- Hello, and welcome to episode four
of our branding your business series.
I'm Jess, I'm a design educator at Canva,
and in this episode,
we are diving into brand style guides,
and how to use color to perfectly represent your brand.
(upbeat music)
So now we have an idea of our brand
purpose values and personality,
it's time to distill those into a style guide,
so we can use them consistently when we create content.
What is a brand style guide exactly?
And why is it important?
We asked branding expert, Steph, to explain.
- A style guide displays the visual rules
around how to express your brand identity.
It will specify your choices of color, fonts,
imagery, typography, and how to use your logo.
So whether you have 1 or 100 employees
working with your brand,
it should always have a consistent look and feel.
This is where your style guide comes in,
to be your single source of truth.
Style guides clearly explain
how to visually communicate everything for your brand,
from font formatting to your color coding.
The reason style guides are so important
is to ensure everyone designing or representing your brand
stays on brand.
This means your audience recognizes
and comes to love your brand
every time they interact with it.
- Once you've identified all these elements,
store them in your Canva brand kit.
This makes it super easy to apply your colors,
fonts, and logos to any design,
making branded content creation quick and easy.
We'll show you how to set up your brand kit in Canva
a little later.
So let's explore how to set up a style guide,
starting with color.
Let's hear some insights from our design school team.
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- When it comes to branding,
not all colors are created equal.
If you pay attention,
you'll notice some pretty interesting patterns,
like, why are so many banks blue?
And why are so many health products green?
What's going on here?
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- Semiotics plays a huge part in color.
You know, we can all name the color
of what a digger might be,
it's gonna be yellow,
'cause it's a bright warning color,
and it comes from nature.
So I think to find exactly what you need
and what you want to be,
it's about thinking about where you wanna communicate.
Do I wanna be trusted?
Do I wanna be edgy?
Do I wanna be minimal and respected and quiet,
and actually make people think about who we are?
Your color should come from your motivation,
and kind of where you're trying to take your identity.
- Color has a really big impact on your brand.
That's because different colors
carry different associations for all of us.
What feelings do you want your brand to evoke?
Blue conveys a sense of safety and security,
making it the color of choice for finance and insurance.
Red conveys excitement, and apparently stimulates hunger,
which is why it's used by so many fast food brands.
You don't want to be the same shoe as everyone else either,
so try plotting out all of your competitor's logos
on a color wheel,
and see where they cluster.
Find a spot on the spectrum that's unique to you,
and you'll be well on your way to a vibrant future.
- You can see how important it is to choose the right color
to represent your brand.
Understanding the inherent meanings behind colors
helps you decide what you want your brand to convey.
And once you've chosen your main color,
how do you find colors to compliment it?
It can be tricky if you're not an experienced designer,
but luckily Canva is here to help.
If you're not sure how to choose
a great looking color palette,
Canva has a fantastic tool to help,
you can access it at canva.com/colors.
You can find four different tools
to help you learn about color meanings,
understand color harmonies,
and help you choose color palettes for your brand.
Steph will give us a demo in just a moment.
First, click the link in the episode description,
or scan this QR code to access your workbook.
We asked Steph to show us some tips and tricks
to learn more about colors,
and how to add them to the workbook.
- [Steph] Now I'm going to show you
a really useful resource,
this is canva.com/colors.
It's a perfect way to find color pairings for your brand.
There's amazing features like color palette generator,
color palette ideas, the color wheel, and color meanings.
For this demonstration,
I'll take you through the color wheel.
So when you open this up, you get this beautiful gradient,
and at the moment,
this is set to complimentary color settings.
So using your mouse, you can easily find on the color wheel
what color sits directly opposite.
So let's say for example that your brand is fun and vibrant,
you might want to go for a really bright pink,
and you can see here that it's actually selected a hex code,
and what you can do is,
if this is the color you are interested in,
you can click here and that will copy onto your clipboard,
and then you go back to your workbook,
and you can click on the rectangle here,
go to your colors, select add new color,
and then you can copy paste that hex code.
So you can see there that the gray rectangle
has changed color.
I'm also going to copy paste the hex code
just for our reference.
Now I've actually got some colors
that I'd like to use for a bakery brand,
so what I can do here is I'm going to choose a color
that's a little bit more earthy,
so we've got this burgundy here.
And when you go into the color selection,
you can see that that they've got the hex code right here,
so I'm gonna copy that and update that in my design.
And I'll just change that to white,
so we can see that against the darker color for contrast.
And now for choosing secondary colors,
you want something that really compliments your color,
so you can go back to the color selection
if you need some help,
but I know what colors I'd like to use at the moment,
so I'm going to choose this really nice cream.
I think this will compliment really well
with the dark shade,
and I'm just going to find the hex code here
and place it in.
And then for a secondary color as well,
I would like to use a white shade,
but as you can see, we're against a white background here,
so I'm just going to quickly create an outline
so we can view that easily.
And then you can check what the hex code is for this white,
and copy paste that in as well.
And the last color, I'm just gonna choose a gray,
keep it really neutral and copy paste that in.
- When combining colors, consider accessibility,
about 5% of the world's population
has some sort of color blindness.
Making sure you have high contrast
is really important for legibility.
Colors on opposite sides of the color spectrum
have higher contrast than those next to each other,
so you can see on this image
how much more effective it is
when colors on opposite sides of the color wheel up paired.
So that brings us to the end of episode four
on brand style guides,
and choosing the right colors for your brand.
The style guide will help you ensure
all your brand content is consistent,
which is super important when building a brand.
Don't forget to subscribe
so you don't miss out on our next episode,
which is all about choosing the right fonts for your brand.
See you there.
(upbeat music)