Ready to turn your brand strategy into a brand IDENTITY? (aka make your brand not only feel and sound good but look good too?!). This step is absolutely crucial for any artist or maker looking to grow your brand.

In today’s episode, we’re diving into the process of transforming your brand strategy into a cohesive brand identity that attracts the right audience and reflects your brand personality, and business goals.

From how to gather inspiration to putting it all together into brand guidelines, I’m breaking down the 8 key steps to go from vision to visuals.

So whether you’re starting out or looking to refine your existing brand, this episode is packed with actionable tips and resources to help you on the way!

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Resources mentioned in this episode:

• When DIYing your branding, how do you know if you’re “doing it right?” Listen to the episode or read the blog post here
• Which of the 7 Unique Logo Types is Perfect for You? Find out here!
• Need help finding branding inspo? Check out my Pinterest
• Ready to create your colour palette? Coolors.co or Adobe Color are the tools I recommend

Uncover & embrace your unique brand magic in 7 days 🪄 with the Brand Magic Blueprint!

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Read the accompanying blog post.

Tag me on Instagram @makerandmoxie and let me know you're listening.

And sign up to the Moxie Musings newsletter for more goodness like this.

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Want to support the show & help me make the world a more creative place one brand at a time? You can pop something in my tip jar here.

Any amount is appreciated, as is sharing the episodes or recommending the show to your creative friends!

Want to sponsor the Brand Your Passion Podcast? You can view the options & book in here.

As creatives, you know how to design something that looks good. But when crafting your brand identity, how do you create something that communicates the right things, attracts the right people and aligns with your overall vision? How can you translate that kind of abstract concepts like philosophy, purpose or personality Into concrete visual elements, I get it.

It can be hard to go from big ideas to specific design choices, such as fonts and colours. So today in this episode, I have a bunch of tips and my entire process to walk you through to help make that transition easier. So grab your sketchbook or open up your design software and let's get started. Today, we are tackling a topic that is crucial for any artist or maker looking to grow your brand, how to use your brand strategy to design a brand identity that not only looks amazing but truly resonates with your audience. So if you are just starting, or you're looking to refine your existing brand, this episode is going to have some actionable insights for you.

We are going to be exploring how to take that like the really big, beautiful vision you have for your creative business and translate it into a cohesive visual identity from choosing the right colours and fonts to designing logos and other brand elements that capture who you are and what you stand for.

But it's not just about making things look pretty. We are talking about designing with intention. How do you make sure that every design decision you make comes from this? Solid strategy so that your brand not only attracts the right customers, but it reflects your style and your business goals. Let's talk about it.

So first things first, and if you have heard me talk about anything ever before, you're going to know this, but you need that brand strategy first, right? One common mistake that people always make is jumping straight into designing and skipping any strategy. But this is going to make it hard to make those decisions, or you're going to end up.

Changing your design a bunch of times, or feeling like just a lack of conviction when it comes to making those decisions, you're going to be umming and ahhing and feeling like you're changing things all the time because you don't know why you're making those decisions. You're probably not. Choosing colours because you think they look cool, or you're like getting bored about what you currently have.

And you don't feel like you have a reason behind choosing what you've chosen you need to do a strategy to help guide you in making those decisions.

So this means understanding the six. P's of brand strategy. These are your purpose, philosophy, personality, people, positioning, and presentation.

And I have a free email course. It's called the brand magic blueprint that will help you start figuring this out. It will walk you through each of these steps. one of them every day for six or seven days because spoiler alert, there's a secret seventh one to help you uncover each of those parts of your strategy.

So if you want, if you don't already have a brand strategy, or you haven't started doing this process, or you want some help in doing this process you can Check out this email course. You can go to bit. ly forward slash brand magic blueprint. And you can go through this process to start getting a brand strategy put together.

But once you have that brand strategy, how do you use it to design your brand identity?

One thing that you need to know before we start doing anything is that everything in design has meaning. So when you look at the colour red, you might subconsciously feel things like anger, or you might feel alert, or passionate, or hungry.

When you see a cursive font you might get a sense that whatever is typed in that typeface is elegant or fa or expensive. If you see a sparkle icon where before you might have seen something cute and magical, you might now start thinking about A. I. So all of these things hopefully help you understand that everything in design has meaning.

So when we are going through this process, we are telling a story with every decision that we make. We are the energy with the colours and the tone with the typeface, the scene with the images, we are making subconscious links with our logo. All to create a picture in our audience's mind of who we are in the milliseconds it takes for them to make their first impression of us.

And that's what we're trying to achieve with this process and why it is so important to think about what you're communicating and how it feels when you are making decisions about your brand identity. So I just wanted to preface. Everything we're about to do with that because we're not just making willy-nilly decisions here.

We're not just, picking colors or choosing fonts or designing logos, because. They are cool shapes or fun colours or anything like that. It's because they are challenging, and we are trying to use that to create a story or create a picture or yeah, tell a tale for our audience that we want them to experience.

Let's go through each step of the brand design process. And I will tell you exactly how I do this and how I use a brand strategy when I'm designing a brand so that you can do the same.

[0:03] Defining Your Brand Concept

Okay, so step number one is defining a concept. So before you start, you might want to use your vision mission and positioning to define a concept, an overarching idea for your brand.

For example, I just worked with a brand that was all about careers, but in the strategy session, we talked about his vision, which is all about helping his audience build their career so that they can build their life. That is the bigger picture. It's not just about, getting a better career or a new job or anything like that.

This idea is about building something bigger, something better, something impactful. And that became the concept behind everything. So the visual language became these sort of like building blocks. And I took an element of the logo to create building blocks and that kind of Became the visual idea for everything.

So we created a pattern out of these building blocks. Another example is a brand I just worked with who teaches a particular piece of software, but something unique about them is that everyone talks so much about how well they make complex, confusing, overwhelming things easy.

So the whole brand idea became concepts made clear, and this inspired the entire visual language. So again, we created the logo. Out of that idea, we created patterns and illustrations and a system for these sub-brands out of this idea of concepts made clear. So you can create an overarching concept for your brand.

If you look at your vision, your mission, your positioning, the impact you want to have on the world. If you look back on your brand strategy and look at it, what is it that I'm trying to communicate? What is it that underpins everything I'm trying to do? What is the story that I'm trying to tell?

And that can create an overarching concept for your brand.

Then you can take, that concept. And like I said, you can use that to impact and influence the design decisions that you make. As I said, I took the idea of building and created patterns that were building blocks or created Illustrations logos and visuals that communicated the idea of concepts.

So I created some fuzzy graphics that then were connected to these really clear graphics. So it communicated the idea of that. Okay.

So moving on to the mood board. Phase or finding inspiration. This is where you can use that brand concept or keywords about your personality to find inspiration.

So say, for example, you could search things like bold typography calm photography or brick patterns, et cetera. One mistake people make here is only looking for branding examples. He might want to look for things like painting sculptures or signage, and I'll leave some links below to a bunch of my Pinterest boards.

Where you can find so much inspiration. So I'll just link my Pinterest below. I have so many boards set up for things like that, like painting and signage and a whole range of other things that hopefully will spark some inspiration for you. But yeah, use your keywords. If you have decided that you want your brand and your personality to be bold, then look for bold paintings.

Or if you want your personality to come across as calm, then look for a calm sculpture or something like that, that might inspire how your brand could grow, be communicated and the same with your concept. If you, like I said, are creating a concept around building or building blocks or something, you might look up brick patterns or building blocks or all of those sorts of things to inspire what your brand might look like.

Okay. Once you have found your inspiration, you're ready to set up your design workspace where you are about to be putting everything together. What I do next is put your. Keywords and the words you've decided that you don't want your brand to be. If you decide you don't want to be cold or masculine or whatever, definitely put those words there to the words about what you want your audience to feel and any information about your ideal customer next to where you are going to be designing so that you can check as you are working, that your brand is aligning with your strategy.

So I always have these keywords and information about the audience and any other key details that I need to know that I want to keep in mind as I design keywords next to where I am working so that as I'm putting things together, as I'm dropping in inspiration, as I'm doing anything to do with the brand, I can check all the time and make sure that.

What I'm doing is aligning with the strategy so that I don't get too carried away and start designing things that look nice and that I think are cool and that are working and that I love, but don't align with what we wanted them to do that aren't communicating the right things that aren't appealing to the right people.

You need to make sure that whatever you are doing is aligning with the brand strategy. So keep those keywords in your design workspace.

Okay, phase number four, choosing a colour palette. How do you use your brain strategy to do this? Number one, you can start with colour theory and think about what colours traditionally communicate the keywords that you've decided you want your brain personality to come across so if you want to communicate trustworthiness, for example, blue is the traditional way to do that. So you can start there obviously, but that's not the be-all and end-all. That is. Just the starting point then search for color palette inspiration Again, look up your keywords to find palettes that fit within your brand personality But one mistake people always make here is not searching without their keywords.

So you might miss something unexpected So here browse colour palette inspiration without your keywords and see if you find something surprising that still fits your brand personality for example, you start searching bold colour palettes or luxurious colour palettes, for example. Make sure that you also just do a general browse through some colour palettes and see if there's anything else that still feels bold and luxurious because something else might surprise you and might, still fit that just wasn't tagged in that certain way or didn't fit in that initial search.

So just don't limit yourself by the initial search. Then you want to drop all that inspiration into your design space and start pulling out colors to create those palettes and refine those until you have a succinct palette that fits your brand personality. Then you can use tools like Colors.

co or Adobe colour to refine that palette even further and get it down to five to seven colours, for example, and make sure you check its accessiColory as well. Again, make sure you check that against your list of keywords to make sure that it aligns with your brand personality goals and Against your ideal audience and whether you think this is a palette that will appeal to them.

You won't want to lock in your colour palette at this point because you will make sure you want to test it and put it into some social media graphics or a website or something like that to test it and make sure they all work together and it looks good in context and things.

But that's the basic process.

Okay, finding the right fonts. This is how you will use your strategy to do this. So again you will start by looking into font classifications which ones fit the personality you are trying to communicate through your brand font classificationsares a big, big topic but I will again leave some links in the description or the show notes so that you can start to get an understanding of this.

But this is a little bit what I was talking about at the top of the episode, where if you see a cursive font, it's going to generally give you the feeling of it being elegant and expensive and that sort of thing, versus if you see a Sans Serif font that's going to feel a lot more simple and modern and give you a different feeling.

So you want to just generally get an understanding of the different kinds of fonts that are out there and how they generally feel and which ones might be the right type of ones for what you are trying to communicate through your brand. And then again, you want to do a similar thing to what you were doing with the colours, so search for some typography inspiration, looking up your keywords to find those fonts that fit with your brand personality.

Again, do the same thing if you're searching for luxurious typography, bold typography, calm typography, calm fonts, etc. Do that same thing and see what comes up. And then again, as I said, with colours, don't forget to just do a general browse to see what comes up in case you missed something. You don't want to miss those.

Exciting surprises and then make sure you drop those inspirations into your design space so that you can start gathering a good selection of inspiration when you go to search font foundries or marketplace websites, like fonts. google. com or creative market, this is where you can find fonts that match your inspiration or that are, yeah, informed by the inspiration that you gathered and that work well together.

And then you can create a font suite of two to three typefaces that communicate your brand personality. And you're probably going to want, yeah basically a one main typeface or primary typeface, which will be for like headings and it's probably going to have a lot more going on. And then you're going to have a secondary typeface, which will be for your body copy.

So big paragraphs of text probably will be a little bit simpler. And then you might have a third typeface as well. That could be for subheadings or decorative parts of your typography. Yeah, if you just have subheadings or little extra bits, you might have a third typeface there too.

Okay, and then you're going to want to again, make sure you check these against your list of keywords to make sure they align with your brand personality goals and think about the ideal audience and whether you think these fonts are going to appeal to them. If your audience is Moms who are of a particular age and in a certain place and they have these certain values and they love this type of stuff, get in their head and think about whether these fonts are something they are gonna love and it's gonna attract them.

And they are gonna be like, Ooh, I love that. And that's something I would click on. Think about them and whether they are gonna love these fonts or not.

Okay, now let's talk about logos. First things first, you want to take a look at the seven unique types of logos. Again, I will link this to see which ones you think are right for you based on the style that you're going for the personality you're trying to communicate and the audience that you want to attract.

Then you can search for logo design inspiration, looking up your keywords to find logos that fit with your brand personality. You want to be careful here that you are just looking for inspiration, not that you are looking for something to duplicate or copy what you want to make sure that you are just really finding.

Inspiration. So yeah, search for that logo design inspiration. It's a very similar process to the fonts and colours. You're looking for that inspiration. You're dropping the inspiration into your design space. And then you're going to start designing your logos and refining those designs until you get a suite of cohesive logos that communicate that brand personality.

And with logos, you're going to, want maybe two to three versions of that logo. For example, you might want a horizontal version, a vertical version, and then maybe just an icon that would go in your profile photo or smaller spaces. So you need a few different versions so that it can remain consistent wherever your logo is used.

But this is the same process. So yeah, make sure that., as you are designing your logo, you are checking in, making sure that whatever fonts you're using in the logo however you're laying out your logo whichever style of logos you're using, whether you're creating like an emblem lockup or you're making a monogram or however you are going to lay it out, feel, see, In line with how you want your brand to feel and the people that you want it to appeal to and all of those things that you sit out in your brand strategy.

And again, make sure you check it against your keywords. Think about your ideal audience and all of those things. Okay.

And now we want to just talk about adding other brand elements. So as we know, as I've said and parroted many times, a brand is way more than just logos, colours, and fonts. So you might also want icons, illustrations, patterns, or photography, for example, and potentially other things.

Based on your brand concept and the inspiration that you gathered at the beginning, think about what other brand elements you want and need to be able to communicate your brand personality and create the experience you want to create and attract the right audience to your brand. So as I said at the beginning, that example about the Brand concept is about building your career and building your life.

I knew that I wanted some sort of building block element to like, create this idea of this, like building your career and building your life. I knew that was some one brand element that I wanted in this brand, so you might want something similar. So think about what you're.

The concept is something you want to create, how you want to create, communicate your brand personality who your audience is and what kind of elements you might want to add. So drop your inspiration into your design space again design some brand elements, whether that is icons, illustrations, patterns, photography, et cetera and then do the same process.

So check against your list of keywords. Think about your ideal audience, etc. And then last but not least, you want to review everything together.

So if you haven't already, you might have at this point, you want to start putting things together. So your logo, colors, fonts, and additional brand elements.

So you might want to create some examples. So like I said before, maybe an Instagram post or a mock-up of your website or some sort of example where you can start putting these things together. This is what I do as a brand designer for my clients. I put them on mock-ups. So like a t-shirt or a website homepage or an Instagram carousel or a Reels cover so that I can make sure all these elements are coming together and they work together as a full package, but also so that my client can see Hey, all these elements work together and they create this full brand experience.

So you want to do that as a practical thing to make sure that they work together like visually. But you also want to make sure that they. As a whole package, communicate your brand personality. They match the positioning as a goal and that will appeal to the audience you want to attract because your logo individually might communicate the right thing.

Your colours might communicate the right thing, but when you put them together, they might create a different kind of energy. So you want to make sure that when you put everything together, it still communicates the right thing. It still feels like the right thing. So make sure you put it all together and test it all together.

And if you're struggling to do this alone, make sure that you get feedback from a few other people. So that could be a friend, a colleague, another artist, another creative or people in your audience, ask them what words they would use to describe the brand and who they think it would appeal to.

It would be. Helpful to do that. Another great resource that will help you with this is to listen to the episode that I've recorded about how to know you're doing it right. When DIYing your brand, it's just a few episodes before this one. Recommend doing that. It will give you some advice about who to talk to and how to do that.

And also some other tips about how to feel confident through doing the DIY branding process. So definitely recommend that. Okay. So that has been the process. How to use your brand strategy throughout the process of DIY in your brand.

I'm going to give you some next steps now. So some actionable things you can do to start doing this.

So number one, go through the brand magic blueprint. If you haven't already gotten started on your brand strategy, it is going to walk you through each of these steps. So one step every day for seven days to give you an actionable tip to uncover parts of your strategy. And you can get started at bit.ly/brandmagicblueprint.

Once you have some thoughts on each of those six parts of your strategy. Start gathering some inspiration for your brand identity based on your personality keywords and refine it down to a mood board that your ideal customer would love. And then if this is not something that you want to do for yourself, you can always hire somebody to do this for you.

People like me or other amazing brand strategists and designers are here to support you in turning your vision into visuals. So Feel free to reach out to another person to help you to do your design because yeah. It's a process. It can be difficult. It can be a lot. Don't feel like you have to do it all by yourself if you are feeling overwhelmed.

So that would be my next step for you is to go through the Brand Magic Blueprint, create a mood board of inspiration for your brand, and then think about whether you want to do this process by yourself. If you do, that's great. Listen to more of my podcast episodes. And we will help you make that happen.

Or have a look at some designers who can help you make it happen. Okay. I hope this helps you to turn your brand strategy into your brand identity. And remember. The brand identity process is an iterative, creative process, so have fun, experiment, take your time, and don't be afraid to like, and refine your ideas as you go.

I hope this is helpful, as always until next time, keep creating, and I will see you in the next one. Okay, bye-bye!