Laura Busche

Design

How to Create your Brand Identity Board

By Laura Busche · January 12, 2017

One of the best ways to ensure that your brand’s look and feel is cohesive is to maintain a living identity board that everyone on your team has access to. A brand identity board is just a summary of the main guidelines to take into account as you design visuals for your audience. These visuals can take the form of stationery, ads, blog content, catalogs, sales collateral, submarks, and various other applications.

Design is your not-so-silent seller. It speaks volumes when potential customers are trying to figure out what your brand stands for. Your color, type, imagery, and layout choices reveal what your brand is all about even before people get a chance to read any text. Ideas like your values, mission, and vision are reflected in the design decisions that you make early on in the process.

It is absolutely essential that your brand feels cohesive across all of these customer touchpoints. Think about it: how would you feel if every time you saw a brand it looked entirely different? Your relationship would seem disjointed, and you might even have problems recognizing it among a larger group of brands. It simply hasn’t shown you any kind of distinctive visual character. Fortunately, though, we are fixing that today.

And we’re doing it in two steps:

Part A: Defining your brand’s visual character

Before we even start building your board there are a few components that you’ll need to define:

While there are many other building blocks in your visual identity, we will address these five throughout this guide. I will share some general pointers and the very best external resources I’ve found. You can always go back and modify the brand board to add any missing elements.

1. Designing your brand’s color palette

We are visual beings and color consistently sends us silent messages. Warm hues like yellow and red create a different ambiance than the cooler blues and greens. Warm displays passion, while cool conveys efficiency. Highly saturated colors reflect a vibrant brand personality, while more muted tones represent a sense of constraint. Going for a palette with many different colors speaks volumes about the brand’s energetic, extrovert character, while choosing one or two (a monochrome palette) can project minimalism and exclusivity.

I’ve found the following to be useful when selecting a color palette:

More resources to find inspiring color palettes: Design Seeds, Colourlovers, Coolors.

https://www.pinterest.com/laurabusche/dreamy-color-palettes/

2. Choosing your brand’s main and supporting fonts

Different types of fonts can help convey brand character traits. Font designers gather inspiration from very specific sources that inject a certain mood and context to the type families they create. Here are my main tips when choosing your brand’s font palette:

https://www.pinterest.com/laurabusche/typography-inspiration/

More resources to find inspiring font combinations: Design Seeds, Typewolf, Creative Market.

3. Selecting suitable logo variations

I’ll assume that you already have a logo for this component. If you don’t currently have one, feel free to leave a comment below and I’ll reach out with logo design resources. To create your brand board, at the very least, you will want to have:

4. Picking brand textures and patterns

This part will seem much easier once you have defined points one and two. Your color palette will help you select a series of textures, graphic elements, or patterns to complement the brand’s look and feel. I have found the following to be useful in selecting those:

More resources to find inspiring textures and patterns: Flatlays on Instagram, Styled Stock photos at Creative Market

5. Defining what on-brand photography looks like

Building a brand’s visual identity will require thinking like a photographer sometimes. What kinds of props and environments go well with our brand’s look and feel? How can we leverage filters, color correction, or light balance to preserve that look? The simplest way to go about this is to collect photos that display the aesthetic you are looking for. As you piece different photos together, you’ll start seeing similarities and hopefully be able to articulate what it is that sets them apart from other photos. A few more pointers:

Part B: Summarizing it on a board

You’ve done all this great work and now it’s time to summarize it. Why? Because having a clearly defined brand aesthetic is of no use unless you can consistently refer to it to make design decisions. You can create the most appealing color, font, and pattern combinations in the world and your brand could still lack cohesion in the eyes of your target market. That’s why I’ll introduce three ways to turn these decisions into a true reference board, in order of difficulty:

  1. Create a physical brand board
  2. Create a digital, shareable brand board using Canva
  3. Create a digital, shareable brand board using Illustrator

1. Create a physical brand board

To be perfectly honest this is something you might want to have even if you’re going the digital board route. It is just a completely different experience to physically surround yourself with a resource that lives and works with you. Imagine you’re sitting in your office working on your brand and boom: there’s your board to remind you of what it looks like, 24/7 — even when you’re offline. That’s some powerful inspiration, and in my opinion this type of board deserves to be created regardless of how you plan on sharing it online.

To create a physical brand identity board, just buy a corkboard and print out the elements we discussed above. Pin each of them following any of the suggested layouts below, or come up with an entirely new layout that works for you.

2. Create a digital, shareable brand board using Canva

You don’t have to know your way around complex design software to take your brand identity board online. Just use this Canva template, make a copy first, and modify it to include your own elements. Signing up for Canva is free, and the app works on any browser — no software installation required. You can download your board as a PDF, JPG, or share it directly with the team. If you feel like this method is working for you, take a look at Canva for Work. That paid version of the app will allow you to add a color palette, upload custom fonts, and assemble a brand board easily.

Here’s a recap of the steps involved:

  1. Click on this Canva template
  2. Make a copy. This is very important to avoid modifying the original template, which prevents others from using it.
  3. Share the link with your team
  4. Optional: download and print

3. Create a digital, shareable brand board using Illustrator

So Illustrator is your thing. Download this simple template and add the elements you’ve chosen above. If you’re wondering why I’m suggesting Illustrator rather than Photoshop for this, there’s a very specific reason: your brand assets are better off stored as vectors for easy copying and importing. In most cases, you’ll want to have assets like your logo in both formats (.psd and .ai), but it is much easier to manipulate them directly in Illustrator. If you don’t have access to Illustrator, open this layout in Photoshop and tweak it by overlaying shapes and text as needed.

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Over to you!

Do you feel ready to create a brand board? Have you already designed one and want to share how it went? Let me know in the comments area below.

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