In a world with too many choices, branding is key to making your company stand out from the rest of the pack. But let’s say that you already have branding in place, and it just doesn’t seem to be doing as much as it could. How can you breathe new life into your brand and make it perform over and above your expectations?
That’s exactly what we’re here to discuss today!
There’s never been a better time to get involved in good branding, and the main reason for that is the sheer number of resources available to company owners and branding experts.
Among the hundreds of possibilities, we’ve picked fifteen must-have business design tools and resources to help you fulfill your branding dreams.
For Sleek, Stylish Logos
- There are a lot of places you could go for built-from-the-ground-up design, and LogoDesign.net is a strong contender for the favorite. The site offers a quick turnaround, with the possibility to create the perfect logo for your brand in just two minutes — for free. If you need a little assistance, take a look at the custom design portfolio on site.
- Are you determined to create your logo all on your own, starting with your hand-drawn idea? Then we would definitely suggest Inkscape, which is a vector illustration software. It’s free, it’s easy to use, and it’s effective.
For Awesome Layouts And Templates
- If you’re new to the world of branding, you may not even be clear on how many different arenas there are where you can make branding work for you. And even if you know which different areas deserve your attention, how can you keep the appropriate sizing straight? Piktochart is a popular choice for layouts and templates for everything from social media posts to infographics. There are both free and paid features, as well as tutorials and demos that make it easy to use.
For Effective Color Choice
Are you trying to put together a good color scheme for your updated brand? Here are some of the best tools available to help you make the right choice.
- Colordot helps you to get a visual on how your palettes will look together. It’s free, fun, and simple.
- Coolors is a drag and drop function that lets you extrapolate colors from a chosen image, allowing you to find colors that work well together in the most organic way possible.
- Material Design is a great way to ensure that your color choices are user-friendly, measuring the accessibility and legibility of text against your chosen colors.
- Paletton is a highly popular color scheme designer, helping you to bring together colors that play well with each other and give your branding the pop you need.
For The Best Font Families
- Open Foundry offers an easy to use interface and a wide variety of font options, as well as giving you the chance to experiment with kerning, sizing, and spacing.
- For free, open-sourced, curated fonts, look no further than The League Of Moveable Type.
- Font designers do awesome work, but there are so many free resources that sometimes it almost devalues what they do. If you want to give something back, look to the Lost Type Co-Op. Rather than using a set price for a font, you can choose to pay what you think it’s worth, and the money goes back to the designer of the font.
For Graphic Bases
If you need some awesome images to build on as branded content, these are the resources you should turn to.
- Unsplash offers a wide range of beautiful graphics and photos, absolutely free.
- Stocksnap bills itself as the number one resource for free stock photos.
- If you need more variety in image types, Shutterstock has one of the largest range of vectors, illustrations, photos, and even videos and music, all royalty free, for a low price point.
For Brand-Centered Websites
Is it time to make your website reflect your incredible new branding? Then it’s time to put these resources and tools to work for you.
- ThemeForest is a simple to use website theme platform that offers walkthroughs and guides to every aspect of your site, with both free and paid versions.
- WordPress is a highly popular platform, which offers some of the highest customizability. Even the free version is well worth a look, while you can add features and plugins for a low monthly cost.
One thing to note is that these design resources range from free to paid options, with varying levels of ease of use. We’ve noted some of the available options on the individual resource, and also included what each resource is best used for. But it’s worthwhile to remember that many of these resources are very versatile, and can be used for more than one aspect of branding.
It really just depends on what tool you want to use, and how comfortable you are with using it. And you can, of course, combine as many of them as you would like!
Give Your Brand New Life — Steps To Take
Each of these areas is definitely worth your time to address. But you may want to do all of them in order to really max out your brand’s appeal.
- Give your logo a facelift. Your logo is probably the primary graphic that your customers become acquainted with. They’ll associate it heavily with everything they know about your company. So make sure that the style is not antiquated, that it fits the personality of your brand, and that it’s easy to reproduce and remember.
- Modernize your color choices. Many brands have different variations on color palettes, while making sure that their logos and other graphics show well in grayscale and in limited colors. Others use unique color palettes depending on the season, occasion, or product line. These are all solid decisions to consider. Since color enhances and influences how we feel about a graphic and a brand, updating your color palettes could be a good way to maximize customer response.
- Upgrade your image quality. Regardless of the images you choose, they should always be optimized for quality and sized appropriately. It also helps if you use images that are unique and easy to identify as fitting your brand.
- Fine-tune your fonts. Fonts come and go in popularity, and to a large extent they’re a matter of taste. But it’s vital that you make sure your typefaces are clearly legible and easy to read.
- Refine and re-align your content. From graphics to videos to articles and beyond, content is king in terms of dedicated branding. Take the time to analyze your existing content, making certain that it fits your brand’s personality.
- Try a social media campaign. Branding is only effective if it’s visible to the viewer, so make sure your new branding techniques don’t get lost in the shuffle. More and more consumers are relying on social media to help them learn about brands of interest, as well as assisting them to communicate with their favorite companies. So using social media to advertise your brand is one of the top ways to actually reach potential customers.
- Revamp your website. Your website is the home base of your brand, and as such, it should be frequently updated. Make sure to revise content, including graphics, to reflect any changes to your brand as a whole, such as updated logos and color palettes.
Remember, branding is not a “one and done” solution — it takes several steps to put effective branding into place. And even if you’re at a good position with your brand, there’s always the future to think about!
With these tools, you can keep on top of your branding journey, and make sure that your branding continues to live up to its potential.
Author Bio
Alice Scott is a passionate writer and blogger who specializes in topics related to digital branding, blogging, and online business. She loves having Churros with her cat Chubby and morning walks.
