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What is a brand board?
why do you need to have one for your business?
When I started building my first website, I didn’t have any idea about brand board and why do I even need to have one. And as you can guess my first website looked pretty bad, it didn’t have any consistent style. It was hard to keep all this information in my head, I wish I created a visual document back then to guide my design process and make my life easier. Today I see how much time I could have saved if I created my brand board before even thinking about building my website.
What is a brand board
A brand board or a brand guide is a visual document that includes all the visual elements of your brand. There’s no strict formula for what you can include, sometimes elements that you can include vary. It can include such things as your logo variations, brand colours, typography, patterns and graphic elements (if you have any), photos, and featured images. Depending on your business, sometimes you can include graphic design variations for your blog posts and design variations of your business cards.
Usually, it’s a graphic designer or a persona who builds your website and helps to create a brand board for your business. But if you’re building your website on your own, you could create it by yourself. While creating a brand board, you need to know exactly what you want to achieve with your business, how do you want your business to show online, and what emotions to evoke in your future visitors. A visual style should be reflecting you as well, and you want to choose the style that you like.
Of course, your business should be about the people your serve, but I believe that your visual identity and website design should also reflect you as a person or a business and align with your values.
Why do you need a brand board?
The most important reason for creating your brand board is to have a consistent visual style all the time. Every time you need to update some elements on your website, send an email or create a visual graphic for your new blog post you don’t need to spend time remembering what fonts or colours to use. You will be able to open a ready-made document and follow it.
Having a consistent visual style is important whether you’re a small business owner or a huge corporation. It helps to build trust among your prospects, look professional and be recognized.
A brand board can be very useful for your graphic or web designer. It simplifies the website building process a lot. In many big companies, a brand board is like a manual for a design team which every member of the team can use and move forward with her work.
Examples of brand boards
Brand Board Variations For My First Website as a language mentor
Creation process
A good brand board should please you and reflect you as a person, but at the same time, it needs to fulfil your business needs.
In order to start creating it, you need to understand what images you like and what visual style and what emotions you want to evoke with your brand. You will need to do a small research to learn what you like and what will be the best fit for your business.
I usually start with creating a mood board or an inspirational board. It’s a collage of images and sometimes some colours that evoke a certain mood or style of your brand. It’s an inspirational tool for your future visual design. Very often a web design process starts with it.
As soon as you are clear about what emotions you want your brand to evoke and the style you like. You can start creating a colour palette, a font pairing, and maybe searching for patterns and style images that you will use consistently.
There are many free online tools to help you to do that if you don’t have a budget to hire a professional graphic designer. You check free stock images library to choose the style of images you like. You can check Google fonts to choose the best font pairing. You can also generate your colour palette online. I won’t go here into too much depth about all the resources you can use. I will probably make another blog post about it.
Tools to help you to create a brand board
You can put all the elements in a one-page document easily as well. There are many free online tools that help you to do this. Probably the easiest one is Canva. It’s very intuitive and easy to use, you have many great free templates as well.
If you want some more advanced design tools. The one that I really enjoy is Figma. It’s completely free when you start. Although, there’s a small learning curve if you want to master it. There are many great plugins and templates to help you to start.
You can always if you won’t try to use Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator. Everything is up to you.
Final Thoughts
Whether you’re a small business, a huge corporation or a creative having a brand board is absolutely vital for your business. The brand board will help you:
- save time
- help to stay consistent with your visual style, and a consistent visual style will help your brand to be recognized, look professional and trusted more
- make designing your website so much easier