Everything about branding, finding your voice, presenting your business in a consistent and attractive way and creating a long-lasting customer experience.
Last week I showed you the 3 key rules of choosing the right fonts for your brand. This week, I’m still talking about typography, but we go one step further. We’ll talk about an important and often ignored step in brand identity design: defining your brand typography system. But what is a brand typography system? –…
I’m bit of a font hoarder. I think I mentioned this before, but currently I have more than 500 font families on my iMac and even more that I purchased and not yet installed. As a logo and brand designer, I know that my work depends on high-quality fonts. Why? Because the right font can easily…
When we think about philanthropy and giving back to society, we often associate it with giving or raising money to solve an issue. But building a socially responsible brand can be achieved in many more ways than just filling empty pockets. In this post, I’m going to talk about a topic that’s very close to my…
We got to the final part of the Brand Colors blog post series. You’ve already learned about the emotions that colors can trigger and the 4 easy steps to build your unique brand color palette. In this last blog post you’ll learn about color codes and how they can help you get the best result when using your brand…
Last week I showed you the effects and psychology of each main color group. If you haven’t read that article, you can find it here. Today, I go a step further: in this article, you’ll learn how to create your brand color palette. This post comes with an inspiring freebie: 50 beautiful color palettes for feminine brands. These color…
Colors have an important role in brand identity. Depending on what brand colors you choose you can affect your audience and customers in different ways: you can cheer them up, calm them down or stir up feelings of nostalgia in them. Your brand colors also build brand recognition. Just think about the red and yellow…
You went to watch a movie with your spouse. The theatre is filled with the rich scent of popcorn and the noise of chatting people and arcade games. You find your room and seats, watch all the trailers – and some annoyingly dumb ads – and then it comes. The logo of the movie studio glides into the center of the screen with heroic music…
As a designer, I don’t have a problem when I have to open a new type of design app. After a while they all seem similar and I can easily find the features and tools I’m looking for. But when it comes to newbies, or business owners who want to buy only…
In my previous blog post, I shared 5 money-saving options for obtaining a logo for your new business. It was a good start to show you, that no matter where you are in your entrepreneurial journey, you can have a nice logo and visual identity. However, cheap pre-made logos and logo templates can come with limitations if you don’t purchase them from a trusted…
Almost every time I attend to a networking event and tell others that I’m a graphic designer specialized in branding, I get the same question: “Can you make me a logo for $100?” Of course, sometimes the other person says a different amount, anywhere between $0 to $200 or even asks if we could “barter…
In today’s post, I’m going to share with you my mood board creation process. First, you’re going to learn about the steps I do to choose the right images for my mood boards. Next come 2 videos, where I’m going to show you how to build your brand mood board in Photoshop or…
I wrote about the importance of mood boards in a previous post, but I thought it’s time to revisit this topic. In that post, I quickly listed what I usually include on my mood boards. Since then, my process evolved a bit and I’m ready to share the improved version. I…
Every industry has its fancy terms, and this is true for branding too. Experts like to throw words like “positioning” or “brand personality” at us but this doesn’t mean we have to feel intimidated. Actually, these branding terms can be explained in everyday language and this is what I attempt to do in this post. Not fun enough?…
If you’ve ever worked with a designer or design agency, you might have heard about the “creative brief” document. Now tell me honestly: did you think that you definitely need that document, or you started questioning your designer. “Is she just trying to overcharge me for something I don’t need?” No worries, a creative brief is a legit and important document that you need before every…
Is it possible to learn from your competitors without feeling envy or the urge to copy them? I’m sure you faced this situation before. We all do. We see someone successful on the same market that we try to cater to. Her business looks like the perfect example of where we would like to see ourselves in the very…
In my previous post, I showed you how to define your Ideal Customer Avatar (ICA) when you’ve just started your business and you haven’t had any clients yet. But after a while, you’ll start working with customers and gain real-life insight onto their life, their struggles and dreams. These are invaluable information that you can benefit…
In my previous post, I wrote about the meaning and the importance of an Ideal Customer Avatar (ICA). Today, we go one step further and I show you how to define yours when you are just starting out. When you are new to business, and haven’t had any clients yet, or only had bad clients…
Who is your Ideal Customer Avatar (ICA)? If you haven’t answered this question yet, or if you wonder “what the heck is an Ideal Customer Avatar?”, my next few posts are for you.WHO IS THE CUSTOMER?I was on a meeting with my boss, the product developers, the marketing director and category manager back in my package design job. We had…
“Niche Down!” – I heard from one of my favorite business role models plenty of times and nodded in agreement. Serving a smaller market was something I could easily accept… well, up until I started building a strategy and not just doing things as they randomly appeared in my mind. That was when I realized, that I liked…
Cold winter days are the best for reading. It’s the ultimate embodiment of coziness to curl up on your couch with a good book while the fire is cracking in the fireplace and a cup of Alpine Punch tea latte is filling the room with sweet almond scent. Your kiddo…
In the Brilliant Brands blog series, I’m going to show you all kind of follow-worthy companies – from small to well-known – and give you an insight on their branding secrets. And the best: you can copy these best practices and apply them to your own brand. So let’s dig…
If you have a business, then your ultimate Black Friday question is: shall I discount my products or not? Do I have other ways to attract customers than cutting my prices? These are very good questions. A discount can be a great way to accelerate your sales but you also run the…
Have you ever purchased Instagram templates? You know, those packages on Creative Market and similar sites with 50+ layouts for sharing your content in style. I actually sell those products myself and this post is going to be a bit controversial… I don’t recommend you to buy too many of those…
Ten years ago, your two options for creating visual content for your website were the Pro Tools (like Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop) and the Annoyingly Incompetent Tools (Like using PowerPoint to create website headers. Have you ever done that? It’s really painful). This is not the case today. We have so…
When it comes to your brand, photos are everything! You use them on your website, in Instagram, for your webinars, online courses and e-books. Unfortunately not all of us are great with cameras or have the extra time and money to buy props and organize our own photo shooting days…
If I have to choose my costliest designer quirk it’s certainly my hard line addiction for great fonts. I often tell my husband when he sees a new design related expense on our credit card that “Honey, a designer can never have enough fonts!” The situation is a bit different…
Do you feel intimidated when you open Photoshop or Illustrator? I totally understand you. Believe it or not, but I felt pretty lost 10 years ago when I first came across these key design softwares. True story: while I was studying industrial design engineering, I was more capable in AutoCAD…
In today’s society I sadly see less and less empathy from our world leaders. I’m not even going into more details ‘cause this isn’t the platform for politics. But I’m sure most of you know what I’m talking about. So setting aside any time-sucking complaint marathon, I dare to say:…
It has been for a while that I wanted to blog about all the amazing design apps for creating beautiful social media templates from scratch. It seems that new and new tools are introduced every week to address all sorts of design needs and to promise productivity and ease of…
