it just how you want it. The logo will likely be on pretty much all printed materials and digital assets, so it’s gonna get a lot of visibility.
It’s important that everything discussed so far that you’ve finalised gets marked down in a guide. For simplicity, use Google Docs or Microsoft Word and use headers or tables to mark down your colours, fonts, and other important elements.
Nowadays, a lot of people are using applications like Figma to whiteboard everything, including brand and style guides. Figma and similar tools are very powerful, but there is a little bit of a learning curve to them.
Having a branding and style guide lays out and organises all of your colours, fonts, and other branding assets in one convenient place. It doesn’t need to be perfect and of course you can adjust it later on, but if you aren’t sure how to start putting it to good use then consider our graphic design and branding services to jump-start your business branding.
Come see us today at Print on Demand.
