Brand consistency is key in creating a recognisable brand for your business.
And I see so many business owners who struggle with creating brand consistency. Can I let you in on a little secret?
It’s not a difficult as it may seem, but first of all brand consistency could mean anything. So in this blog, I’m going to address visual brand consistency.
Here’s 3 ways to create brand consistency in terms of your visuals:
COLOURS
You need to be really clear on what your brand colours are. This is something small business owners are extremely guilty of – tweaking their brand colours, constantly. My advice would be, spend some time getting your brand colours right from the beginning and if you struggle to even know where to start, I’ve created a little guide for you below to help you out.
Once you are clear on what your brand colours are, make sure you use them throughout everything. And just stick to those colours too. If you introduce a completely different colour in, or decide to use a shade of one of the colours, you’ll end up with too many and you’ll begin to feel overwhelmed with how many colours you do have. Sticking religiously to a brand colour palette for your business makes creating brand consistency a lot easier. And, the more consistent you are with your brand colours, the recognisable your brand will become.
FONTS
The same advice can be applied to fonts too. I would advise creating a font kit for your brand, which consists of a heading, sub heading and body copy font. See below for an example. Again, you want to be making sure you stick to just these fonts only and don’t introduce any others in. This is what creates brand consistency.
BRAND ELEMENTS
Another way to create brand consistency is to take advantage of your brand elements. Do you have a symbol within your logo? You could use that on it’s own within your graphics because this will help people identify graphics as yours by using your symbol. The same again if you have a sub mark version of your logo. A sub mark is a more condensed version of your logo which can also be used on graphics. Brand elements could also include patterns, icons and symbols.
All of the above combined is your Brand Toolkit – your fonts, colours and brand elements.
Your Brand Toolkit is like your brand bible and to keep everything organised and in one place, it’s handy to have a Brand Stylesheet with all of this on. If you don’t have one of these already, feel free to use this Canva Brand Stylesheet template and customise it to your brand.
How to use the template:
1. Click on the link above.
2. Click on the pencil icon at the bottom in the middle.
3. Select ‘Use template’.
3 time saving hacks for you to create brand consistency…
SOCIAL MEDIA TEMPLATES
Having social media templates in place will save you so much time – for Facebook, Instagram and IG Stories as well. Canva is a great tool to use for these and with branded templates in place, it means you won’t have to keep creating your own designs from scratch.
LESS IS MORE
This is something I really passionate about. Designs don’t need to be complicated with lots of different elements to the graphic/design everywhere. Sometimes you need to strip things back, make it a lot less complicated and think more about the message you are trying to get across.
PLAN AND BATCH CREATE
If you’re anything like me, I much prefer to plan my content out rather than create it there and then on the fly. Planning it out saves so much time again, by pre-writing your captions and then creating graphics and sorting photos out in one place (like a dropbox folder for that month) ready to schedule in or post.
Which area and time hack are you going to work on first to create more brand consistency for your business? Let me know in the comments below.
