What is your brand’s style? Essentially it is the undertones to all of your branding. We’ve been through creating a brand board previously (see here). Think of your brand style as a more detailed thought from your brand board.
What an earth am I talking about? Well, here is an example for you. Your company has a logo, what components and themes can you pull out of that design? Does it feel a little whimsical? Is it bold, strong and brave? Do the colours used represent this? Is it the typeface alone doing all of the work?
Lets go back a step. When designing your branding, logo or any other element, what was it that you initially wanted to portray? Are you super girly? What message did you want to send to your audience and how did yourself or your designer capture that? Are you rolling with the watercolour trend to reflect creativity or femininity? These are all parts of your brand style.
Does that make your brand style a little more understandable?
Moving on. How can you better your brand style? Below, I will run through six super beneficial ways to do exactly that.
1. CONSISTENCY – We’ve all heard the phrase, ‘consistency is key’. Well, it is! In order to strengthen your brands style it need to be consistent, it needs to be recognisable and it needs to be memorable. If you have 3 different logos, different colours and different type faces then I doubt anyone will remember your brand. This is because you don’t have a consistent style.
2. TRENDS – Brands change, branding changes, like everything else in the world. Trends are such an influential aspect of your brand style. It’s important to keep things moving with the time without swaying too far away from keeping your brand consistent. Every so often its normal to have a slight re-brand. Not a total overhaul but maybe one of your key fonts has become too out dated. Don’t be scared to step back and rethink how it might effect your brand style and what you can do to improve that.
3. MESSAGE – This takes us right back to the beginning. What is the message you are portraying and does your brand style truly reflect this? If not then we need to go right back to the basics and rework your brand’s style until it does just that, giving your audience the right message about who you are and what you do.
4. PLACEMENT – This is an interesting one. When considering placement of your branding you might think that different situations suit different designs. Well, you are correct. You may have a logo, sub logo or even another alternative but, these designs all follow the same brand style. You don’t think twice and think its a different logo. Think of your brand style as the stem of your tree with all sorts of different yet consistent elements branching off it.
5. COLOUR – All brands need a colour palette. This is one of my main rules when considering your brands style and brings us straight back to consistency. 10 colours will never make a brand memorable. Think about it, Coke Cola we associate with being red. Sprite, green and so on. By no means does that mean you have to stick to just one colour but, my best advice is to limit yourself no more than 3 or 4 colours.
6. UNIQUENESS – Yes! Individuality, if thirty people all wore the exact same outfit to a work interview, it would make the interviewers job much tougher when trying to get to know the person. Remember your brand has character. Be the one in a dress whilst everyone else wears a suit. Tell the world you’re here. We all need inspiration but, use that inspiration and twist it to form something that is totally unique and amazing. It’ll strengthen you brands style more than you can imagine!
Now, take those six tips and use them to better your brands style. Let your brand rocket and speak for itself without having to answer that awful question of ‘So, what is it that you actually do?’.
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