Dear Brit: How Do I Set My Brand Designer Up for Success?
What to do when you brand is still a blank canvas.
By Brit Morin •
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Brit Morin was 25 when she left Google to start Brit + Co, a lifestyle and education company aimed at helping women cultivate creative confidence. Now — 10 years, $50 million in funding and 1.2 billion pageviews later — Brit's passion is empowering more women to take the entrepreneurial leap. She's a managing partner at VC fund Offline Ventures, host of iHeartRadio podcast Teach Me Something New, creator of Selfmade, a 10-week start-your-own-business course for women founders, and most recently — Entrepreneur advice columnist. Find her here answering the most personal and pressing questions of women entrepreneurs.
Have a question for Brit? Email it to dearbrit@brit.co, and she could answer it in an upcoming column!
I'm developing a new brand from scratch. How can I set up my designer for success?
How exciting! At this stage, your brand is like a blank canvas. As you develop your brand identity, you'll get to develop its look and feel.
Brand identity is an umbrella term that includes many different factors that contribute to how the public perceives your business. These include everything from mission statements, logos, color schemes, fonts and even sounds.
The first step to developing a successful brand is by defining what your brand actually is. What will the public recognize as your business's personality? You need to be able to find keywords or phrases that accurately portray what it is you want your business to be known for. Do you want to come across as elegant, creative, modern, futuristic? There are many adjectives that can show how you'd like consumers to view your brand — find the one (or few) that best fit.
The next step is to translate those keywords and adjectives into a visual language. Some of the most common forms of visual branding include:
Color schemes and palettes: These communicate what mood you want your business to be known for.
Typography: The fonts you use on your website, on social media, on any marketing materials sent out can say a lot about who your business is.
Logos: A great logo represents your brand in an easily recognizable way.
I recently went through the brand identity process with the recent launch of BFF, a new community for the crypto curious that seeks to get women and nonbinary people educated, connected and rewarded in all things web3. As my team worked to create something out of nothing with this brand, we started our process by taking to heart that branding efforts should go beyond just how our audience sees the brand. We told our designer that we wanted it to feel friendly and colorful, yet mysterious and esoteric, like so many things in crypto feel right now. We knew that "BFF" meant together-ness, so we asked to see that depicted in the logo and branding as well. It's a healthy balance of the "girl next door" friend that you'd want to learn crypto from, coupled with a bit of darkness and intrigue about what comes next. As you can see, everything from our logo, to our social media posts to the branding of our first NFTs reinforce the feeling and emotion that BFF aims to communicate.
So start with your own process. What's your brand name, what feeling do you want it to depict, and how can you ensure consistency in that look and feel across all channels? DM me @brit on Instagram if you ever want specific feedback. I'm here for ya!
