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The first impression someone has of your business is crucial. And many times, it’s the design aspects people see first - whether it’s your website, Instagram graphics, or business cards.
That’s why solidifying the visual elements of your branding is important through a style board, whether you’re just starting out in business or have been in business for years.
What is a branding style board?
If you're not a designer, you might not know what a brand style board is. It's a document that showcases all the elements of your brand design and visually organizes the brand's style and identity. If you work with a graphic designer to put together a full branding package in the future, you should receive one from them.
A brand style board typically includes items like the brand's main logo, alternative logo, favicon, fonts, graphic elements, color palette and textures or patterns.
In this post, I'll break down what the purpose is of each element.
1. Main logo
Your main logo will appear at the top of your site. It's the primary identity of your brand.
2. Alternative logo variations
The alternative logo is a variation of your main logo. Since many times your main logo appears in a rectangle format, the alternative logo is typically presented in a circular shape. This makes it easy to place on social media banners or headers,profile images, stamps, etc.
3. Favicon
The favicon is an graphic that appears in a webpage window above the URL of the site you’re on. Many favicons will be letters or icons - you can either take the initials or a letter from your company name, or just use a graphic element from your logo.
One of my clients is opening a coffee shop and we made her favicon a coffee bean icon. You'll notice that the one for my site is LD.
Favicons are meant to be extremely simple since they take up a very small amount of space.
4. Fonts
Brands most commonly have 2-3 font choices. One is for titles and headings, one is for the paragraphs of text and the other, when included, is typically a decorative font that is used sparingly.
It’s important to keep this simple because having too many font options can be overwhelming and takes away from your goal of actually branding yourself.
If you’re not sure what fonts to go with for headings and paragraphs, here are some tips.
Sans serif fonts are great for headings. These are the fonts without the extensions on the end of the letters (which you’ll notice on this font). Because sans serif fonts have clean lines, they’re easier to read for short, bolded phrases of text like a heading. The font used for the title of this blog post, Myriad Pro, is a sans serif font.
Serif fonts are great for paragraphs. Just as I mentioned above, this font is a serif font, and you can see the extensions that come off the bottom of the letters. Serif fonts are recommended for paragraphs because they’re typically easier to read a large mass of text.
5. Graphic elements
Graphic elements are what gives your brand a personality. This includes things like "buttons" (images that link to a page on your site), a divider or line separating sections of a page from one another, or other graphics/icons you can place throughout your site.
Just like I mentioned the coffee shop above, for her branding style board, I added different coffee icons.
6. Color palette
These are the four or five brand colors that, for the most part, are non negotiable. Other than the default of a white background and black paragraph font for a website, your branding throughout your website (color blocks, H2 and H3, links) can reflect these colors.
When choosing brand colors, it's typical to identify a mix of dark and softer colors so that when you put one on top of the other, you create a contrast between them.
The desired result is brand consistency, and that’s why having a variety of 6+ random colors plastered throughout your site, social media profiles or webinars will prevent you from achieving that. Someone will be very confused if they see a bright yellow all over your Instagram feed, but not on your website.
It's helpful to store these colors in an easily accessible folder on your desktop, or inside your Canva Pro account. I absolutely love this feature of Canva because I don’t need to find my color codes every time I want to create a graphic. I can just click on the colors from my Brand Kit.
You can use a tool like Coolors.co to find the hex codes for your brand colors.
7. Textures/patterns
There are many uses for textures and patterns - background for a header on your website, blog post graphics, webinar design, etc. These should match your brand colors and the feel of your logo design as well.
My favorite place to find textures and patterns is Creative Market.
Brand style board examples
Below you’ll see 11 different brand style boards for not only my own business, but also for a variety of my clients in different niches - health/fitness coaching, mindset/leadership coaching, photography, recruiting, conversion copywriting, etc.
You’ll now be able to see how all the design elements from above are displayed on a branding style board. This helps keep me and my clients on-brand when creating something new.
