Design Secrets to a Professional Looking Brand

I’m sharing with you at design secrets that are going to help up level your brand from your brand, visuals it to your website. I’m going to be giving you simple tweaks to help you take your brand from amateur to looking amazing. So join me as we go through these design secrets. Hey, welcome back. So today we’re going to be talking about these design tweaks that you can make. They’re super easy and they’re going to help up level your brand. Even if you can’t pay for a custom brand or website or writing now and you are still on the DIY train, that’s okay because there are several tips here that are going to help you make it look like a professional helped you out with your branding and your website.

Design Secrets to a Professional Looking Brand

The first tip, and I think a lot of creatives overlook this or they may not just understand what it’s for is that your mood board or inspiration board. The mood board helps you refine your vision and sets the tone for your brand style or vision.

Inspiration Board (Mood Board)

I want you to be clear on what you want your brand to look like. This is going to help you create the visuals for your brand, the tone for it. So maybe prior to going into Pinterest, sit down and think of three to five adjectives that you want your brand to be known for. That could be modern, simple, romantic, corky, fun. Sit down and think of like three to five adjectives before logging onto Pinterest and creating a secret board. Then just go through and start exploring different pins.

Think about fashion, travel destinations, photography styles. It can be anything from clothes to food or whatever inspires your brand or helps you set the overall mood or tone. This inspiration board you can refer back to whenever you feel like you may be getting off-brand or need help, just kind of staying or sticking to your brand. This is a great place to start helping you identify what your visual brand is.

Whenever you’re going through Pinterest, after you pin, you know, say 15-30 pins, are you seeing any reoccurring colors that you may be drawn to? Because now we want to create our color palette and I like to stick to three to five colors.

Defined Color Palette

So you have a one to two primary colors. A secondary color, you use quite as much, and then make sure you have a neutral like gray, brown, black, something like that to really help stabilize your brand.

Creating that color Palette and then using it throughout your brand identity, from your website to your social media graphics, to your Facebook cover. Make sure that you’re using this color pallet over and over and over again helps build your brand identity.

Fonts

You need to stick to three main fonts. A header font that’s going to be the big one on your website (the biggest font). A secondary font used as a subheader and then a paragraph style.

Have a serif font (that’s the one with the like the little feet and tails on it) for the header. Have a sans-serif (that’s the one that doesn’t have the the the feet and tails on it) as the subheader. And making sure that you can differentiate the three fonts. We want them to be different but cohesive.

Be Mindful of Font Size

Watch your font size. That can go both ways so your fonts can be too small and hard to read and your audience won’t be able to read what it is you’re writing. Or having a really big clunky text can just look amateurish, so making sure that you’re using good font size is another really small tweak that can help you look a little bit more professional.

High-Quality Brand Imagery

We want to make sure that we are using high-quality imagery for once again, your Instagram feed, your social media graphics.

Even on your website, there’s a plethora of free high-quality imagery that you can use and I will link to those in the show notes like Unsplash or Haute Stock. There’s so many and you can even use places like Creative Market to find even more.

This is a great place to keep in mind that that mood board that we talked about in the first tip, whenever you’re picking out your brand imagery from those free stock places, make sure that it’s in line with your brand. If your brand is like bright and fun and Quirky, then we want to lean towards images that emote that vibe. Don’t go dark and moody if that’s and not what your brand is about. Use your mood board in that way with your brand imagery, those are how those two go hand in hand to really start building out a brand identity that looks super professional.

Simple Website Navigation

We’ve covered your brand identity, your mood board, your color pallet, your fonts. Now what we’re going to move into your navigation on your website. We want to make sure that your website has easy navigation. So using simple terms like home, your homepage about for the about page portfolio or gallery for those pages, simple terms like that because one of the main reasons why visitors are going to click off your website is if they get confused, they don’t know who you are, what it is that you’re trying to sell or where to go next.

Make sure that you have very easy navigation and you’re not leading people in 50 million directions on one page of your website. For each page, you should have one main goal on that page.

Your homepage should possibly take them to an about page, your about page to take them to an investment page. Just make sure that you’re not creating too many buttons that are making it difficult for your readers to understand where you want them to go next.

Text Alignment

We want to make sure that our website, once again the font is not too big or too small. We’re using good font ratios, but also the texts alignment and using center align texts for like all of your texts, from your headers to your sub headers to your paragraph can make it look super messy. I’m professional and people are just aren’t going to read what you have to say. Make sure that you’re either keeping it justified, which is where all of the lines are the same length or left align. It just makes it easier to read and overall it looks and more professional. So those are some of the quick tips I have for you. Design secrets that can take your brand from looking maybe a little bit amateur to a more professional.

Brand Toolkit

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