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﻿>>HOLLIE: Hello and welcome to this week's episode. Today I want to talk to
you about Brand Design, Brand Identity. I want to give you a Brand Design 101,
amazing killer tips for how you can help your business grow, through brand design
[intro music]
So I wanna talk to you about how Brand Design differs from Brand Strategy. In the last episode
I was talking to you all about Brand Strategy and what it means and why you need it, and what's
included. And so today we're talking about Brand Design, but how is that different?
Last week I gave you a metaphor of baking a cake and told you that Brand Strategy is all
of the preparation that you do before you build the cake. Before you get stuck in,
you put your apron on and you start baking. Brand strategy is all of that planning and
preparation work beforehand. It's getting vision and goals and mission and the
ingredients and the instructions altogether, so that you're ready to bake your cake.
Brand design is actually making the cake. It's about once you have clarity
around what you do and what you offer and how you're gonna do it. It's figuring out then,
let's do it, let's put it into action, let's start putting these ingredients together,
let's start turning it into an actual cake that people can see and eat, take part in. So,
Brand Design is all about creating these tangible things that people can hold, or see, or read,
or hear, or experience, when it comes to your brand. This is all about standing out and
representing yourself in the best way possible. Elevating your brand and your business to
match who you are and where you want to be. When you have a really great brand design you feel
super confident and super excited and passionate of sharing your brand, sharing your business with
the world, it's a really powerful thing for you as a creative to feel that confidence and
that clarity and feel like the creativity in your brand matches the creativity of your art,
or whatever it is that you make. So let's talk about how it's done. As I said
last time, I talked to you about my brand building framework, my Make Your Mark model. And step one,
or pillar one, in that model is clarity. And that was the Brand Strategy portion of things
but now I wanna talk to you about creativity. This is all about Brand Design. Defining your vibe,
making your vision visible, and yet boosting your brand. So, defining your vibe is really exciting.
It's kind of the transition point between all of that clarity work that you did, in figuring out
the foundations of your brand personality, and your voice, and your tone, and the people that
you're talking to, the direction that you want to go in, goals that you have and everything. And
then turning that into something visual, because in defining your vibe we're figuring out how do we
do that, and what direction visually and with copy and everything we want to go down.
So this is about figuring out what is your brand attributes, and what does your brand look
and feel like, how should people feel when they experience your brand. Looking at inspiration,
finding some of those other people doing similar things to you and thinking like, what are they
doing that's amazing that I can learn from - not copy - but learn from. And then what are some
visual things I can be inspired by, what's some messaging I could be inspired by, a part of
your brand you can find inspiration for. And then you can put this together into mood boards
I *love* mood boards so much [laughs]. This is a really great snapshot of what your brand should
look and feel like. It's kind of a pre-design design task, because you can really refine
what your brand is like, before you get too stuck into what colours you're using and fonts, and
everything and you can really set the direction from the beginning. It saves a lot of time and
money and stress and hassle down the road because if you spend the time getting the mood board right,
and defining your vibe really clearly, then when you get the next part all of that stuff
is super easy and straightforward because you know the direction you're going in.
Then that leads to the next part which is making your vision visible; This is about finding those
colours, fonts, logos, patterns, illustrations, icons, whatever it is that you want to put into
your brand. It's also non-visual things so things like audio, and copywriting, and customer
experience, these are all things that are part of your brand but are not necessarily visual so it's
important to remember these things too. And then lastly is boosting your brand;
Taking everything that you've just done figuring out the direction, defining your vibe,
all of those colours and fonts and logos and patterns and everything that you've just created,
applying that to your whole business to make sure that everything is not in a kind of frivolous way
just because you can, but in a really thoughtful intentional way. This can be applying your brand
to your website, social media, thinking about SEO, your customer service, the journey that people
take finding you and then buying from you, any print material you might have - that's
like business cards or flyers or maybe you run a market do you have signage in the market,
things like this - these printed materials are really important too. Any other digital assets
maybe you have like YouTube banners or thumbnails for your YouTube channel.
Graphics for your Patreon, podcast or whatever it is these are all ways you can apply your
brand. You can also think about the content that you're creating, any onboarding for your clients
or for employees if you have those, what does that look like, and how is that branded? Things
like invoices and contracts, and all those kind of boring things but those things can be branded
and should be as well. All about making sure that when people land on something of yours they know
that it’s yours, and they know what it’s about. If they do land on your podcast or your Patreon
or your social media - wherever they might find you - they know that they've landed in the right
place, they know who you are, see exactly what you do and recognise you.
So, let’s recap that; Everything that goes into creativity, and transforming that clarity that
you've created into something tangible that people can experience, is: defining your vibe,
making your vision visible, and boosting your brand. We want to figure out the direction
that you're going in and get really clear on that, and transform the clarity into a clear
direction visually, your copy and everything, then we want to use that direction to inform choosing
colours and fonts and everything that makes your brand tangible [laughs] Things that people can
see and experience. And then you're gonna boost your brand, so you can take all those things that you've just decided
and then apply those across your business, across websites and social media platforms and everything.
So, that is a overview of Brand Design. It's a little bit of a 101 of what goes into Brand Design
and three main steps on creating your brand. As always I'm going to be going into more detail in
my mini-masterclass in my free Facebook group, so if you wanna join it's the Black & White Studios
Society and there will be a link either below the podcast or the video, you can just search
it on Facebook and we'll be in there answering your questions and going into this in a little
more detail. You can also download the ultimate branding checklist for free which will give you
a list of everything you need to think about, from the clarity portion that we talked about last time
all this creativity stuff, then to the consistency part, which I will be talking about next week,
so make sure that you come back for that. I hope that you've enjoyed this episode and
that you've learnt a lot from it. If you like this video please click the like button below
and subscribe if you haven't already, and I will see you next time.
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