Creating a memorable brand identity is crucial for any new business or podcast. It helps you stand out from the competition, build trust with customers, and create a consistent and recognizable image. In this blog post, we’ll explore how to create a brand identity for your new business from soup-to-nuts. If you’ve already established your brand, learn how to reverse-engineer your brand and create a brand style guide here.
We’ll cover how to design a logo in Canva, select brand colors using color psychology, choose brand fonts using typography best practices, identify your brand’s tone of voice, select images that align with your brand, and set up a brand hub in Canva.
If you have an existing company, but you lack a brand style guide, check out this post where we show you how to reverse-engineer your existing brand.
Designing a Logo in Canva
A logo is the cornerstone of your brand identity. It’s the visual representation of your business and should be memorable, unique, and reflective of your brand. Canva is a great tool for designing a logo, even if you have little to no design experience. Here’s how to design a logo in Canva:
- Choose a template or start from scratch.
- Add your business name and any taglines or slogans.
- Choose a font that reflects your brand’s personality.
- Add any relevant graphics or images.
- Experiment with different colors until you find the perfect combination.
- Save your logo as a PNG file with a transparent background for versatility.
When designing a logo, be sure to keep it simple, relevant, and memorable. Avoid using too many details, colors, or fonts that can make your logo look cluttered or confusing. Be sure to use symbols, icons, and images that leave a lasting impression on customers. Unique shapes, icons, or images help convey your message or story in a creative way.
Selecting Brand Colors Using Color Psychology
Colors play a significant role in how people perceive your brand. Different colors evoke different emotions and can influence purchasing decisions. To select brand colors using color psychology, consider the following:
- What emotions do you want to evoke? For example, blue is often associated with trust and stability, while red is associated with excitement and passion.
- What colors are your competitors using? You want to stand out from the competition, so choose colors that differentiate your brand but still evoke the emotions that you want your reader to feel when seeing your logo.
- What colors align with your brand’s personality and values? For example, a health and wellness brand might choose green, which is associated with nature and growth.
Once you know what you want your most dominant color to be (ours is teal), you can use Canva’s color wheel tool to create harmonious color combinations based on color theory. You can also use Canva’s color palette generator that helps you extract colors from an image or a logo that you like.
Tips on Choosing Your Brand’s Palette
Here are some tips on how to select your brand colors:
- Choose a primary color: This is the main color that represents your brand and dominates your logo and branding materials. This color should be tied to the color psychology of your brand. Staples is red; Facebook is blue; Uplevel Coworking is teal.
- Choose secondary colors: These are the colors that complement your primary color and create contrast and balance in your branding materials. These colors help you add nuance to the emotions your brand evokes in people. Our secondary colors are orange and deep teal.
- Choose accent colors: These colors add interest and variety to your branding materials and highlight important elements or calls to action. Choose accent colors that stand out from your primary and secondary colors and attract attention. For example, you can use bright or warm colors for a fun and playful look; or you can use dark or cool colors for a sophisticated and elegant look.
Selecting Brand Fonts Using Typography Best Practices
Typography is another important aspect of your brand identity. It can convey your brand’s personality, tone, and style. When selecting brand fonts, aim to:
- Choose fonts that are legible at different sizes, especially for your body copy.
- Select fonts that reflect your brand’s personality. For example, a luxury brand might use a script font (headings or accents only!) while a brand that has an “everyman” vibe might choose more nondescript fonts.
- Use no more than two or three font families to maintain consistency.
What is a font family?
A font family is a group of fonts that share the same design characteristics and work well together. Choose a font family that has different weights (such as light, regular, bold) and styles (such as italic, condensed, expanded) that you can use for different purposes and contexts.
For example, for Uplevel Coworking (and our podcast, Uplevel University), we use the Comfortaa family and Open Sans. You can also use a specific font that only appears in your logo or wordmark if you want it to stand apart from the rest of your brand (an option, but not necessary). For us, our accent/logo font style is Garet Book.
Identifying Your Brand’s Tone of Voice
Your brand’s tone of voice is how you communicate with your audience. It should be consistent across all your marketing materials and reflect your brand’s personality and values. To identify your brand’s tone of voice, take these following steps.
- Define your brand’s personality. What do you want your brand’s personality to be? Do you want to be remembered as playful, creative, serious, adventurous, innovative, or authoritative? Choose 3-5 adjectives that reflect your brand.
- Determine your brand values. What message do you want to convey to your audience, and what do you want them to walk away with?
- Focus on your target audience. How do your ideal clients communicate? What kind of words and rhetoric resonates with them?
Once you’ve identified your brand’s tone of voice, create a style guide that includes guidelines for writing headlines, body copy, and social media posts. If you have existing content, you can also ask Chat GPT to analyze your brand’s tone of voice.
For example, when I ran some of our website copy (which I wrote) through Chat GPT, it told us that our brand was welcoming, informative, confident, contemporary, and professional:
My exchange with ChatGPT to determine the tone of the copy on our website.
From there, our team is able to create (or generate) new content that uses that same tone. If you plan to incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) into your marketing strategy, be aware that
Identifying Images That Align With Your Brand Identity
Images are a powerful tool for communicating your brand’s personality and values. When selecting images for your new business’s brand identity, you want to make sure that the images that you use are consistent across the brand.
Three things you’ll want to identify in your style guide include:
- Image style: This is the overall look and feel of your images that reflects your brand personality and message. You can use adjectives or phrases to define your image style. For example, your image style could be realistic and natural, abstract and artistic, minimalist and elegant, colorful and vibrant, vintage and nostalgic, or graphic. For most B2B brands, I recommend a “realistic and natural” style for the photos you use.
- Image content: This is the subject matter or theme of your images that relates to your product or service, your industry, or your audience. Find 1-2 images that accurately represent each major bucket of image content you might have so that anyone working with your brand has an idea of what images are and are not appropriate for your brand.
- Image quality: This is the technical aspect of your images that affects their appearance and performance. You can use adjectives or phrases to define your image quality. For example, your image quality could be high-resolution, low-resolution, sharp, blurry, bright, or dark. Keep in mind that you can adjust many of these settings in Canva if there’s a photo you like that doesn’t quite meet your standards.
Brand Identity Image Example
Here’s an example of all three of these aspects in action, inspired by one of our newest members, a co-op who helps homeowners, businesses, and nonprofits invest in solar.
- Style: realistic and natural, with vibrant/saturated colors
- Content: smiling people standing in front of homes, solar panels on buildings, smiling groups of racially-diverse people to indicate community
- Quality: bright, high-resolution images with soft lighting
Because Canva’s photo library offers millions of free and premium photos, you should be able to find images that accurately represent your brand. You can also create images that align with your brand using Canva’s new AI tool where you describe the image you want Canva to create on your behalf. Last, for many of the images and graphics, you can also customize your images with Canva’s editing tools that allow you to crop, resize, filter, adjust, or add effects to your images.
Setting Up a Brand Hub in Canva for Your New Business’s Brand
When you’re establishing a brand identity for a new business, Canva’s brand kit feature allows you to create a brand hub that includes all your branding materials in one place. More recently, they’ve dubbed it a “brand hub.” This hub is a centralized place to store and manage your brand assets and materials, such as your logo, colors, fonts, images, templates, and documents. Having a brand hub can help you maintain brand consistency and streamline your workflow.
To fully set up a brand hub in Canva, you need to upgrade to Canva Pro or Canva for Enterprise. Then, you can use the following steps:
- Create a brand kit: This is where you can upload your logo and select your brand colors and fonts. You can also create multiple brand kits for different projects or clients.
- Upload your images: This is where you can upload your own images or access the ones you have purchased from Canva’s photo library or illustration library. You can also organize your images into folders for easy access and management.
- Create your templates: This is where you can create or access your own templates for different types of branding materials and communications, such as business cards, flyers, brochures, social media posts, websites, presentations, and more. You can also share your templates with your team or clients for collaboration and feedback.
- Create your documents: This is where you can create or access your own documents that contain your branding materials and communications. You can also export, print, publish, or share your documents with your team or clients for review and approval.
In summary
In conclusion, creating a brand identity is crucial for any new business. By designing a logo in Canva, selecting brand colors using color psychology, selecting brand fonts using typography best practices, identifying your brand’s tone of voice, identifying images that align with your brand, and setting up a brand hub in Canva, you can create a consistent and recognizable brand identity that resonates with your target audience.
You can create a brand identity for your new business that stands out from the crowd and attracts loyal customers by simply designing a logo, selecting your brand colors and fonts, identifying your brand’s tone of voice, determining what images best represent your brand, and setting up a brand hub in Canva.
Are you ready to create a brand identity for your new business? What are you waiting for? Start creating on Canva today, or book a tour to learn how we can help you meet your business goals!🚀