I get it. You’re a small business or entrepreneur who needs to do your own branding. You’d love to hire someone, but you don’t have a lot of money to spend on professional branding yet. You know that you need to present yourself to attract your audience, but you’re overwhelmed by all the fonts & colors and not sure where to start. These days, branding is not just a logo or a slogan anymore. You need to have a strong online presence and be active on social media to build your brand. Part of that is by being recognizable by using the same fonts and colors. Your audience will start to notice and you’ll feel familiar to them.
Sounds easy enough, but where do you find good fonts?
How do you pick colors that don’t clash?
Don’t worry, I’ll guide you through a simplified process so you can create a very simple brand to get started with. I’m going to give you the easiest way to make your own mini brand by picking a font or two and showing you a fairly quick way to pick your colors.
Choose the right color scheme
Choosing colors is not easy, even for experienced designers and artists. Fortunately, there are some rules and websites that can make the choice easier. The first thing to establish is your project goal. Who is your target audience and what is the standard in your industry? While it’s great to be different so that you stand out, it’s not great to be so different that your audience is confused about what you do because you look like a business in a completely different industry. Take a look at what others in your industry are doing and take notes on what you like and don’t like. Then you can move on to actually picking your colors.
One of the easiest ways to start is by deciding on your neutrals (for example black, gray, white, or other desaturated colors) and then adding in one accent color. Use this color for anything that needs to have attention drawn to it, or for all your CTAs (calls to action) if you have them.
Another simple method is to pick one color, such as blue, and use different shades and tints of that same blue. So you’ll create a palette that ranges from a very dark blue to a very light, almost white, blue. Boom, there are your colors. Now you can just add black, white, and grays to it as necessary.
If you really want a more colorful look, some other places you can search for beautiful color palettes are on Pinterest, or by going to a website like https://htmlcolorcodes.com/ or https://coolors.co/.
Just be careful about putting colored text on a colored background. It’s best to stick nearly white text on a dark background or almost black text on a light background so you don’t have readability issues due to lack of contrast or color blindness.
What Kind of Fonts Should You Pick to Suit Your Brand?
Now that we have an idea of color, we need to decide which font best expresses our brand. This is a question all designers are faced with, and there are many correct answers. But, as a general rule, you need to pick a typeface that’s easy to read. Keep it simple!
One of the easiest places to start is with Google Fonts. You’ll find that a lot of their fonts are available in many other software programs and are used extensively on the web. So if you decide to start a blog, the fonts are readily available in WordPress. The more popular ones like Montserrat, Lato, and Roboto are currently available in the free version of Canva.
Pssst- these three fonts are popular for a reason and are excellent choices if you’re having trouble deciding, or just don’t want to waste time scrolling through an endless font library.
If you want to up the personality of your brand, you can spend the time to find a more unique font. Unique fonts are especially good for adding as an accent. Script fonts are beautiful in feminine and beauty branding. Bold and chunky fonts work great for brands that want to have a strong presence. Pay attention to the feeling you get when you look at a font and ask a friend or two if you’re unsure.
No matter what font you choose, just make sure you always remember the #1 rule – LEGIBILITY. The last thing you want is to invite your kid’s friends over for a Fartnight party. Just because it’s accurate doesn’t mean you didn’t want people to read it as Fortnight.
Fun examples of terrible typography:
Tips on How to Use These Guidelines When Designing Your Own Branding
The first step to creating your brand is understanding what your brand stands for. Who is your audience and what do they want from you? This will help you make decisions so that you can present your brand in the best possible way, and make sure your audience recognizes you and engages with you.
-Use these guidelines as a starting point and adjust as your business and project needs change.
-Pick legibility over any perceived “style” when choosing typefaces. It doesn’t matter how nice it looks if it’s misread or gives someone a headache trying to read it.
-Colors are easiest to work with when there is a limited palette. Stick with one or two colors max plus neutrals. You can use different shades and tints of the same color to expand your palette. Go to https://htmlcolorcodes.com/ or https://coolors.co/ to start picking out those colors!
Hope this helped you pick out some awesome colors and fonts. If you have any questions or want to add your tips for finding great fonts and colors, add them to the comments.