Logo & Branding
The visual components to your brand can strengthen your message and the emotional response from your audience. Defining these help keep your fundraising and sales material looking like you.Building Your Brand
Get to know your customer, and how they need to perceive you to do business. State your values and reinforce them in your design. Defining the visual components — colors, fonts, and graphic elements — are the first steps to creating a recognizable brand. A great brand is one people love, which means it evokes emotion.
Logo Design
Your logo is an opportunity to convey what the brand stands for in a first impression. There are a few ways to go when designing your logo.
1
You can use an icon or graphic to represent you
(ex: the Nike swoosh).
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Or you can do a combo of both (ex: AT&T).
Keep in mind how and where it’s used, you’ll need it in varying forms; in the circle of a social media icon, on the tab of the webpage, or as a single-color embroidery on t-shirts for your sales team.
If you don’t have a logo yet, we recommend hopping over to google images and using your best descriptors to get some ideas for what you want. Often they’ll lead to a stock photo site and you can buy the image. Canva is a great tool to create something to get you going. If you want to just have something to use for now, you can open a doc, find a font and color you like and take a screenshot of your company’s name.
Colors
A simple splash of cerulean blue or hot pink can be an easy way to unify things while making them more pleasing to look at, but color will eventually will play an important role in helping with brand recognition in customers.
Colors evoke emotional reactions and carry certain perceptions with feelings associated. For example, blue is calming and insights trust, green implies health and growth, orange can imply fun and affordability. Colors can have significantly different meanings in different cultures. An understanding of color theory (primary, secondary, tertiary, tones & shades) can help, especially when selecting more than one.
You’ll want to select a primary brand color and a secondary color that can be used as an accent. Your colors should be aligned with your brand’s personality, and with your goals for your brand (ie. standing out versus fitting in). Be sure to know what your competitors look like, and any trends in your industry.
There is nice color selector tool from Adobe here.
Once you pick a color you like, find the hex value (six numbers and/or letters following a hashtag). For example, the blue header on this page is #02ADD3. Store these numbers to keep things as consistent as possible.
Color can strengthen your pitch deck’s design. It can help you tell the story, or to give the reader a certain feel. Be deliberate in your decisions and keep it clean.
Fonts
When designing your brand, you’ll want to select two or three fonts to represent you. Keep in mind your brand personality and values.
One font will be for your headers, maybe used in your logo, this will be your primary statement font. A second font should be selected for your body copy, along with parameters on size, letter spacing, font weight, and line height, to keep things looking consistent. Some brands will choose a third font to be an accent subheader. This can be helpful especially if your brand does a lot of call outs, or calls to action in your marketing.
Fonts are divided into three main categories; serif, sans-serif, and decorative. Serifs, like the font Times New Roman, have small feet on the ascenders and descenders. Sans-serifs, like the font this text is written in, are simple and without feet. Decorative fonts are all the others, including scripts and handwritten fonts.
The most important thing in font selection is legibility. If they can’t read it, it’s not working. Beware fad fonts (Helvetica was all the rage in the 90s). Over-used system fonts can carry subconscious feelings, best to pick something fresh!
Google Fonts is a great free library with plenty to choose from while you get going, and can make things easier when you go to design your website. Canva is great resource with a huge font library and a ton of templates for marketing materials. If you purchase a license for a font, keep the file download handy, perhaps in your google drive folder.
Graphic Elements
A great brand is one you know. A strong graphic element can be used to make all your material immediately recognizable as you.
You can play with the shape of the letters your name makes, or use a graphic element from your logo. Once you define the graphic element you want to use, you can start to play with how to use it in the design. It can be modified to customize your slides, resulting in a branded template.