We’re walking through the process of how to create on-brand visuals based on your Brand Season and style guide.
One of the biggest struggles I hear from my community is staying consistent. A few weeks ago, I created a faux case study for consistent brand visuals and it was a huge hit. So, I wanted to dig into this idea a little more, which brings me to today’s post.
I want to officially welcome you to the ‘Designing On-Brand Series’ where I’ll be walking through each Brand Season and creating a faux brand style guide, as well as graphics, website mockups and marketing collateral to show you how your style guide can translate into other design elements.
The Style Guide
Maiya Agire is a wellness coach for stay-at-home moms. Her personal brand falls into the Spring Brand Season, so the colors are bright, warm and full of saturation. Her number one brand attribute is ‘friendly’ and when someone experiences her brand, she wants them to feel welcomed, inspired, excited and motivated to take to action.
Website Mockup
As a Spring Brand, the website should be light, bright and fun. In this mockup, the colors were used as an accent on buttons, subheadings, the footer and secondary navigation menu. The custom pattern makes a great section background for text that needs to be highlighted and/or focused on.
Because the primary logo is has a centered alignment, it made sense to create a centered navigation menu with the main logo on top of the pages. To switch things up, the submark was used in the footer to help provide balance to the menu.
The photography is light, bright and airy. This aligns with her brand personality that feels welcoming and friendly.
Social Media Template
When it comes to social media templates, the first question to ask is how you’ll be deciding to use them. Are you sharing quote graphics? Or, business tips? Or, maybe illustrations? Once you decide what type of content you’ll be sharing on social, you can then create templates for each type.
Maiya Agire’s brand is full of bright colors which transfer well as accent colors on her Instagram feed. Similar to the website, it’s also worth noting that the photography editing style is light, bright and airy. Styling props have bright accent colors and the space is busier and more chaotic than minimal.
Business Cards
The business cards continue with the style of using her bright colors as an accent. We bring in her alternate logo on the back of the card and the lotus + diamond element on the front. Because business cards are small in size, I tend to gravitate towards keeping them simple.
Designing on-brand collateral is an evolutionary process. Just remember to be patient with yourself and test. As you start putting your graphics out there, you will learn what’s working and what’s not. What your community responds to and what they pass by.
Happy branding!
All my best,
