Hey, fellow builders!
I’ve heard that many budding businesses are struggling with creating their brand and its visual identity. You look at Nike, Starbucks, and Apple, and you know that they’ve spent millions of dollars developing their brand identity. So should you, you think?
But we know little about the ups and downs of these multi-million companies when they were just start-ups. What we know is that they certainly couldn’t hire a top-notch designer for perfecting their logo, fonts, and signature colors. They had a business to build.
In fact, a lot of these current top-performing brands have changed their visual identities several times during their lifetime. It should inspire you that, for example, Twitter’s first logo looked like this:
In this article, I’ll give you a quick action plan how to create your first visual identity even if you’re on a $0 budget.
THE ACTION PLAN
PART 1: COLORS
1. Choose the right dominant color for your website and brand.
The dominant color is your brand color – like the fire engine red for Coca-Cola. If you already have a logo, make sure one of the primary colors of your logo is using your dominant color.
This color will help bring out certain emotions or feelings when people arrive on your website – just like passion, excitement, boldness and love for Coke. This is the color that you want your audience to remember when they think of you.
It’s so important because different colors have the abilities to attract specific types of shoppers, and can even alter consumer behaviors.
Here’s a handy infographic to help you choose your perfect dominant color. See if you can find the color that best represents what you stand for!
2. Combine complementary colors to create your perfect color scheme.
Brand identity doesn’t just consist of one color alone. In your website design, it’s best if you use your dominant color together with different complementary colors for buttons and other accents.
Complementary colors are simply colors that go together well, and it’s a science that you don’t need to master to make it work for you.
Here’s our favorite tools for creating complementary color pallettes:
Color Supply (https://colorsupplyyy.com/app)
3. Choose a background color that works for you.
Use Coolors tool to pick 3-5 colors (not more) – one for background, one for headings, one for text, and 1-2 for accents.
PART 2: FONTS
Similarly, a good font combination also gives the feel of it.
As an important rule of thumb, remember that you should never use more than three fonts on your website. Moreover, each of these fonts should carry different levels of importance. When choosing a color palette, the process usually consists of finding a primary color, secondary color, and an accent color. You can essentially use the same pattern with your typography.
Your primary font is the most visible one, and should be used on the headers of your website. A suggestion: it would be wise that it matches the style of your logo if there’s text in it. In general, this is the font type that should be the most identifiable with your brand, even if it’s not the most used on your site.
Your secondary font will largely consist of your ‘meaty’ textual content. This includes paragraphs, descriptions, blog articles, etc. While the primary font can be catchy and original, your main goal for the secondary font is legibility. Don’t expect potential clients to inquire into your products/services if their retinas are burning after just 20 seconds of reading.
Finally, the accent font is the one that you’ll use for a very specific purpose. When it comes to websites, this is usually dedicated to calls to action. In order to attract the eyes (and clicks) of your visitors, you’ll want to choose a typeface that stands out from the rest of your pages.
PART 3: LOGO
Now, combine what you picked up in the first and second step. Your logo can consist of a colored shape/illustration with the name of your brand, a shape/illustration only, or text only. It’s entirely up to you.
Remember that at this point of starting a business, logo shouldn’t be of great importance. There are plenty of tools out there that help you create your first logo without the need of a Photoshop skill or hiring a designer.
Here’s a list of free online tools that let you create one:
Canva (https://www.canva.com/)
Logomakr (https://logomakr.com/)
Placeit (https://placeit.net/logo-maker)
Namecheap (https://www.namecheap.com/logo-maker/)
Free Logo Design (https://www.freelogodesign.org/)
TailorBrands (https://www.tailorbrands.com/)
As I said, your logo can be simply text only, so you might as well just pick a font you like and use it in your Elementor header as your logo for a while.
As you can see, building your brand’s visual identity is quite an easy process, and it’s tons of fun! Remember that you’ll have plenty of time to work on your brand identity, as you go, but at this stage, it’s most important to simply create one for the purpose of your website and paid advertising you’re going to use.
Hope this was helpful!
Happy building!
Kate
