Before you start creating graphics for social media, official and confidential documents, and other types of visuals, set a brand guideline first.
Having a brand guideline lets you and your whole team make any documents, files, and visuals officially yours by having and using your own design elements. This also sets apart what you create from your competitors and other brands.
What Your Brand Guideline Should Have
Let’s say you’re going to create a contract with an employee, what design elements do you think you need to use? Fonts, logo, and possibly a document template, right?
What if you’re making social media graphics, what do you think you’ll need? Colors, fonts and perhaps a template, a photo, and a logo.
To make everything you create visually in sync with your brand, you’ll need to establish first the fonts, colors, and templates you’re going to use from here on out.
Fonts
Your brand should only use one or two fonts. It’s not against the branding or design law to use three or more but if you want to keep it professional, use the same one or two fonts for everything. Just add another one if you want to emphasize your brand name or for your logo.
Colors
All colors are attractive but don’t randomly pick you feel like using. Stick to your brand’s colors or your logo’s colors.
However, if you want to make it playful and if you feel like sticking to the same colors over and over again is boring, you can use different colors but stick to the same shade. If you’re going to use vibrant colors, use them consistently. If you’ll use pastel colors, see to it that all your visuals use a soft shade color versions.
Templates
There are different kinds of templates. You should create one for official business documents, social media graphics, blog posts covers, business cards, and what not.
The logo and other information should already be placed so every time you edit this template, these design elements stay exactly where they are.
Where You Can Start
There are websites that can help you set up your brand guideline from scratch. Online tools like LogoAi can generate a logo design and even automatically set a brand guideline for you to follow.
