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CRAFT YOUR BRAND CREATED BY
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BRAND DESIGNER + DEVELOPER
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PART TWO
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Way to go, friend! You made it through Part One! Getting a clear understanding of what branding is and why it’s important as well as whether or not you’re in the right place for a rebrand and the branding mistakes you must avoid making is vital before moving forward with actually crafting your brand. After all, if you don’t grasp these things going into this process, the chances are high that you’ll have missteps along the way. Through this part of the book, we’re about to dive into actually crafting your brand. We’ll touch on what actually goes into a well defined brand, crafting the “inside” of your brand through a series of questions to get you thinking, and then working on the outside of your brand by developing the design style that will represent your blog’s brand. During this part of the book, it’s important to take your time. Creating your authentic brand can’t be done overnight or in a few days. Instead, try to set aside a day or an afternoon once a week to work through the content. If you get stuck, don’t force it. To build a successful brand, you have to be intentional while crafting it from the inside out, so take your time and enjoy the journey while you’re on it!
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HOW TO CRAFT YOUR BRANDING
The process of crafting your brand could probably be compared to writing a research paper for school. Don’t worry, doing this is a lot more fun than writing those boring essays that seemed like they never ended. As I said in the last part of the book, ultimately the process of branding is about getting to know you and then bringing out your personality through your blog’s brand in fun and unique ways. It’s not just about creating something that looks like what everyone else is working on or what you think your readers and followers want to see from you. To have the most success with your brand, it has to be about you. Through investing the time it takes to dig deep into the message and values of your brand then combining those and the other somewhat behind the scenes aspects of your brand with things like color, type, and photography, you’re building an identity for your blog that is truly an authentic representation of you. Investing time into creating a brand based on who you are helps you: CREATE A COHESIVE EXPERIENCE: Ever look at someone’s blog and just feel like everything works so well together? You’re not quite sure what it is about the blog, but everything feels pulled together, and it makes you want to stick around to get to know them and read more of their blog posts. By investing time into crafting your brand, you’re also creating a powerful, cohesive experience for your readers. Having a cohesive experience means your design and message is all consistent. You may not think that your readers notice things like this, but trust me they do! If you get that feeling of wanting to hang out in someone’s archives all day, your want your readers to experience that with your blog as well.
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BUILD AN EMOTIONAL RELATIONSHIP WITH YOUR READERS: When you started your blog,
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you didn’t write your first post with the intention of someday creating services or products to sell to your readers. Heck, you may not have even given any thought to trying to make money through your blog at all. (If you didn’t - that’s good! You should never start your blogging career with the sole intention of making money from it.) However, after a few years you may have started to get ideas of how you can better serve your readers through affiliate sales, services, or products. To be successful selling things to your readers, you have to create an emotional and trustworthy relationship with them. One of the key ways to do this is through crafting your brand and maintaining consistency within it as you grow your blog. REACH YOUR OVERALL, BIG GOALS FASTER: Not only are you taking one major thing off of your to do list by establishing your branding, you’re also going to find the simple tasks don’t take as long either. Things like creating post graphics, writing and scheduling social media posts, and even coming up with ideas on what posts to share with your readers will be a breeze. The bonus to that: you’ll be able to dedicate time working on your big goals, helping you obtain them faster. Regardless of if your goal is to gain sponsors and make money or just grow your readership to a certain number, your established brand and more time will help you accomplish your goal quicker than you would without having your branding nailed down. Throughout the following section of this book, we’re going to work together to help you craft your best brand yet for your blog. You’ll find questions that I present to my clients and even regularly ask myself while working on my own brand, but remember: if you really want to get most out of this content, you have to do the work with me. That’s the only way you’ll finish this ebook reinvigorated and ready to take the blogosphere by storm with your blog’s new branding. In the following sections we’re going to dive into everything from the forgotten details of branding to taking a serious look at what design will best represent your brand. In this section, THE BASICS, I’m going to break down some key items to a well developed brand, the dreaded topic of copying, and how to take inspiration from your favorite bloggers, but not their exact identity. Section Two, THE DISCOVERY STAGE, is where we’re going to start diving into some of the deep stuff. You’ll not only be taking a look at your big goals, but also really getting to know your blog from the inside out. Because there’s so much to consider about your blog, this section is one of the longest, and therefore it will probably take you the absolute longest to get through this one compared to the rest, but once you do it makes everything else much easier. Everything you nail down in this section will be builded upon when we start taking a look at things like design.
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Once you’ve got the roots of your brand in place, we start digging into DEVELOPING YOUR
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STYLE in Section Three. The ideas we cover here will help you figure out how to take what you’re inspired by and developing your own design style and then how you can build upon that. It’s my firm belief that design can literally make or break a brand, so while I won’t essentially be teaching you how to become a graphic designer, I will be sharing the important facts and examples of how design can take your brand to new heights or hold you back from your goals indefinitely. It’s in the following sections that you will learn everything you need to ask yourself about your blog’s brand before you even want to think about how you can do things like start making money through passive income or even opening your own business. It doesn’t matter if you’re planning a complete overhaul of your brand, or if you just needed this book to help you fine tune a few things here or there - I’m confident that you’ll find the help you need while also being inspiring to ask yourself new questions or approach things differently on your journey. If nothing else, you’ll finish this section with a better idea of your blog’s exact identity and what you want out of partnering with a branding or design expert if that’s a route you see in your near future. Once we’ve covered everything in this chapter, we’ll talk about how to build out your new brand, maintain consistency in doing so, and where to go next to grow your blog authentically in Chapter Five. But before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s dive into your brand together!
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THE BASICS
When it comes to crafting your brand, there’s a lot of things that come into play. Most people often go straight to the logo or blog design when they think of a blog’s brand, but did you know that it’s much more than that? There are many aspects that come into play for your brand and can affect your brand either positively or negatively if you’re not actively making sure that everything is on point and consistent. Specifically, while crafting your brand you should think about things like your story, your message and values, discovering who your audience is and who you want it to be, how to position your blog’s brand among the vast amount of other blog’s that are online so that you stand out, social media, and the ever important design. In this section, we’re going to talk a little more in-depth about the things that go into crafting a well developed brand, breaking down each item so that you know what we’ll be working on in Section Two, THE DISCOVERY STAGE. As we work through this section, you’ll begin to see how thinking about the “inside” characteristics of your brand can affect how your readers see your brand and what impression those same characteristics and design give to your potential followers. In addition to the breakdown of a brand, we’ll be talking a little about how to collect inspiration from your favorite bloggers or designers, and I’ll also touch on the dreaded topic of copying and how to avoid copying those you admire while you’re working through this process. Once we’re done, you’ll be ready to dive into Sections Two and Three and start answering the hard questions for your blog and developing your design style!
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THE INSIDE OF A WELL DEVELOPED BRAND
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The majority of what shapes a brand are the things that are “inside,” some things that you can’t actually see even though you and your readers know they’re there. These are the things that make your brand yours even if your best friend is writing the exact same type of blog as yours. The questions that help you develop the “inside” of your brand are often harder to answer than figuring out what design style should represent your brand, but as I mentioned: it’s the most important thing that goes into branding. YOUR STORY: You may think that this is only relevant for businesses, but your story comes into play with your blog as well. Regardless of what your niche is, knowing and developing your story will help you get in tune with what shaped your past to get you where you are now. The great thing about your story is that it can influence what type of content you’re putting out, who you’re writing for, and even your message. Your story can be a tough one to nail down if you just can not figure out what got you to where you are, but if you really dig deep, you’ll start making connections you might have never noticed on your own. YOUR WHY: Building on your story, your why is key to crafting your brand. Once you really understand your story, it’s much easier to figure out the real why of your brand, or the why behind the why. That might sound crazy; let me explain. Often we say that we blog because we want to help people or because we like it, but once you know your story, it’ll start to become apparent to you that there’s a bit more to it than that. I’ve heard several bloggers mention that once they nail down their why everything becomes easier and this is because you instantly know more about where you’re going with your blog, who you’re helping, and how you can help those people. YOUR MESSAGE: When you’re working on crafting your brand, creating content, or even just decided what brands to partner with, it’s important to consider your message. Ideally, your message would help explain to your readers and potential followers what exactly your brand stands for. You want your message to convey the value of your brand as well as what makes your blog different from those in your niche. Your message will be what you use to describe your brand, and it can be used in a variety of places! YOUR VOICE OR SIGNATURE PHRASES: You may not realize it, but your brand has a voice. Some people don’t ever consider the impression of your brand your voice can create for your readers and potential followers. Depending on your niche, you might want the voice of your brand to be casual and fun or more serious. When deciding on what tone you should take for your brand, consider your content and audience, but most importantly your message. Signature phrases can be a create way to add to your brand’s voice. You shouldn’t necessarily go out of your way to create a phrase for your brand, but if one naturally develops have fun using it!
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YOUR AUDIENCE: Just as important as you are to your brand is your audience. It’s always great to
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know two aspects when it comes to your audience: the target, or ideal, and the current. A lot of people write blog posts about how it’s important to know who your target audience is and all the details of your ideal reader, but it’s equally as important to your brand that you know who you current audience is as well. Knowing who they are and what they need from you will help you shape your brand and also come up with content ideas to share with them.
THE OUTSIDE OF A WELL DEVELOPED BRAND As I mentioned before, there’s a lot more than just a logo design and a color scheme that go into crafting your brand’s design identity. In fact, there’s a family of elements that help add personality and finesse, which help craft the design style and identity that will help round out your brand and give the first impression to potential readers and followers that makes them want to stick around. YOUR LOGO: Having a nicely designed logo is key for your brand because it’s the first thing your readers and potential followers will see when they visit your blog, and often when they visit your social media outlets as well. The logo is important to pay attention to because it’ll be the first impression everyone will get from your blog. While you want it to be a good representation of your brand, you don’t have to include every design element or style that you want your brand to be represented by. We’ll talk about where you can feature those in a second! COLOR SCHEME: Just as important as your logo is your color scheme. Although many amateur designers don’t know or see the role of color psychology, it is a key way to attracting certain types of people to your blog! If you don’t know anything about color psychology, let me explain: the brain processes color faster than it does type or images and can bring out a certain type of emotion in us. For example, let’s take a look at the Whole Foods brand. When you go to their website or visit their stores, what colors do you see the most? I notice the browns and greens, the most, and what do I relate to those colors? Well, I call them earth tones, and they give off a holistic, natural, and even organic vibe - exactly what Whole Foods would want you to get from their brand. When working on your color scheme, keep in mind of how you can use color to build a certain response from your readers and followers! ADDITIONAL DESIGN ELEMENTS: Additional design elements include things like icon illustrations, patterns, buttons, photography, and texture. It’s easy to go overboard with these things, but if you’re intentional about what you’re adding to your brand, they can add personality to your brand. While you can add some of these to your logo, it’s certainly not at all necessary. Instead, you could feature these additional design elements in your blog design, business cards, media kits, and more! The most important thing here is that you evaluate if the
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elements add to your brand story or simply distract from it. Also - you shouldn’t start incorporating
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these things because you see others doing it. Find what works for your brand and stick with it. THE ANATOMY OF A BRAND DESIGN
FONT SELECTION: Fonts are a simple way to add certain characteristics to your brand’s style. There’s such a variety of font / type out lately that it can be overwhelming to decide what would work for you and incredibly tempting to fall back on what’s trendy, like brush lettering. Consider what you’re going for with your brand when you’re choosing your fonts or type style. For example, handwritten fonts like Bellwethers will create a more fun or whimsical style for your brand, while a serif font like Times New Roman will create a more serious tone for your blog.
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VISUAL INSPIRATION: Inspiration is important to your brand, but it’s not necessarily something
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that your readers or followers will see. I love keeping a Pinterest board of inspiration for my brand, so when I’m feeling like I want to try something new or can’t decide if some element would work, I’ll refer back to my existing design but also my inspiration. When you finish this part of the book, you’ll walk away with your own Pinterest board or notebook full of inspiration for your brand that you can make your very own moodboard with!
COLLECTING INSPIRATION + LEARNING FROM YOUR FAVORITE BRANDS Regardless of whether you’ve worked with a branding expert or walked through some of the steps outlined in this book by yourself before, collecting inspiration from your favorite brands and bloggers will make the entire process easier, and it’s an integral part in getting start on developing your design style. You’re probably familiar with collecting inspiration from your favorite bloggers already, and if you’re not - it’s something that you should be doing regularly. Sites like Pinterest make it incredibly easy to make collections of your favorite blog posts, resources, designs, and more, and it’s something you should take advantage of even after you’re “done” crafting your brand. In addition to my Pinterest boards, I love collecting magazines and books that have great design to be inspired by while I’m working on my own brand and with my clients. One of my favorite ways to collect inspiration for my brand and those clients that I’m working with is by creating a moodboard, which is what we’ll be doing for your brand later in Section Three. When you’re creating your moodboard, you want a variety of things to be present, so while you’re collecting inspiration pull out things like fonts or a certain type style, color schemes, patterns, and even photography! Eventually we’ll bring it all together to create something like this for your brand: Instead of just collecting inspiration from your favorite bloggers, what if you could learn from what you’re gathering as well? Sometimes when you see something you like you’re not sure why you like it, you just know that you do. However, when you start to really inspect the piece you’ll slowly start to uncover what it is you like specifically. Knowing why you like something is equally as important to figuring out what design style you’ll put to work for your brand. While you’re collecting inspiration, keep a notebook or a note in Evernote of what you’re collecting and why you like it. If you’re not sure what it is you like specifically, take a look at the specific elements within the piece. Is it the fonts or colors? What about the photography, illustration, or patterns? Slowly but surely you’ll figure out what it is you’re responding to the most, and as you document these different things you’ll start to see a pattern in what sorts of things you’re responding to. This will help you develop your own design style!
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AVOIDING CREATING A COPYCAT BRAND Unfortunately, it’s incredibly easy to cross the line of gathering inspiration from your favorite bloggers to actually copying what they’re doing with their own brands. Creating a copycat brand is a crippling move for your brand that will hurt your brand and relationship with your readers, ruin your online reputation with your peers and potential collaborators, and leave you feeling a complete disconnect from what you’ve created. Throughout this process you’re going to be asked hard questions about your blog, and you’ll be tasked with
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creating a unique design style for your brand. While working though these different stages, it would
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be easy to go online and see what your favorite bloggers might say or create and simply copy or rephrase what they have to work for you. However, not only will you know that you’ve copied someone’s brand, it won’t take long before your followers and peers online also begin to see the similarities. Everything that you answer or create should reflect back to your brand specifically. You’re not going to be doing yourself any favors if you’re creating a brand based on someone else’s blog’s brand. Even if your blog is in the same niche has who you’re looking to, your answers are never going to be exactly the same. Your blog’s brand is based on your likes, your personality, and your followers. If you’re working through this book and find yourself getting stuck and tempted to see what someone else might say to the answers or the design challenge, take a break from working on things. Often what happens is that we rush ourselves through branding exercises because we want everything done now so we can grow our blog, start making money, or start tackling our big goals. That means we don’t take our brand and followers into consideration enough, and instead just want to get an answer down so we can move on to the next thing.
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COPYRIGHT NOTICE You are free to use this brief for branding your own business but may not sell it, distribute it or repurpose the content in any way. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from the Publisher. The moral right of Kory Woodard Nobes to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyrights, Design and Patents Act 1988. Cover photo by Ashley Mahoney www.ashleyelladesign.com
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CRAFT YOUR BRAND CREATED BY
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BRAND DESIGNER + DEVELOPER
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PART TWO
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Way to go, friend! You made it through Part One! Getting a clear understanding of what branding is and why it’s important as well as whether or not you’re in the right place for a rebrand and the branding mistakes you must avoid making is vital before moving forward with actually crafting your brand. After all, if you don’t grasp these things going into this process, the chances are high that you’ll have missteps along the way. Through this part of the book, we’re about to dive into actually crafting your brand. We’ll touch on what actually goes into a well defined brand, crafting the “inside” of your brand through a series of questions to get you thinking, and then working on the outside of your brand by developing the design style that will represent your blog’s brand. During this part of the book, it’s important to take your time. Creating your authentic brand can’t be done overnight or in a few days. Instead, try to set aside a day or an afternoon once a week to work through the content. If you get stuck, don’t force it. To build a successful brand, you have to be intentional while crafting it from the inside out, so take your time and enjoy the journey while you’re on it!
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HOW TO CRAFT YOUR BRANDING
The process of crafting your brand could probably be compared to writing a research paper for school. Don’t worry, doing this is a lot more fun than writing those boring essays that seemed like they never ended. As I said in the last part of the book, ultimately the process of branding is about getting to know you and then bringing out your personality through your blog’s brand in fun and unique ways. It’s not just about creating something that looks like what everyone else is working on or what you think your readers and followers want to see from you. To have the most success with your brand, it has to be about you. Through investing the time it takes to dig deep into the message and values of your brand then combining those and the other somewhat behind the scenes aspects of your brand with things like color, type, and photography, you’re building an identity for your blog that is truly an authentic representation of you. Investing time into creating a brand based on who you are helps you: CREATE A COHESIVE EXPERIENCE: Ever look at someone’s blog and just feel like everything works so well together? You’re not quite sure what it is about the blog, but everything feels pulled together, and it makes you want to stick around to get to know them and read more of their blog posts. By investing time into crafting your brand, you’re also creating a powerful, cohesive experience for your readers. Having a cohesive experience means your design and message is all consistent. You may not think that your readers notice things like this, but trust me they do! If you get that feeling of wanting to hang out in someone’s archives all day, your want your readers to experience that with your blog as well.
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BUILD AN EMOTIONAL RELATIONSHIP WITH YOUR READERS: When you started your blog,
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you didn’t write your first post with the intention of someday creating services or products to sell to your readers. Heck, you may not have even given any thought to trying to make money through your blog at all. (If you didn’t - that’s good! You should never start your blogging career with the sole intention of making money from it.) However, after a few years you may have started to get ideas of how you can better serve your readers through affiliate sales, services, or products. To be successful selling things to your readers, you have to create an emotional and trustworthy relationship with them. One of the key ways to do this is through crafting your brand and maintaining consistency within it as you grow your blog. REACH YOUR OVERALL, BIG GOALS FASTER: Not only are you taking one major thing off of your to do list by establishing your branding, you’re also going to find the simple tasks don’t take as long either. Things like creating post graphics, writing and scheduling social media posts, and even coming up with ideas on what posts to share with your readers will be a breeze. The bonus to that: you’ll be able to dedicate time working on your big goals, helping you obtain them faster. Regardless of if your goal is to gain sponsors and make money or just grow your readership to a certain number, your established brand and more time will help you accomplish your goal quicker than you would without having your branding nailed down. Throughout the following section of this book, we’re going to work together to help you craft your best brand yet for your blog. You’ll find questions that I present to my clients and even regularly ask myself while working on my own brand, but remember: if you really want to get most out of this content, you have to do the work with me. That’s the only way you’ll finish this ebook reinvigorated and ready to take the blogosphere by storm with your blog’s new branding. In the following sections we’re going to dive into everything from the forgotten details of branding to taking a serious look at what design will best represent your brand. In this section, THE BASICS, I’m going to break down some key items to a well developed brand, the dreaded topic of copying, and how to take inspiration from your favorite bloggers, but not their exact identity. Section Two, THE DISCOVERY STAGE, is where we’re going to start diving into some of the deep stuff. You’ll not only be taking a look at your big goals, but also really getting to know your blog from the inside out. Because there’s so much to consider about your blog, this section is one of the longest, and therefore it will probably take you the absolute longest to get through this one compared to the rest, but once you do it makes everything else much easier. Everything you nail down in this section will be builded upon when we start taking a look at things like design.
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Once you’ve got the roots of your brand in place, we start digging into DEVELOPING YOUR
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STYLE in Section Three. The ideas we cover here will help you figure out how to take what you’re inspired by and developing your own design style and then how you can build upon that. It’s my firm belief that design can literally make or break a brand, so while I won’t essentially be teaching you how to become a graphic designer, I will be sharing the important facts and examples of how design can take your brand to new heights or hold you back from your goals indefinitely. It’s in the following sections that you will learn everything you need to ask yourself about your blog’s brand before you even want to think about how you can do things like start making money through passive income or even opening your own business. It doesn’t matter if you’re planning a complete overhaul of your brand, or if you just needed this book to help you fine tune a few things here or there - I’m confident that you’ll find the help you need while also being inspiring to ask yourself new questions or approach things differently on your journey. If nothing else, you’ll finish this section with a better idea of your blog’s exact identity and what you want out of partnering with a branding or design expert if that’s a route you see in your near future. Once we’ve covered everything in this chapter, we’ll talk about how to build out your new brand, maintain consistency in doing so, and where to go next to grow your blog authentically in Chapter Five. But before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s dive into your brand together!
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THE BASICS
When it comes to crafting your brand, there’s a lot of things that come into play. Most people often go straight to the logo or blog design when they think of a blog’s brand, but did you know that it’s much more than that? There are many aspects that come into play for your brand and can affect your brand either positively or negatively if you’re not actively making sure that everything is on point and consistent. Specifically, while crafting your brand you should think about things like your story, your message and values, discovering who your audience is and who you want it to be, how to position your blog’s brand among the vast amount of other blog’s that are online so that you stand out, social media, and the ever important design. In this section, we’re going to talk a little more in-depth about the things that go into crafting a well developed brand, breaking down each item so that you know what we’ll be working on in Section Two, THE DISCOVERY STAGE. As we work through this section, you’ll begin to see how thinking about the “inside” characteristics of your brand can affect how your readers see your brand and what impression those same characteristics and design give to your potential followers. In addition to the breakdown of a brand, we’ll be talking a little about how to collect inspiration from your favorite bloggers or designers, and I’ll also touch on the dreaded topic of copying and how to avoid copying those you admire while you’re working through this process. Once we’re done, you’ll be ready to dive into Sections Two and Three and start answering the hard questions for your blog and developing your design style!
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THE INSIDE OF A WELL DEVELOPED BRAND
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The majority of what shapes a brand are the things that are “inside,” some things that you can’t actually see even though you and your readers know they’re there. These are the things that make your brand yours even if your best friend is writing the exact same type of blog as yours. The questions that help you develop the “inside” of your brand are often harder to answer than figuring out what design style should represent your brand, but as I mentioned: it’s the most important thing that goes into branding. YOUR STORY: You may think that this is only relevant for businesses, but your story comes into play with your blog as well. Regardless of what your niche is, knowing and developing your story will help you get in tune with what shaped your past to get you where you are now. The great thing about your story is that it can influence what type of content you’re putting out, who you’re writing for, and even your message. Your story can be a tough one to nail down if you just can not figure out what got you to where you are, but if you really dig deep, you’ll start making connections you might have never noticed on your own. YOUR WHY: Building on your story, your why is key to crafting your brand. Once you really understand your story, it’s much easier to figure out the real why of your brand, or the why behind the why. That might sound crazy; let me explain. Often we say that we blog because we want to help people or because we like it, but once you know your story, it’ll start to become apparent to you that there’s a bit more to it than that. I’ve heard several bloggers mention that once they nail down their why everything becomes easier and this is because you instantly know more about where you’re going with your blog, who you’re helping, and how you can help those people. YOUR MESSAGE: When you’re working on crafting your brand, creating content, or even just decided what brands to partner with, it’s important to consider your message. Ideally, your message would help explain to your readers and potential followers what exactly your brand stands for. You want your message to convey the value of your brand as well as what makes your blog different from those in your niche. Your message will be what you use to describe your brand, and it can be used in a variety of places! YOUR VOICE OR SIGNATURE PHRASES: You may not realize it, but your brand has a voice. Some people don’t ever consider the impression of your brand your voice can create for your readers and potential followers. Depending on your niche, you might want the voice of your brand to be casual and fun or more serious. When deciding on what tone you should take for your brand, consider your content and audience, but most importantly your message. Signature phrases can be a create way to add to your brand’s voice. You shouldn’t necessarily go out of your way to create a phrase for your brand, but if one naturally develops have fun using it!
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YOUR AUDIENCE: Just as important as you are to your brand is your audience. It’s always great to
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know two aspects when it comes to your audience: the target, or ideal, and the current. A lot of people write blog posts about how it’s important to know who your target audience is and all the details of your ideal reader, but it’s equally as important to your brand that you know who you current audience is as well. Knowing who they are and what they need from you will help you shape your brand and also come up with content ideas to share with them.
THE OUTSIDE OF A WELL DEVELOPED BRAND As I mentioned before, there’s a lot more than just a logo design and a color scheme that go into crafting your brand’s design identity. In fact, there’s a family of elements that help add personality and finesse, which help craft the design style and identity that will help round out your brand and give the first impression to potential readers and followers that makes them want to stick around. YOUR LOGO: Having a nicely designed logo is key for your brand because it’s the first thing your readers and potential followers will see when they visit your blog, and often when they visit your social media outlets as well. The logo is important to pay attention to because it’ll be the first impression everyone will get from your blog. While you want it to be a good representation of your brand, you don’t have to include every design element or style that you want your brand to be represented by. We’ll talk about where you can feature those in a second! COLOR SCHEME: Just as important as your logo is your color scheme. Although many amateur designers don’t know or see the role of color psychology, it is a key way to attracting certain types of people to your blog! If you don’t know anything about color psychology, let me explain: the brain processes color faster than it does type or images and can bring out a certain type of emotion in us. For example, let’s take a look at the Whole Foods brand. When you go to their website or visit their stores, what colors do you see the most? I notice the browns and greens, the most, and what do I relate to those colors? Well, I call them earth tones, and they give off a holistic, natural, and even organic vibe - exactly what Whole Foods would want you to get from their brand. When working on your color scheme, keep in mind of how you can use color to build a certain response from your readers and followers! ADDITIONAL DESIGN ELEMENTS: Additional design elements include things like icon illustrations, patterns, buttons, photography, and texture. It’s easy to go overboard with these things, but if you’re intentional about what you’re adding to your brand, they can add personality to your brand. While you can add some of these to your logo, it’s certainly not at all necessary. Instead, you could feature these additional design elements in your blog design, business cards, media kits, and more! The most important thing here is that you evaluate if the
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elements add to your brand story or simply distract from it. Also - you shouldn’t start incorporating
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these things because you see others doing it. Find what works for your brand and stick with it. THE ANATOMY OF A BRAND DESIGN
FONT SELECTION: Fonts are a simple way to add certain characteristics to your brand’s style. There’s such a variety of font / type out lately that it can be overwhelming to decide what would work for you and incredibly tempting to fall back on what’s trendy, like brush lettering. Consider what you’re going for with your brand when you’re choosing your fonts or type style. For example, handwritten fonts like Bellwethers will create a more fun or whimsical style for your brand, while a serif font like Times New Roman will create a more serious tone for your blog.
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VISUAL INSPIRATION: Inspiration is important to your brand, but it’s not necessarily something
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that your readers or followers will see. I love keeping a Pinterest board of inspiration for my brand, so when I’m feeling like I want to try something new or can’t decide if some element would work, I’ll refer back to my existing design but also my inspiration. When you finish this part of the book, you’ll walk away with your own Pinterest board or notebook full of inspiration for your brand that you can make your very own moodboard with!
COLLECTING INSPIRATION + LEARNING FROM YOUR FAVORITE BRANDS Regardless of whether you’ve worked with a branding expert or walked through some of the steps outlined in this book by yourself before, collecting inspiration from your favorite brands and bloggers will make the entire process easier, and it’s an integral part in getting start on developing your design style. You’re probably familiar with collecting inspiration from your favorite bloggers already, and if you’re not - it’s something that you should be doing regularly. Sites like Pinterest make it incredibly easy to make collections of your favorite blog posts, resources, designs, and more, and it’s something you should take advantage of even after you’re “done” crafting your brand. In addition to my Pinterest boards, I love collecting magazines and books that have great design to be inspired by while I’m working on my own brand and with my clients. One of my favorite ways to collect inspiration for my brand and those clients that I’m working with is by creating a moodboard, which is what we’ll be doing for your brand later in Section Three. When you’re creating your moodboard, you want a variety of things to be present, so while you’re collecting inspiration pull out things like fonts or a certain type style, color schemes, patterns, and even photography! Eventually we’ll bring it all together to create something like this for your brand: Instead of just collecting inspiration from your favorite bloggers, what if you could learn from what you’re gathering as well? Sometimes when you see something you like you’re not sure why you like it, you just know that you do. However, when you start to really inspect the piece you’ll slowly start to uncover what it is you like specifically. Knowing why you like something is equally as important to figuring out what design style you’ll put to work for your brand. While you’re collecting inspiration, keep a notebook or a note in Evernote of what you’re collecting and why you like it. If you’re not sure what it is you like specifically, take a look at the specific elements within the piece. Is it the fonts or colors? What about the photography, illustration, or patterns? Slowly but surely you’ll figure out what it is you’re responding to the most, and as you document these different things you’ll start to see a pattern in what sorts of things you’re responding to. This will help you develop your own design style!
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AVOIDING CREATING A COPYCAT BRAND Unfortunately, it’s incredibly easy to cross the line of gathering inspiration from your favorite bloggers to actually copying what they’re doing with their own brands. Creating a copycat brand is a crippling move for your brand that will hurt your brand and relationship with your readers, ruin your online reputation with your peers and potential collaborators, and leave you feeling a complete disconnect from what you’ve created. Throughout this process you’re going to be asked hard questions about your blog, and you’ll be tasked with
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creating a unique design style for your brand. While working though these different stages, it would
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be easy to go online and see what your favorite bloggers might say or create and simply copy or rephrase what they have to work for you. However, not only will you know that you’ve copied someone’s brand, it won’t take long before your followers and peers online also begin to see the similarities. Everything that you answer or create should reflect back to your brand specifically. You’re not going to be doing yourself any favors if you’re creating a brand based on someone else’s blog’s brand. Even if your blog is in the same niche has who you’re looking to, your answers are never going to be exactly the same. Your blog’s brand is based on your likes, your personality, and your followers. If you’re working through this book and find yourself getting stuck and tempted to see what someone else might say to the answers or the design challenge, take a break from working on things. Often what happens is that we rush ourselves through branding exercises because we want everything done now so we can grow our blog, start making money, or start tackling our big goals. That means we don’t take our brand and followers into consideration enough, and instead just want to get an answer down so we can move on to the next thing.
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COPYRIGHT NOTICE You are free to use this brief for branding your own business but may not sell it, distribute it or repurpose the content in any way. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from the Publisher. The moral right of Kory Woodard Nobes to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyrights, Design and Patents Act 1988. Cover photo by Ashley Mahoney www.ashleyelladesign.com
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