Building a brand identity is more than essentially designing a logo. Going with strategic design decisions across each facet of your visual brand can mean the contrast between mixing in and popping out from the competition.

A solid and consistent visual representation of your brand is something you need regardless of what business you’re in, whether that is beginning a personal brand, monetizing your YouTube audience, or sending off an online store.

However, consider the possibility that hiring a designer is outside your budget.

Fortunately, there are a few free and low-cost tools and resources to assist you with building your brand identity regardless of whether you have no design abilities or budget. In the event that you’re not ready to invest in hiring a designer, you can in any case accomplish professional results with a DIY approach.

What is brand identity?

Brand identity is a holistic package of assets, visual elements, and design decisions that address a brand’s picture. The combination of these elements makes a brand exceptional, assists it with standing apart from the competition, and procures it brand acknowledgment among clients.

Brand identity is made out of various creative decisions that characterize your brand personality visually. These are a portion of the elements of brand identity:

Typefaces
Color palette
Logo
Visual medicines and style
Brand name
Brand tagline

Your decisions will turn out to be important for your brand guidelines, illuminating visual decisions you make while building your website, making marketing materials or business cards, and curating content for social media feeds.

Why is brand identity significant?

A brand identity gives your brand a visual anchor and assists you with making consistency at each client touchpoint. A tagline, an exceptional logo, or a distinct palette can stick to clients, assisting you with building brand acknowledgment.

Over the long run, consistent visuals and branding design decisions will assist you with building brand loyalty and trust, clients will be aware to expect similar high-quality content or products they’re utilized from you.

In jam-packed markets, areas of strength for identity can likewise assist you with standing separated from your competitors. At the point when clients pick one white shirt over another, quite a bit of that choice comes down to brand. Taking areas of strength with your general brand including a brand identity that resounds with your target audience can give your independent company an edge.

Organizations with solid visual brands have a major advantage over the competition on the grounds that more often than not you can perceive an ad or a post from them without seeing their logo.

How to set your brand identity in motion?

Brand your online store

Sooner or later in your task, you’ll presumably need to fabricate your own branded website. In some cases it’s the initial step, some of the time it’s the last, however, having a spot to call your own (as opposed to selling on a marketplace or third-party channel) gives you full creative control.

You have more visual flexibility on your own website than on some other platform, however, you’ll in any case have to adhere to your brand guidelines to guarantee your brand identity is consistent.

Here, you’ll apply those guidelines to various spots:

Store theme. Your theme is a website template that frames the skeleton of your site. Pick one that already lines up with your brand identity, and basically alter it to plug in your own text styles, colors, and pictures.
Photographs and graphics. As with anyplace, photographs address your brand, these ought to be consistent with your visual style. A few themes have existing realistic elements (boxes or color-blocked sections) be certain these work with your brand when you pick your theme.
Textual styles. Most themes allow you to pick your textual styles inside the editor. On the off chance that your text styles are not accessible, you might require coding or advanced information to load these textual styles.
Logo variation and placement. Pick the right logo variation for each utilization case on your site. Your favicon will utilize your most straightforward logo, while your landing page could incorporate a bigger rendition of your fundamental logo.
Color palette. At the point when you lay out your color scheme in your underlying branding design work out, you ought to have hexadecimal codes for each color. These are helpful codes perceived across software (like Photoshop or Canva) and the web. Inside your theme, you can set your brand colors utilizing these codes.

Brand identity on products and packaging

Your brand decisions can show up wherever from on the item itself (say a shirt mark) to packaging (chocolate covering) to the outer shipping packaging (a custom poly mailer).

While working with an accomplished printer or utilizing a self-serve online printing service, the onus is on you to be certain that the documents you produce have the right colors (viable with print) and sizes to accommodate the printing application.

The more places you can have your logo or other branding elements appear, the better possibilities you should solidify your brand in your client’s brains. Utilize the fitting logo variation for every application.

Marketing and customer communication

Your social media pages needn’t bother with to be put with enormous versions of your logo again and again, and as a matter of fact, they shouldn’t.

Your social feeds ought to be more organic and aspirational, and show products in a lifestyle context. Your logo can pop up in unpretentious ways on the packaging, however, your brand identity can be effectively communicated through visual and color decisions across your grid or playlists.

Have your brand identity show up consistently across each of your communications channels, including all that from shipping notification emails to checkout. Utilizing the suitable logo variation and size is significant for each utilization case.

Your brand should leave a lasting impression

A portion of the world’s best brands Apple, Nike, and McDonald’s are generally conspicuous by their most worked-on logo.

Frequently you’ll try and know the brand by the tone of an ad, text style decisions, or photography style before the brand is even referenced. That is on the grounds that incredible brands have prepared clients through consistent brand identity design.

With a couple of straightforward guidelines and a few free user-friendly tools, accomplishing the same is conceivable. You currently have everything in your toolbox to make a visual brand identity that encapsulates your brand’s main goal, draws in the right expected clients, and makes them want more.