When you’ve got the money, going to an organisation to design your full brand kit in one hit is certainly the best way to go. This is normally about $20,000AUD and not all small businesses have this kind of coin. I happen to be one of those. So what then?
When you can’t afford to do it all in one hit, you need to do it step-by-step, and you need to prioritise with the most important items first.
The logo is something that begins the branding cycle in my view. To create a logo you need to have a logo brief. You first put together a brief that describes what you want for your business, what your core values are and how you want to be perceived by your ideal customers. Take time on this brief. It is very important.
Next you need to find a designer to trust this with. Please don’t go cheap on the logo. You need a quality designer to complete your logo. It’s the cornerstone of your look and feel. It’s the first and most important visual that your customers will see, and the key visual that informs how they view you as a business. If you spend money with a designer on anything, let it be the logo.
I gave my brief to Kyle Nielsen because he’s a great designer and has a good feel for my business. If you need help finding a great designer speak to other people you know who have used designers or give us a call on 0416 196 485 and we can put you in touch with the right person.
Once you have a logo this will inform a lot of the other decisions you’re going to make along the way. It will also help you create some pretty great graphics without being a graphic designer. Don’t get me wrong, if you’ve got the budget for a graphic designer then definitely use one. This blog is purposed for people who are doing it on the cheap…and you can get a great look by following some simple guidelines.
How can we get the best out of our designers whilst contributing a little ourselves to save on costs?
The secret ingredient in this process is Canva. For those of you not familiar with Canva, it’s a design program built for people who need visuals but don’t have well-honed graphic design skills…yes, even you can create your own graphics that look professionally done. The key is in getting the designer to do the templates and then the rest is simple to follow. Some of the templates you might get your designer to do might include:
- Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+ cover images
- Website sliders
- Blog headers
- Visual posts within your social media such as Testimonials, Quotes, Promotions, Hero series (you’ll need a size done up for each of your social media platforms).
If you use Canva for work then you can set up a brand kit that has your pre-designed logo, text and colours so every graphic you create has an on-brand look and feel. This is really important for a quality, professional look to your marketing.
So now I have a winning logo, Kyle has graciously given me a few colour options to play with until I have the look and feel that feels ‘me’, or in your case feels ‘you’.
As a side-note, we started with a black and gold colour. This felt very masculine and a little too heavy. It was slick and bold but I wanted something a little more feminine, and something more approachable. A simple colour change to the already fabulous design made it fit just right.
Here’s the final result:
Now I’m uploading this into Canva, I’m playing around with a few designs and I’m copying my designer into the process so that he can check I’m not doing anything silly. Of course, I’m still paying my designer for his time, however, I’m not shelling out thousands because I’m doing some of the work myself.
I’m also experimenting with the process in Photoshop to see if this is more efficient for me. You may have some basic skills in Photoshop that allow you to edit templates. Whatever your preference you can get the designer to provide the right file for you. Canva requires they have a login, but you can get them to send you .psd files for Photoshop or whatever program you’re comfortable using.
Here’s a couple of examples of the templates I’m using:
This one’s a template for a tip about websites for Facebook
This one’s a quote template for Instagram
This is a template for something I’ve called the ‘Be’ series for Instagram
Once I’ve got these templates I can create multiple images from the one template. When I’ve exhausted the template, then I can go back to the designer to do something else for me.
In summary, building your brand on a shoestring doesn’t mean doing it all yourself. It means paying quality designers to do the really important parts and using some tools together with a little bit of training to do the rest yourself. Visuals are so vital in today’s competitive online world that you can’t afford not to get this part right.
