What is a brand? And how to develop the brand system.

You have your logo and you are so excited to show it off! However, your designer only gave you one type of logo file and you don’t know what to do with it from there. Get a better designer, having a go-to designer is essential for your business. A professional designer should never give you one file for a logo. Your brand is a tangible item and a key element to your business. Your brand is not just your logo.

Let me repeat that again and let it sink in.

Your brand is not just your logo!

You may be thinking “Naoma, what the heck is a brand then?” Keep reading I will break it down.

Your brand is every visual, tangible element including the way you caption your posts on social media. Yes, that's part of your brand too. Your brand is your voice when you are not in the room.

So how do we create a visual brand system with the one logo you have? It’s okay, don’t freak out. You don’t need a whole new logo unless you fall under the category of template logo. If you have one logo file that is authentic and made for your business and follows the 3 C’s to great branding, then we have a basis to work with. 

1 — COLOR

We have some colors that we can utilize and if your business palette and from there we can create a secondary color palette to support your primary branding colors. 

2 — TYPOGRAPHY

Typically you would have a font that is used in your logo. Now we just need to use that for headers or sub-headers depending on the type of font it is. Then we need to find another font to pair with it. One thing I recommend if you do not hire a designer is to not use the free trendy fonts to base your entire brand system off.

Why?

Because they are trendy now and look great now. When creating a brand we want to be an evergreen tree, not an annual flower, so that this brand doesn’t look dated in a year or two. Remember when everyone wore chevron a few years ago? Don’t pick a chevron type for your primary branding. If your primary logo font is a script, I would pair the sub-headers and body copy with a sans-serif font (the one without the little feet) If you do want to have a more delicate feel, if this follows with your brand values, then you could use a beautiful serif such as Baskerville, Caslon, Garamond, Etc. If you look on Pinterest you can find all sorts of font pairings just keep in mind you want something that won’t be stuck in a trend! 

3 — PATTERNS

Is there a way to create a pattern with your logo or take items from your logo to create some pattern to be used on printed materials or even on your digital media? You can try to do this on your own, but I highly recommend hiring a graphic designer for this aspect if you are wanting a pattern. 

4 — STYLE

You want to make sure that the images you are using on your social media and on your website are cohesive. That means they have the same photography style, do you have a lot of white in your imagery, that is something that you would need to carry throughout. If you look at a lot of successful Instagram accounts you will see they have a cohesive color palette as well as a certain style of photographs or illustrations. Ensure that you aren’t all over the place and look consistent! 

5 — VOICE

Make sure your voice (captions, blog posts, etc) matches your personality and your business personality. You don’t want to have something fun and quirky and your “voice” to be lackluster and boring because you are losing your target’s interest! Keep in mind you want people to know you are genuine and that there is a real person behind the scenes. We connect with people, not computers, so ensure you have that human aspect in your writing. 

Now you may be thinking, why is this important? Well, you need to have a brand system to ensure your web presence isn’t just the same image over and over again. You need consistent variety, does this make sense?

For your brand to be successful you need a system that will not pigeonhole you.

Some people are more attracted to lighter-based images, while others like more colorful images, both of these people could be your target audience so you truly need your brand to be able to attract both types of people without looking like you are two separate entities.