How To Build A Brand & Define Your Company’s Style

When you hear the term “branding”, you may think it only applies to huge companies like Coca-Cola or Nike who can employ entire marketing teams. While it’s true that many national and international corporations spend millions on branding, it’s just as important for your small business to take it into consideration. In this article, we are going to look at branding in how it applies to your company website & online presence, but the principles can be applied to other offline advertising initiatives as well.

1. The Importance Of A Good Logo

building a brand logo design
It’s common to update your logo over time.

Your logo is one of the most important aspects of your company brand. It will appear on your website, your social media accounts, business cards, letterheads, and advertisements both online & offline. It can determine how memorable you are in the minds of your customers. Think about McDonald’s and the golden arches, or Nike and the Swoosh. Recent studies into the psychological effects of logos concluded that “effectively managed brand logos can help companies to build stronger customer brand commitment.” Many small businesses started with a basic text logo, and have never had the time or resources to invest in a new design.

Graphic designers can be expensive (though well worth it!), but there are other ways to update your company logo.

Fiverr is a website where you can hire someone to do something (in our case create a logo) for $5. To start, we recommend hiring 5-7 different designers to get a variety of logo options. You’ll notice that the quality can vary significantly between designers. With any luck you’ll be happy with at least one of the logos you’ve commissioned.

When hiring a designer to create a logo they will ask you what color’s you want it to be, which brings us to our next section….

2. Picking The Right Color For Your Brand

People tend to have a different emotional response when shown different colors. This is important to keep in mind when determining what colors you want associated with your brand. Like logo’s, these can change, and it’s not to say these are the only colors on your website, but think of them as the main emotion you want to convey. Here are a few examples of the types of emotions conveyed by color:

  • Red: Physical courage, strength, warmth, energy
  • Blue: Intelligence, communication, trust, efficiency
  • Yellow: Optimism, confidence, self-esteem, extraversion
  • Green: Harmony, balance, refreshment, restoration

Click here for more information & color descriptions.

What about color combinations?
As anyone who’s had trouble matching a tie to a shirt will tell you, finding the proper combination of colors can be a difficult and time consuming process. Luckily there are a few online tools to make the job easier for you.

Adobe Color CC (Forumerly Kuler)
This tool from Adobe helps you to match colors with various color wheels. Pick a single color to start and then it will show you what colors complement, are analogous too, or different shades of your initial color. It also provides the web hex and RGB values so it’s easy to implement your new color scheme on your website.

ColorPicker is a simpler tool which lets you drag a slider and find the exact shade of your desired color. It will also give you the web hex code, as well as some complimentary colours to use on your website.

3. Finding The Right Fonts

Putting a bit of consideration into choosing the right fonts can be the difference between an amateur looking or professional website. While you could use the same font throughout your site, having a different font for the body text and the main titles & headers can give your site a professional look.

sans serif vs serif fonts
Serif fonts have decorative “feet” on the lettering and are more formal. Sans-serif fonts do not.

If you want an official looking website (Government, Law, Finance, Real Estate, etc) then having your headers and titles use a serif font, and the body font use a sans-serif font can be a very effective choice.

To find a great font for your website, there are many great resources available.

Google Fonts
Google has provided a wide array of great looking fonts that are easy to utilize on your website. Be sure to only load up fonts you are actually using however, as having too many (more than 4) on your site can negatively affect your page load speed.

Ever see a font you like on a website but are not sure what it is? Download and install the WhatFont browser extension. Once installed, you just hover your mouse over any font, and it will tell you exactly what it is, very handy!

I hope this article has helped you to start thinking more about how customers perceive your business. Focusing on your logo, color scheme, and font choice is a great start to building a unique and memorable brand experience. Do you have any brand building tips to share? Let us know in the comments below.

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