The fundamentals of starting a brand

What constitutes a brand and what is branding? Brand and branding is much more than a logo and colors. It’s also the visual representation of your business. In this course brand designer, small business owner, and digital nomad Ayelet Werner will teach us how to build a brand from the ground up.

Before we begin, let’s talk about what constitutes a brand…

A brand can be made up of many pieces, but for the purposes of this course, we’ll define a brand as the visual and verbal identity of your product or service. Brands can be comprised of colors, fonts, an eye catching logo– but overall, it’s the combination of things that set you apart and represents you.

One of the first places to start when creating a brand, aside from coming up with the idea for the brand or business itself, is the strategy of how you’re going to bring your brand to life.

As a small business, there are some questions you should ask yourself in the beginning stages to help you define your brand. Once you have the answers to these questions everything falls into place a little easier:

There are so many more questions you could (and should) ask yourself when starting a brand, but since we’re focused on just the very basics of the graphic design side today, these questions should get you started.

Now if you’re on the other side of the relationship, the designer building a brand for a client, you’ll want to ask your customers the same questions and more!

In the video Ayelet shows an example of a client questionnaire that you might send to your client to get additional details from them before you begin designing.

If you’ve done the work early on to consider your audience and where your brand will show up in the world, this will hopefully have set you up to establish a brand system that fits most your needs.

If you’ve hired a brand designer and strategist they’ll give you a brand guideline document to follow when they deliver the branded assets they’ve created for you. This will likely include brand colors, fonts, logos and how to use them. If you’re working on your own, you’ll probably want to set one up so you can easily follow it as you create for your brand.

Sticking to your brand guidelines and tone of voice is important to ensure you show up consistently online and in the world)Sticking to your brand guidelines and tone of voice will make you that much more likely to always appeal to your target demographic and audience.

Here are some of the key elements you’ll find in most brand guideline documents:

As your brand grows and the outside world does too, you may need to evolve and adapt your brand to change with it. Let's say a new social media platform pops up and you need updated brand assets to fit it, or you release a new product with different packaging– these are all things that may require evolution, adaptation, or change– and that’s okay! The most important thing is to stay consistent with changes and how you show up.

An easy way to do this is with Brands inside Adobe Express. When all else fails, here’s a little “cheat sheet”:

To recap: We started with strategy, set up our brand guidelines, and talked about how to adapt and evolve as we go.

Remember: