Brand Design & Expression Bootcamp™ - Design an Iconic Brand & Visual Identity System (Course 2)

1. Introducing Brand Expression Design: If you see a brand and it doesn't look trustworthy, do you think you'll ever buy anything from that business? Let me ask you, do you think this brand looks credible? Do you think they take great care of their customers? No. How about now? Studies have shown it takes 7 seconds to create a first impression. And the better something looks, the more trustworthy they've seen. You know that feeling with a brand when everything just feels right to you, everybody's felt it well, that's a result of every brand element working perfectly together and connecting with you in a way that makes it almost impossible to walk away without buying something. Now this is the second in a five step program to help guide anybody throughout the brand building process. Helping you go from a new start up to a trusted brand in no time. Using proven frameworks and step by step lessons. Now, both myself and my team at Clementine House Brand Agency have worked with thousands of brands over the past decade to help them develop their brand identity and expression. And I've also been lucky enough to teach and work with over 20,000 students with my online school, the Lancaster Academy of Design and Brand. And everything that I've learned over the past ten years of helping brands communicate and express themselves is right here in this very course. My name is Scott Lancaster and this is my Brand Expression Master class. 2. What is Brand Expression?: So what is brand expression? Well, the clue is in the second word expression. And as we all know, expression is very important. Expression allows us to communicate better. It allows us to connect with people more effectively and cry every time we see a sad dog video on Instagram. Obviously, not me, I never cry. But what specifically is brand expression? Well, let's take the brand, Tiffany and Core as an example. And let's imagine for a second that the brand is a real life woman. Now, what words would you use to describe the Tiffany and Core brand if she was a real living and breathing woman? She's blue. What like Tiffany? Have you lost your mind? Okay, maybe that wasn't the best analogy to use. So let's keep things super simple. Your brand expression is everything that your customer can see, hear, read, and experience. And if we imagine your brand as a jigsaw for a moment, you'll know that you need all the pieces of the jigsaw to work together perfectly to create that bigger picture. And every piece of your brand jigsaw needs to come together to create that bigger picture, to craft a certain perception within your customer. And those things include things like your logo, your typography, your copywriting, the things that you post on social media, your website, the photography on your website, and so so much more. So how do we figure out how we want our customers to think about us? Because once we know how we want people to think about our brand, we can start to pull the pieces together to create that bigger picture. Well, if you've already completed the first course of this five step program which covers everything in Gasa, Strategic branding, then this should be a piece of cake for you. But if you haven't, do not worry. I'm going to make sure that I break everything down. So everything super easy to understand no matter how much experience you have in branding and business building. So that you can build a brand that your customers can connect emotionally with. So when we finish, your brand will be able to express itself so well. It will also cry at cute dog videos and Instagram. I mean, I don't personally cry at those sorts of things. I mean, I can understand other people that do, but I've never done that. I mean, I know they've got, you know, cute floppy tails and you know, the cute ears and the nose and they just look up like it's a sorry. Anyway, brand expression all starts with your brand's DNA because this will help us make the right decisions for every piece of your brand's jigsaw. And just as a side note, as we go through this course, there will be some lessons which will be essential lessons to guide you through every step of the process. And then there'll be some bonus lessons which will go into more depth in regards to key areas throughout the brand building journey. And this approach works really well because what we found is if you don't need any additional support, you can just glide through all the lessons. But if you do need some additional support, then you have the extra support there if you need it. And on that note, I'll see you in the next lesson. 3. Creating Unique Brand DNA: So what is brand DNA? Now, we all know what DNA is. It's what gives us our uniqueness and our character. Now there's actually a really famous study conducted in 2002 based around DNA, which can teach us a little bit more about ourselves. And all you need to do is just take your hand like this. So you can do this at home. Just take your hand like this with your palm facing the ceiling. Then very slowly take your two middle fingers and bring them as close to your palm as possible. Okay? Then point your wrist forward. And all you need to do now is punch your arm forward like this, in a forceful manner. Now, if some web comes out of your wrist and hits the wall, there's a very high chance that you're spider Man, or Spider Woman, or a Spider person, whichever you prefer. So we all now know that DNA gives us our character and makes us stand out in a unique way. And the way that we act, look, communicate, and express ourselves can help others create a perception and an idea about who we are. Everything about our DNA helps others figure out how they should feel about us. So when we start to build your brand's DNA, we need to keep this in mind the entire time. We need to remember that how our brand looks, communicates, and expresses itself is going to help our customers to create a perception around how to feel about our company. Now, getting this delicate balance right could be a little bit tricky unless you have an experience, Brandon Expert with a decade of experience who can help you through every step of the process with proven frameworks. And maybe just maybe he can make it so easy to follow that even a three year old who thinks is Spider Man can do it. Anyway, on that note, let's continue to build your brand in the next lesson. See you soon. 4. The Brand-Building Framework: Okay, so what is this Scott's genius proven framework to brand building that can solve all of your problems? Anyway, the framework we'll be using, we'll be first selecting the characteristics that represent our brand and also the customers that we're wanting to connect with. As I mentioned before, if you haven't already completed the first course of this five step program, it could be difficult for you to understand your customer persona to a certain level to really perfect your brand's DNA. Now, it's really important for you to get your brand's DNA in place throughout the brand creation process because it's going to help you to make decisions regarding your brand far easier later on. For example, if you want to be seen as a luxury brand, then there are certain color schemes and certain fonts and type faces that are going to help you create that perception within your customer a little bit easier and more effectively. And it's the exact same when we make a first impression on a person for the first time, we judge them on how they look, how they smell, how they speak, what they say, and also what job they have, just to name a few. And the initial impression and perception that we have in regards to either a person, a business, or a brand or restaurant, whatever is all based around or thoughts, memories, and experiences. For example, if we're walking down the street and we see a big scary guy with a tatty on his face and a scar on his lip. We're probably going to cross the street and we're not going to really want to engage with that person. Now in reality we don't know that guy. He can make incredible cupcakes and sell them and be the sweetest guy in the world. So what does this mean for us? Our job in this course is to make sure that your brand can express itself properly. So that you can build the perfect perception with your target audience. So complete this section in your brand building booklet because we're soon going to be moving on to using your brand's DNA to create your brand's unique voice. I'll see you soon. 5. Brand Voice Mini-Masterclass: And now finding your voice is super important if you want to learn how to communicate properly. And that usually happens around 12 months old. But we're not here for baby stuff, okay? We're here to find your brand's voice. And thankfully, it doesn't take a year to find it. So we'll start by learning what brand voice actually is. Then we'll learn the difference between a good brand voice and a bad one. Then I'll show you how to create your brand's unique voice so that you can communicate with your customers better. So what is brand voice? Well, brand voice is basically the unique and consistent manner in which a brand communicates its message or personality to its target audience. This includes tone style, language, and messaging that our brand uses across all channels, including marketing, social media, and customer port, et cetera, et cetera. And your brand voice plays a huge part in how your customers perceive you. So the question is, what makes a good brand voice? Well, your brand's voice needs to align with your brand's purpose, mission, vision, statement and values, and also your brand's identity. This may be something that you already have in place, but if you don't, our strategic branding course, which is the first of this five step program, will cover everything and make sure you have all of those elements in place perfectly. So now we know what a brand voice is. How do we make a good one? Well, all grid brand voices take these very important boxes. First is the tone needs to be right. For example, when my wife tells me to do the dishes, her tone can be quite scary. But when she asks me to buy her snacks, the tone is very, very different. Your brand voice should connect emotionally with your target audience. This can be done by first understanding who you're trying to connect with, which kind of goes without seeing. And then use the same words and approaches and language that that specific person would use themselves and listen. You could watch 1 million videos on creating a brand voice. And 99% of them are going to make it far more difficult and complex than it actually needs to be. And I'm going to prove this with one simple question. Do you and your friends communicate with each other in a similar way? Now, we all know the answer to this question is yes. But the real question is why? Well, that's the beauty of it. Humans like to be with other people that are similar to them. We like being around people that we can relate to and see a part of ourselves in. And brands are no different. So if you as a brand owner can understand first and foremost who you're trying to communicate to, then it's 80% of the battle when trying to come up with your brand's voice. And last but not least, the last box that needs to be ticked. Consistency, no aspect of branding, no matter what it is, works without a level of consistency. Which is why it's super important to be filling in and completing your brand building document as we go through this course together. This single document will not only keep you aligned as an entrepreneur and a founder, but it will also align everybody outside and inside your business to make sure your brand is perfectly consistent at all times. Again, I've created an additional lesson in this course to make sure that you can follow along with me as I build this brand document for a real life client so you can develop your brand's voice perfectly, just in case you need a little bit of extra support along the way. Because obviously, I'm a very nice person. Anyway, I'll see you in the next lesson. 6. Bonus Lesson: Brand Voice 'Work with me' Session: Hello and welcome to the Brand Voice session in the Work With Me series. Within the Brand Expression master class. So if you've never did a Work With Me session before, basically it's extremely damn worth, it's very cashable. We're basically going to work through the guidelines together just in case you need a little bit of extra support and a little bit of extra guidance. So there's not going to be any crazy editing. I'm literally going to be sharing thoughts that I am kind of thinking whilst I'm bringing together my brand voice for example, and then logo and brand names, et cetera, et cetera. And you're going to pick up some things that you should maybe be thinking about throughout the process as well. Okay, so let's start working through your brand voice. So took the previous lesson on brand voice, which you should have if you're on this session. Now you'll know that brand voice is essentially, it comes down to a couple of things. But most importantly, you need to focus on the person who you're trying to attract and actually speak to. Okay, if we go back in our brand guidelines now, if you haven't already completed this target persona, or customer persona, however you want to call it, then the brand strategy part of the full program. So the first course of the five step program may be worth taking for you. Now if you haven't took that course, that's absolutely fine. You can just fill this out as best you can without actually taking those lessons, But it just helps you to really understand who you're talking to. So it's going to make the brand expression stage of the process much better and much clearer and give you a lot more clarity. The reason for that is when we are talking to someone, we need to understand what they want and who they are so we can speak to them in the way that it is best to communicate with them. And that English did not make sense. But you get what I'm saying, right? We need to learn how to speak to people that we want to connect with, okay? If we don't speak their language and use the types of words that they can associate with, it's going to be hard for us to get that connection. And therefore, it's going to be difficult for them to connect with our brand and then buy from us. So keep that in mind. But basically what I want to do in this session is just start to think about the brand voice and how you can do it really simply in pretty much no time at all. So we've got four different aspects of our brand voice that we want to think about. Okay, now. The first is our brand voice is, so this is ultimately thinking about things like, you know, if our brand was a person and this is what I always say to clients. Think about your brand as a living, breathing person. And if you can do that, then it starts to kind of help you visualize how that person would act. So let's kind of dive into our brand, which we are currently developing within the Brand builder pro program, and understand what our brand voice might be like. So if we look at the brand archetype, we found the lover archetype, That was the one in the brand strategy session. Within our five step program, we found that the lover brand archetype was the most suited and fitting for what we're trying to do. Okay, so we start to look at the brand voice section here and it says things like, you know, the lover archetype is quite sensual, quite epathetic, quite soothing, and quite loving. So I like those like, those are, you know, the types of, you know, approaches and the types of voice that I want to develop for the brand, which is going to connect with Julia here who's 33, a female. She's engaged, wants kids but doesn't have them yet. Lives in New York marketing. So she kind of understands how to communicate and she's quite savvy and she does yoga, traveling and coffee age. She likes Lulu Lemon, the North Face Junior's Cheesecake. If you haven't checked it out, it's amazing, check it out. And Joe's Pizza. Yeah. She probably has to do a lot of yoga to kind of work off all the pizza and cheesecake, which is pretty much the only reason I go to the gym. So we're looking at who Julia is and she's quite loving, quite creative. She overthinks, but she's self aware. So she's a thinker, right? She she cares about people, I think. And she's really loving, obviously with her fiance. And, you know, she, she's quite creative as well. So I think that that kind of lover archetype is obviously going to connect really well with her. But the brand voice that is going to be developed to connect with Julia. I'm going to take them all. But I want to take sensual and loving. I think sensual and loving are really going to connect with who Julia is, right? So we're going to get those two and we're just going to drag those like. So let's just get these all lined up. Perfect, Close enough. We've got loving and sensual. How else would a brand like to be positioned if I'm trying to connect with Julia? Thoughtful. She's thoughtful, right? She over thinks she's self aware. The brand should be thoughtful. And again, think about. I need to watch my spelling. Think about the brand as a person, like I said before. And then imagine someone who Julia might get along with, right? Does that kind of make sense? So, you know, someone who's kind of sensual kind of, but you know, they're in touch with their emotions. I think that's kind of something that I want to kind of get across. And also thoughtful, Julia, over thinks, so I want the brand to be thoughtful, loving and also I think empathetic is actually quite a good one. So we're going to do empathetic, yeah. So now if we're looking at those, that actually looks pretty good. I'd be happy and quite confident thinking that if a person had these qualities, they would connect quite well with Julia. Okay, so let's move on. We value as a brand value. Okay, so what are our values for our brand? Let's think. Let's move back to idea validation to help people be the best version of themselves. Calm, peace of mind should be inspired by create stork jewelry. So it's a stork jewelry brand. Just reminding myself because it was a little while since we did the brand strategy course, which is the first step. I'm going to change this to calming so I don't like sensual and this is all part of the process. By the way, when you're developing a brand, don't be scared to admit that you make a mistake. You don't optimize something. I had sensual there and it was, it was just standing out to me. It was standing out to me and it wasn't something that was kind of fitting with everything else after I give it a little bit of sort of subconscious thought. So I've just replaced it with calming and that's normal. That's completely normal. We value, we que, stoicism is peace of mind. We value time, value time and focus. I think Julia obviously does this because she takes time, she takes time on coffee dates with her fiancee. She wants kids, she wants kids. So eventually she's going to have kids as well. So she's self aware, so she thinks she is a thinker. Originality, I think originality is something that is really important for the values of the brand and also as well quality because I think these are very kind of mindset focused. Quality is basically saying that we care about what we see. We're very mindful, actually let's do that, mindfulness. So we're very mindful about what we do. We don't just do anything. We're mindful about what we do. I think Julia is very much like this, right? And I think that's due to her struggles with mental health and the past, right? This is the process that we need to go through when we're developing a brand for a particular type of customer. Now we're trying to understand what makes this person tick. And this is why a lot of founders actually create great products for themselves. Because they kind of understand what makes them tick and what struggles they were going through. So keep that in mind because it's super important as you're kind of, you know, creating your brand voice and every other aspect of your brand, to be honest. So our communication is simple. We don't want to overcomplicate things. It is caring, empathetic. Oh, honestly, this is imperfect. You are seeing the worst side of me and my beautiful spelling. Thank God for spell check. Let's at loving, right? Our communication is caring. We've kind of got that honest, honest, honest. So, I think we've got good values. We're not rebellious. You know? We're very honest. We're very direct. We're going to be the Okay. Supportive. Good. We are not we are not rude. We're not rude. Were not mindless. We're not mindless. Mindless minds. Okay. Dearie. Dearie. Me. There we go. I don't know if you can see this, but there's like a fly, like annoying me around the room. And like I want to try and like, you know, catch it and put it outside or whatever, but it's, it's too fast for me. It just keeps mocking me and it keeps flying past the camera and like mocking me and laughing at me, probably laughing at my spelling, to be honest, it's a bumper. Let's have this. Okay. So I'm just looking at this again. We are not, we're not we're not liars. No, we're not liars. We are not corner cutters. Um, corner cutters are. If you're not sure what that means, it basically means we don't cut corners, right? We do everything properly. We do things properly. We don't cut corners. We are not a corner cutter. What else are we not? What else are we not? We're not rude. We're not mindless, We're not corner cutters, We are not. Mm, loud, Calm. We are calm. Peace of mind. Everything's okay. Don't need to worry. Life's stressful enough. We are not loud. We are smooth, soothing calming, thoughtful, empathetic, loving. I just literally became the brand for a second there, the like. That was weird anyway. Okay, so hopefully this gives you a little bit of an idea and this is a really good exercise thinking about the brand as a person, because it's going to come in super handy later on as we start to think about the visual expression of the brand. The brand strategy side of things is really important because it really helps you to understand who you're talking to, what makes the brand special. You know who the other competitors are, the other people that are competing within the same market, in the same space. As you know, how can we can take the weaknesses of that particular competitor and wrap ourselves around them and really kind of constrict their ability to take opportunities. What brand archetypes? So how do we actually kind of communicate? What type of brand DNA do we have? And then also, you know, what's our purpose, what's our values, our mission, our vision statements, and then where's our actual position in the market. So you don't have to do this, but it does help. It does make things a little bit easier when you get to this point because you've got things to reference afterwards. So anyway, I hope this lesson was valuable. The Work with me session. I really appreciate you taking the time and if you need any additional support or anything at all, please please, please reach out to me. I am. It's literally like I love it when students ask me questions. I get tons of questions every single day across every single platform. So please, please let me know I'm here to help in any aspect. So yeah, thank you so much for your time and I will see you in the next Work with Me session where I will almost definitely work on my spelling. 7. Creating a Memorable Brand Name: Now finding the perfect name for your brand is a little like naming your firstborn child apart from, it's nothing like naming your first born child. But it is important to get right now. Although brand naming can be a little bit tricky, it is easy for anybody, no matter what your experience level, to find the perfect brand name for your company if you have the right guidance so you know what you're doing. Now what we're going to go through in this lesson is going to cover all the essentials that you need to understand how to create the perfect brand name. But if you want to go through the framework in more depth, then there is a dedicated course which can guide you through every step of the process, which goes into far more detail. So just in case you need it, if you get stuck, that course is there for you to help you. So let's get started. What actually makes a great brand name? Well, all the best brand names on the planet tick these very important six boxes. First, you'll find that all great brand names are super memorable. You'll also find they have a little bit of mystery about them to spark our curiosity. You can also usually connect the brand name to something visual fairly easily. And you should also make sure that your name connects with and is fit for your brand's long term strategy. All brand names should be able to be protected and trademarked. And last but not least, the name should roll off the tongue effortlessly. The truth is, if you can find a brand name which takes these six boxes, then you're doing very, very well. But keep these six boxes in mind because you're going to need them very soon later on in this lesson. So what type of brand names are there to choose from and which one is best for your specific brand and situation? Well, there are three different types of brand names to choose from. Descriptive, suggestive, and abstract. And every brand name in the world fits into one of these three categories. But just to get the creative juices flowing, let's look at the most common techniques used by brand name agencies and experts to create world class brand names for companies. These are the eight most common approaches to get the best results. And the first approach is using an acronym. These are initials that stand for a much longer name. Ibm stands for International Business Machines, for example. Next we have inventive mash ups. These types of names are a fusion of two different words coming together. A little like Microsoft being micro chipped, and software merged together to create one single name. Thirdly, we have evocative names. These are words or phrases that can evoke a feeling or an emotion from your target audience. A little like Nike. And the fact that that name is inspired by the Greek goddess of victory, which leads us nicely on to foreign inspired names. This approach gives you so much creative freedom and it always gives you some amazing opportunities. For example, the word cresco in Latin means growth in English is an incredible naming opportunity for any company that wants to help grow sales or do something and have an impact, which is connected to growth. Connecting to an object, person, or thing can also be an amazing way to name your company or brand. For example, if you're a company that is focused on being the fastest or selling based on the speed of your service. Then you could look at animals in the animal kingdom that are known for their speed and being the fastest in their category. Word blending is another approach which a lot of grid brands use. It's a little bit like mash ups, but the only difference is the end result is a little bit more effortless and seamless. A little bit like Netflix for example, which is obviously just Internet and Flick merged together to see exactly what the brand does. Alternative spelling is one of my favorite approaches when it comes to brand naming. For many reasons, brands such as Lift and Crispy Cream enjoy the meaning of the words that they're saying. But the distinctiveness and the uniqueness of the spelling, this can make the brand more unique, more memorable. And it's also great for SEO and domain searches. And finally, we come to completely made up abstract words like Google, for example. They have no meaning. They will essentially be assigned value and a meaning over time. As time goes on, I think we've got plenty of options to choose from when it comes to actually naming your brand. But the real question is, how do you know when you found the perfect name? Well, this all comes down to two very simple stages now. The first is to make sure that any names that you're interested in, take those six boxes that we mentioned earlier on in the lesson. See, I told you you'd need them later. And then once you have some names that take all of those boxes, it simply comes down to this, see which name feels best. I always suggest that every single client that we work with takes at least two to three times to revisit the names that we suggest to them over a couple of days. So go make yourself coffee. Relax. Have a biscuit, do a back flip off an hour plane, you buy some cheesecake, whatever you want to do. But all I'm urging you to do is take some time to let the dust settle. Then come back to the names to see which one stands out. Most of you. Because as long as the names tick, those six important boxes that I stated at the beginning of this lesson, then to be honest, there's no real wrong answer. And again, if you need some additional support in gas in naming your brand, and you really want to go into depth in gas to finding the best brand name possible, then there are dedicated courses out there, including ours, to really help you get your brand naming perfect. So feel free to take advantage of that if you do need that additional guidance. Anyway, I'll see you in the next lesson. 8. Get a DOT-COM Domain for Any Brand Name: If you've ever tried to find a short and sweet.com domain for your brand, these stars, for anything less than $50,000 then you'll know it's as hard as finding a competent assistant. But Scott, I'm your assistant. Never mind. Basically what people have done for many years is they have bought all the.com domains and they try to sell them at 50 to 100 times their original price. Which isn't just annoying, but it also means that there are tons of domains out there just sitting on the shelf collecting dust. Do not fear, because I have a few tricks up my leg, which I use personally when I work with clients directly to help them find incredible domains for their company. Now the first is to add a relevant word to the domain. For example, the brand name Lovewell is not available as a.com domain. But there are two other options that we can choose from now. The first is Lovewell's store, which is essentially adding another word to the brand name. But the second is to create a new brand name, Love Wells, which was available. And both of these can be picked up for just $20 which is an absolute steal. Now there's a resource that I've attached to this course, which you can use to find the best domain possible for your brand and situation. And another way that you can find a great domain for your brand is to play around with the spelling a little bit. And actually chat GBT is a fantastic way to get different spelling variations. If you're set on a brand name that you really love, all you do is just ask Chat GBT for different spelling variations of the name that you selected. And then check its availability on Go Daddy. Now if you really want to.com domain, which isn't available and you're willing to push your budget a little bit to get that premium.com domain, then you could always either check out who is.com or you can hire Go Daddy's agents to contact the seller for you. If the domain has been owned for quite a long time and you can check that on who is.com fairly easily for free, then it may be worthwhile getting in touch with the seller through Go Daddy because they may be willing to sell at a lower price. And well, if you're wondering what price is kind of fair for that particular domain, then you can go to Google and type in Go Daddy Domain Value Tool. And that will give you a fair price of what the market price for that particular domain is. Now please keep in mind that most sellers will try to sell their domains at a far higher rate than what it's actually worth. Now unfortunately, they are entitled to do that. And that is just the way the domain market goes. Just remember, if they're not using the domain ultimately, it's just sitting there useless. So it's actually in their best interest to sell it to you. Just make sure you don't seem too eager and make sure you play a long patient game because that's going to help you when negotiating anyway. Once you've got your brands domain secured safely, then we'll move on with the rest of the course which is starting to get super exciting. I mean, not like the rest of the course hasn't been exciting or fun. I'm just saying that I'm trying to say it's going to get more fun and exciting because there's better things, not better, but there's more things to look forward to. If anyway, I'll see you in the next lesson. 9. Bonus Lesson: Naming & Domain 'Work with me' Session: Okay, so we've just arranged your brand voice in the last Work With Me session. And in this Work With Me session, we're going to be looking at brand names and domains. Now in the course, we have specific lessons before this Work with me session. Which goes through how you can develop a brand name for your brand. And also how to get a domain for your brand as well. So both of those are covered in the previous lessons. What we're going to do in this session is I'm going to tell you how I came up with the brand name for the brand that I'm actually doing within this particular example, but I'm also going to create a brand name with you. Now, the brand naming process, if you know anything about me and my agency, Clementine House, you'll know that we charge anywhere $1000-2 thousand and more. In some cases, depending on how complex the project is to come up with a brand name. It's a seven year process. It is extremely intensive and very detailed. Okay? You have to think about many different factors like mouthfeel trademarking, you know, perception, market positioning, tons of things, like 20 or 30 different things are all kind of balanced in everything. And we have to find the perfect name in the sea of 1 billion names that you could potentially choose, Okay? So we're not going to be able to cover that entire seven year process in this lesson in this Work with Me session. But what I can do is I can give you a little bit of an insight. I can give you a little bit of an insight into my thought process and how I go through the process when I'm actually coming up with a brand name. And hopefully you can learn something from how I think about it. Obviously, I've been doing this for ten years now, so I know a few things and I follow the same process of pretty much every single client that I work with. However, the results are obviously extremely different depending on the clients, what we're trying to do, what the objectives are. So let's dive in the first name that I want to share with you is the name for this particular brand which I actually developed. So obviously, if you took the brand strategy course, which is the first course of the five step Brand builder pro program. So if you took that course, then you'll know exactly what we covered in the brand strategy phase of the document. But if you're not sure, then let me just show you the actual website of the brand which we are ultimately creating. Scott, there we go. So Ailton Scott. Why did we come up with that name? How did we come up with that name and ultimately, what does the name even mean? Well, this actually all started with a very interesting photo shoot which we had in London. Okay, The name Emmyton Scott is actually really simple and it comes from two things. One, it was the street that we shot our first images on, way back in the day like when we were like literally just starting out basically. The second is just my second name. First name, sorry. I don't even know. I don't even know my name now, I'm tired, I need more coffee. So that is basically the way I came up with the name. So, you might think, ah, that's not hard, you know, that's just the street name that you did your first photography shoot on and your name. That's not difficult at all. And you're right, it isn't difficult. But Emerton Scott, if you say it, it sounds British and it's also kind of prestigious, right? Like it sounds like it's a luxury brand. It sounds like, you know, it's got a little bit of class about it now. That isn't because it uses my name by any means. The reason that happens and the reason that we have that perception around it when we hear those letters together, is the formation of the letters and the letters used. For example, if I see the name grammarly, okay, Grammar has this approachable feel about it. Okay? And obviously it has the word grammar in it with Lee at the end, which makes the perception of making grammar more approachable. Right. Let's think of another one, Spotify. Spotify doesn't really mean anything about music. Obviously it does now because we've used it so much. But Spotify just sounds like like this, easy going, easy to use app which could be related to anything. What do I mean when I say, you know, why do we have these perceptions around this particular brand name, Emiton Scott or these other brand names that are in, out there in the market. It mostly comes down to mouthfeel because Emerton Scotlandon, when you hear that, it sounds like, it sounds like a quality brand that people can, you kind desire ultimately. Now that may or may not be the case, but for example, another great example is Mcdonald's Y Crock back in the day. Really wanted the name Mcdonalds. Now, why? Because he said, and I'm going to pretty much get this quote wrong, but he said something along the lines of, Mcdonald, sounds like America, right? Mcdonald's, it sounds like America. He knew the value of that name and how it was just, you know, super approachable and warm and it almost felt like kind of like a family run business at the time. It was a family run business before he kind of bought the business and then just completely shut the brothers out. And if you haven't watched the film, The Founder, I would highly recommend you check it out. So I would like to go through the process of developing a brand new name for this company. Completely brand new, right? Not using my name and not using Emerton's name. So if we needed to completely rebrand this company for this particular business, then we could do it and we're going to do it with each other now. So let's think about how we could rename this business. So the first thing I'll be thinking about, and the first way that I actually approach the brand naming process when I'm working with clients is something along the lines of, okay, what makes your brand special? Okay, so what makes our brand special? Well, we've already looked at different ways for us to stand out. Right? A great place to start would be, okay. The problem that we're trying to solve. This is the brands problem that we're trying to solve. The value that we bring. So we've got peace of mind and happiness in life. The brand is trying to bring calmness, peace of mind and happiness in life, okay? And then we've also got the highest potential and treat others. So we're not really going to get any great names from chat EBT just because it's not really very creative right now. But what we will get is some direction and some kind of idea. So what we're going to do is I'm going to give it the prompt of branding handsome brand naming expert. We have to be accurate. I need a name for Ear Luxury Jewelry. I am not grad at Spelling Jewelry company. The brand name should communicate, communicate, calmness, calmness, peace of mind, and happiness in life. It God, Okay, we're gonna see what it comes up with. Anyway, give me some brand names instead. Okay, So these are horrendous, right? These are literally horrendous names. Imagine blissful baubles, awesome name. What's another one? Gentle Over Jewels. This is the best. Okay? We're not going to use any of these obviously, because I can probably come up with a better name in about 10 seconds than graceful Zen jewels, which is terrible. It's very direct, right? It's very descriptive. What we want to do is we can be a little bit creative with this, right? So let's pick a word out. Tranquil, no treasures, harmony. A little bit too long gems, kind of. It's okay, but it doesn't really give Zen. It's a little bit too obvious. It's a little. What about I like jewel Co, I kind of like jewel. What about this? What about jewel and co. But it's a little bit, I need jewel to be a little bit more abstract. So it's not like jewel like direct jewel way, jewel way, jewel way. And core is not bad. Let's look at some other ones. I kind of like way because of the y at the end just sounds pretty premium. I quite like it. I like the word serene. What does serene mean? Serine's like tranquil, right? It's like calmness commonly used to describe water. I think Se Serena. Serena. Pretty cool? No, Serena. Serena and Co. It sounds a little bit feminine, but I mean, we're actually targeting women, so I mean, it kind of makes sense, right? Celestial trunkets, gentle over, co or owe. That sounds cool, right? Okay. Okay, listen, we've got three names there that are pretty decent, right? You know, they're not going to take over the world, but they're pretty good considering we literally went in chat GBT, looked at a couple of different options and these names just popped out. Obviously, I've been doing this for quite a long time, so it might take a little bit longer for, you know, someone who doesn't have as much experience, but we've got a good start. Okay, the next step is to try and find the domes. For the name. So what commonly happens to be completely honest, is you'll get kind of two or three names which you really like and then you'll check the domains and one will be available or two will be available, or maybe none will be available. So let's go through and just have a little look. So let's just check for Jewel way first. Is Jewel Way available as a.com Jewel Way. I don't really like how jewelways sounding. So look at how expensive this is now. This is in Thai bat because at the moment I'm in Thailand, so it's kind of picking up on that but that's roughly around, I'd say it's a fair bit, it's a fair pop for a domain. Let's see how much it is in USD together. So that's 5,000 that's 5,000 for jewel way. Right. Let's have a little look at how we could make that. So I can pretty much I can guarantee that I can pretty much get that down to $20 by literally changing one single thing. And all I'm going to change is either either this jewel way or jewel way. Is it $20 please? Yes, look at that. So we've literally got the domain from five grand to $20 in $0.19 in literally next to no time. Which is obviously awesome, right? Obviously the spelling is slightly different, but we've just saved five grand, so it makes a lot of sense. Okay, let's look at the other one, because that one's available. So that's good. Serena is definitely not going to be available. If it is, I'm going to buy it. Let's have a look. No, definitely not available. But again, we can look at, you know, if this wasn't available, then we're going to look at this. Serena. No, that's not available. Serena. Serena is available. No, this should be available. There we go. Serena And I haven't even done this before. This is just because I literally have spent years searching for domains for brand names. So I kind of know what's available on what's going to pop up. But there we go. We, you know, we've just found that. And I can pretty much guarantee that if we wanted to go for Serena. Serena and Co, See, this is where I've got a little bit of a problem. So if we actually wanted to go for Serena and Co, I don't like the fact that it has two is there. And you can't actually put like an symbol in there. It doesn't work. It just kind of comes up as a blank. And when you put an ear in there, it doesn't look right. It kind of looks really weird when you have two ears together or two letters together, even if it's not in the same kind of word. So I think, Serena, I think we need to get rid of it. To be honest, I don't really like it very much short. Let's get rid of that way, way. I'm not sure if away is actually pretty good. Let's check that out together a way. Always decent. I mean that is a solid name. Is it worth that? Is it worth that amount? Let's actually check how much it's worth because we can actually do that on Google. It's probably pretty fairly priced, to be honest. It might be a little bit less on here. A little bit less, okay. There's no way that this is only worth $171 I have seen this type of domain go for 50 grand sometimes. So I think this is actually a pretty fair price rate if you wanted to spend that, but if you didn't want to spend that, you know you've got away. And core, which is definitely going to be available. So you've got a and which is good, you've got away, which you can do as well. How can we get this one way? Is that available? No way away. Is available for literally $15 or 15, Batty even. So it's not even $15 it's like $0.19 So hopefully that gives you I actually really like Overwey. I love Overwey. Actually, that is such a good name. Okay. So for the purposes of obviously this document, I am going to keep it as Emerton Scott because that's the actual brand that will be building. I actually already have the Emt Scott.com domain. So right now I actually have domain and also my name ready to go. Now in regards to trademark checks and stuff, there is a session within the. Now in regards to trademark checks and stuff, there is an actual lesson in the program that actually kind of teaches that if you do want me to do a work with me specifically on trademark checks, I can do that. Just let me know and I can work through that with you. But yeah, I just wanted to respect your time because this lesson is already just under 20 minutes already. So thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. And I will see you in the next Work with me session. Okay, see you there. 10. Developing your Visual Branding System: And humans are visual creatures and people use their sight every day to experience the world around them unless you're blindfolded or you've left your glasses at home. But the real reason we're here is to learn what is a visual branding system and also what makes a good visual branding system. And not just that, but what should be included in your visual branding system. Well, let's look at some incredible branding systems by one of the leading design agencies in the planet so that you can get inspired and also be prepared when we start creating your branding system later on in this lesson. If you've never heard of the agency Pentagram, then they're essentially the most respected branding agency there on the planet. So it's fair to say they probably know a little bit about how a brand should look. Now take this brand that they developed, for example. You don't need to be an expert in color palettes, typography, or logo designed to see that this branding looks pretty good and there's a reason that it looks good, and I'll share that with you in a little bit. But just look how the brands icon and wordmark go perfectly together. Look at how simple the typeface is, but it still matches the dynamic feel that the brand is going for. And look how the colors are both trustworthy and professional, but also engaging and approachable. Essentially meaning that you can recognize the brand no matter where you see their branding implemented. And what about this brand identity that Pentagram also developed? This particular brand doesn't even have a separate icon. That distinctive element is actually inside the word mark itself. And we're going to go through the different types of logos later on in this course. So do not worry if some of this doesn't make sense at the moment. And you can see that the distinctive lines and angle used in the W are also used throughout the entirety of the brand's identity. And once again, the font matches the character and the DNA of the actual brand. I also think that color blue is a really smart choice simply because obviously the name of the brand is Wings. So you can kind of connect that to the sky, which is super intentional. But also the fact that in Western society, especially the color blue symbolizes trust, which is great for a banking company. Now don't worry about brand colors just here. We're going to cover that later on in this course. Now actually have a tool which you can use for free to help you find the perfect colors for your brand in a matter of minutes. So in summary, your brand's visual system is essentially your brand's tone and style. It's that trademark look that makes you different and unique. And a grid visual branding system should tick these three very important boxes. Firstly, it should be easy to recognize. Next, it should be able to work in any given environment. And third, it should help you stand out in your marketplace. If your visual branding can tick those three boxes, you can have the complete peace of mind that your branding is going to look great no matter where you see it. So what should your visual branding system include? Well, that depends on a couple of important things. For example, one of those things being where your branding will actually be applied. For instance, if you have a coffee shop, then having a branding pattern could be really useful if you put it on your coffee cup so that people can see people holding those coffee cups and relate it back to your store, essentially helping to bring in more business. However, having a pattern may not be as useful or even applied, or it might be pretty useless for a tech company that is never going to use that pattern on any of its environments. Now, no matter what type of business you're in, your visual branding system should always include these elements. The first is a logo in two or three forms. Do not worry, we'll cover this in more depth in a future lesson. The second thing is a brand color palette. Thirdly, a selection of fonts in different sizes and weights so you can use them in different environments properly. And finally, brand guidelines. Now those are the core essentials. Now let's look at some additional elements that can really help to bring your brand to life visually. You could also invest in icons or iconography. These are essentially a special style of icon which only your brand uses. You could also invest in imagery. Styles, meaning certain types of photography or even a certain filter on the photography to give a certain effect. You could also invest in animations for your brand. And lastly, you could also invest in patterns or some sort of brand code so that your customers can recognize you super easily. Do not worry though, We're going to cover brand codes in more depth later on in the course. Now, there are tons of different ways that you can express your visual branding. But I think focusing on these elements that we've discussed in this particular lesson will keep things nice and simple and just help things not get too complicated. The most important thing that we want to achieve from this course is to make sure that your brand looks credible and trustworthy from Der One. Anyway, I will see you in the next lesson in the course. See you soon. 11. Developing an Iconic Brand Logo: A brands logo is the most important graphic for any company. It's going to be the element that's seen by the most customers, the asset that's used the most across all branded elements. And it will serve as a symbol for everything that your business does and stands for. And it will probably be the thing that your customers remember. You buy unless you sell something like cheesecake or something like that, Especially that Japanese one where it's like gooey in the middle. It's like soft and when you break it, it like droops out and it just goes everywhere. It's like you just want to smother. Anyway, your logo should position you as being credible, established, and trustworthy. So in this lesson, we're going to be understanding what a logo actually is and also how you can develop a great one. And then we're going to swiftly move on to understanding what type of logo is best for your specific situation and brand. Which will then lead us on to creating the perfect brief for you to work with the logo designer to get your branding absolutely perfect in regards to your logo and the vibe of your brand. So first of all, what is a logo and what makes a great one? Well, by definition, your logo is a single graphic that can ultimately symbolize everything that your company is, stands for and offers to your customers. But what makes a logo great? Well, there are three boxes that every single logo should tick if it wants to meet its full potential. First and foremost, the logo should work in any one color. Secondly, it should be super scalable. What I mean by that is it should work just as well when it's really big as well as when it's really small. And last, but by no means least the logo needs to symbolize some sort of message or story about your brand. And if you design a logo which ticks these three boxes, then you are off to a fantastic start. So now we know what boxes we need to take in regards to your logo design. Now we can explore the different types of logos and which one might be best for you in your particular situation. So there are five different types of logos to choose from. First is a wordmark logo, which is ultimately known as a logo type. These consist of the brand's name written in a unique, custom font or typography. This style is ideal for brands that want to keep it simple, but also have a unique and distinctive feel about their logo. And the best part is they're actually super easy to design To next we have lettermark logos. These use initials or acronyms to represent the brand. This approach is usually best for super long brand names that can be condensed down to just a few letters so it's shorter and easier to remember. Now, brand mark logos are graphical icons and symbols that represent something about the brand without using any text, highly visual, and can convey meaning without using words. This style is beneficial for brands aiming for international recognition who need their icon to be recognized without the brand name beside it. To be completely honest, in order to get a really great brand mark design, you need to work with a designer who really knows what they're doing. Because it's actually quite difficult to convey emotion and message and story within one simple, simple or icon. But as I said before, your logo is going to be seen by every single one of your customers at some point in their customer journey. So making that investment is well worth it if you have the funds available. Now, combination logos merge together. Brand marks and word marks together creates a balanced visual representation for your brand. And this approach gives you a visual graphic that can be used separately and a word mark that can be used alone too. Again, the designer that you hire to create this type of logo is going to need to really know what they're doing. An emblem logo includes the brand's name inside the actual icon. This style often gives a classic authoritive feel and is suitable for heritage brands or those in traditional industries. This is a fairly uncommon approach these days due to brands being heavily digitized. But if you're wanting to really stand out and have a more traditional vibe, then this approach could be perfect for you. In truth, there's no right or wrong answer when it comes to choosing the logo style perfect for your brand. Just take the advice in this lesson and use your best judgment to choose a style which suits your brand perfectly. The most important thing is that your logo takes the three boxes that I mentioned at the start of this lesson. So how do you actually create the perfect logo for your brand, whether you're designing it yourself or whether you're getting someone else to do it for you. Well, the truth is you don't have to make things super complicated. It's as simple as focusing on those three boxes that I said at the start of the lesson. And also making sure that you select a logo style which makes sense for your business. I would also suggest collecting a couple of logos that you really like the look of and actually understanding why you like them to make sure that if you do work with the designer, they know your personal taste a little bit better before designing a logo for you. And lastly, you should also suggest some sort of message or story for your brand's logo to communicate. For example, Apple's logo is super sleek and modern and it fits perfectly with the type of technology that they sell. Another great example is the Starbucks logo inspired by the sirens in the novel Moby ****. The brand name actually came from the entire Starbucks brand message, is focused around luring people to the store, much like the sirens did the sailors in the novel to ultimately get them in the store for a fresh cup of lovely coffee. So it doesn't have to be super complicated. Just think of a word or a story and focus your brand's message in all of your brand's efforts around that single word. Try to think of this word or story as the thing that you want your customers to think about your business When it comes to their mind. However, one thing that I would not suggest is giving the designer complete free reign, much like this founder did. Or you may find yourself in a little bit of a sticky situation. Anyway, I'll see you in the next lesson. 12. Bonus Lesson: Creating your logo 'Work with me' session: Okay, so welcome to another Work With Me session. In this Work With Me session, we're going to be looking at the company's logos. Okay, we're going to be putting the logos here, but how do you come up with a logo for your brand? Well, in this session I'm going to come up with a logo with you to actually show you how you can do it. But also I want to share with you how I actually develop logos for different brands all around the world. My thought process and why it isn't as hard as people make it out to be. It is difficult if you don't understand design, but you don't have to make it difficult for yourself. You can actually make it really simple with the logo which I developed for Emet and Scott. So if you look at the actual logo for Emmet and Scott, it isn't that difficult to do. It's simply just a really nice font with a nice type face and a nice color. It isn't that difficult to replicate. Anybody could replicate this and do it in literally no time at all. Now the reason that we actually created this particular logo was because we wanted it to just look high end and just come across as being quite a luxurious company right. Now, in regards to your logo, and this is actually the original logo which I created and it was not very good. This was like ten years ago. Please bear with me. But ultimately, we just wanted the logo which was really simple. This was our only focus. We just wanted the logo which could go everywhere and which was just really easy to apply to wherever we wanted to put it. Now I would say that there are two different types of logos that you should be looking at. This is Clementine House.com my Brandon Agency. So feel free to check that out if you really want to. Now, if we go to the different logos that are on my portfolio, I want to go through a couple that you may want to explore. The first is just a word mark, okay? When we talk about a word mark, word logo, free singing, you're actually getting a concert as well as a course which is your money. If we look at word marks, these are basically words which are a brand mark as well. So for example, you've got Google, the New York Times, which is extremely complex. I wouldn't recommend you going that complex, but maybe you're good at that sort of thing, so maybe you can explore that. But then you've got Coca Color, which is, again, it looks very simple, but it's actually very difficult to get the weight of those letters all perfect. Something like Google and something like the carbon line logo. You can do it yourself in literally 2 seconds. It is not difficult. So what was the previous word? It was way, right over, way. Let's have a little look. So let's just make a logo for owe. Right? Let's go, okay, and I'm going to do it is, if I literally have no idea about design and you can do this on Word, you can do it anywhere, Powerpoint, and you can literally just export as a PNG. Which basically means that the background is transparent and you'll have your logo ready to go. Let's go over way, right? Let's look. Okay, let's pretend I know nothing about fonts and typefaces. Okay, let's go on this. Fonts that look luxurious. Okay, Okay, here. Okay, let's have a look at these. Let's pretend I literally have no idea how to pick up a font or anything. I'm just literally Google in it. So you've got Google that looks cool, right? That looks cool Manhattan. Perfect. Let's look at Manhattan. Let's look at this papa. So you can buy it for literally $15 For $15 you can get your logo done. Okay? Let's pretend that we haven't got $15 Let's do that. Is he going to show me that? We go, okay, then let's just zoom that in. Let's just, obviously, I don't condone stealing, but just for the purposes of this logo, within literally about 2 minutes. Okay, let's do another one. Let's get another one somewhere. Okay, this is just for word marks, by the way. This is logos that are just basically the word no icon. Okay, Which is a different story which I'll go through with you in a second. Let's look at another one. I don't like this one. It's a little bit to, this one is pretty cool. It looks pretty cool. Let's go on. Okay. Obviously you can do this with any type of this, looks awesome, I think. How should we go for this or this? I like this one. Okay, let's go for it. Actually, I like this one. Let's go for this one. It's a little bit more elegant, right? It's a little bit more elegant. A little bit more key copy image. Let's go with this second logo done. It isn't difficult to do a word marked logo. If you wanted like a different type of font, then say for example, wanted to go for a very approachable font like Google, for example. Just type in approachable fonts. Approachable fonts. You go to some more approachable fonts. Let's look at some of these then. We've got these. I think these are actually, no, my fonts isn't free, but Dafont is free. Dafont. Dafont free, That's free. So these are all free. So let's check one of these out. Okay, Bold, that looks awesome. We can look at this, we can look at this. That looks a little bit too crazy, right? Okay, let's look at this one, okay? Awesome. We've got three options there, which is super, super nice. Again, it doesn't have to be really complicated. People make logos super complex, right? What you need to remember is the Apple logo means nothing. Okay. Let that sink in. The Apple logo means nothing. Without all the marketing and the time, and the association that ultimately Apple has built over the last, you know, God knows how many years of been in business, right? I think they came into business in the 1960s or something, right. Let's check that Apple found a date. I'm going to go with 1967, or is that Nike? Oh, 76. 67. I got a wrong man. So close. Okay. Anyway, okay. This is the beauty of doing live videos. Right. Things go wrong. Okay. I've just downloaded this font here. Have no, I haven't. Let's do this one here. You're going to let me download it? Yeah, it should do. There we go. Download, download, close. I don't want to do that. When you see that pop up, there we go. Now, if you see OTF, that's basically the font. So we don't want the italic one, we want the normal one. We want to download the font, what is called all bald. Okay. All bald. We've got that in there up. All away. All away in. Okay. And then we just put all bold. Awesome. There we go. Done. Actually, I don't like this one as much as the other ones, but you can see what I mean, to be completely brutally honest, this was a terrible mistake. This logo is actually not great, right? And I'll tell you why. It's not great. It looks very sharp, it's not very beautifully designed, it looks a little bit terrible, To be completely brutally honest, Go with your got when it comes to logo designs, right? You can see how this one's like elegant, it looks good, it's well balanced, it's well designed. This one as well, it looks good, it looks luxurious. This one literally looks like it's been in a car crash. So anyway, back to what I'm doing, let's go very wrong in this episode. But in regards to funds, keep things simple, right? Do a little bit of research, doesn't have to be days. Take a little bit of time to find a fun that suits you and then choose one and write your brand name in it. It isn't difficult. That's literally exactly what I did, Emerton Scott. And that is literally what I pretty much will do for most of my businesses. You'll even see Clementine House. These are my businesses, the businesses that actually bring me income. Clementine Houses logo is literally Clementine House with a little leaf on the top on like an orange, right? It doesn't have to be that hard. You keep it simple. Keep it super simple. This is the logo for my Joel company, Lancaster Academy of Design and Brand. This is the logo for my brand education company where I actually teach people about branding. Look, don't make it harder than it needs to be, right? But let's say for example, you really want an icon because you really want one. No, the reason you just want one. Or maybe you need one because of the application of your actual logos, right? So let's say for example, you really need one. So Somerset Skywells. The way to get an icon is first to ask yourself what makes your brand special or what message you want to communicate. Okay, so for example, right, we look at, we always go back to the purpose. We always go back to the purpose and the vision, and the mission, and the values of the brand. We always go back to that. Everything stems from that, okay. So there's a reason why there are brands like Dove for example, right? Dove. If you haven't heard of Dove, it's a soap company basically. And they do dove brand purpose. The purpose is to help women everywhere develop a positive relationship with the way they look. Right? This is the message that they are constantly reassuring the world with. They're reinforcing this message. Sorry, again and again and again. Okay. This literally dictates everything the brand does. I know I've just hit my microphone, but bear with me everything the brand does. So if we go to Youtube for example, you're probably going to see an awful lot of food related content because that's generally what I look for on Youtube. But if we look for Do Advert, then you'll see it's all looking at women's self esteem, reassuring that woman's self esteem, of positivity, that positive self esteem. Sorry, all we need to do is look back at the purpose. So our purpose is to inspire, is to inspire women to get the most of out of their life through stoic philosophy. Okay, so let's look at inspire women. So we could look at inspire, for example. You look for icons. Inspire icons. I love it when Google does that. It is my favorite thing when Google does that. Does your computer do that as well? When it just like completely zones out inspilogopylogo. Let's have a look. Okay, so we've got chips, right? We're looking at chips. Now, you may not be a designer, you can hire someone else to do this, but what I'm basically saying is it's going to allow you to get a much better result if you're focusing on, you know, basically developing a logo around a message that you can tell the person who's actually designing your logo, right? If you're not designing it yourself, give them the more guidance you give a designer who doesn't know what they're doing, really, because you're going to have to peer a lot more for a designer who actually knows what they're doing. And if you don't want to a peer for a designer and you're not a designer yourself, just do a word mark. It's just a lot simpler, right? Keep it simple. But if you do really want an icon, pay somebody. The more guidance you can give them, the better. Because most designers, to be honest, don't know what they're doing. If you're paying less than a couple of hundred dollar, basically, right? If you're lucky you'll find someone who's good. We charge anywhere between kind of like $1,000 to $2,000 for various logo design packages. But you can find some decent designers for 500, $400 I think on the likes of fiber for example. But they won't be able to help you find this message, that's the thing. So let's go for some examples in my portfolio just to kind of show you my process of how I thought about it. Skywells, for example, probably one of my favorite logos that we've ever created. The reason being is it literally communicates infinity and kind of sustainable energy in one single mark. You know, this is literally the infinity symbol, It's dynamic, it looks cool, it fits the word mark. So yeah, that's why we came up with that, and that's how we came up with that particular idea. Then you've got more simple ideas like for example, well buds, well buds is the cannabis company. They do really, you know, kind of special strains of different types of cannabis. They just wanted to ear cannabis icon which was looked really high end. So we did that, that was a little bit simpler. Flow bottle for example was a completely different kettler fish. And if you don't know what a kettler fish is, then that is my English slang and I apologize. But it basically means that it was a completely different project, right? Because they wanted Bobby, actually, the founder of Flow bottle along with Rex and Jennifer, his wife there wanted an icon which was more abstract. It was more kind of, you know, a little bit more mysterious, right? It wasn't as obvious. So what we did was their actual product, if you can see here, is a bottle with a detachable bottom basically where it helps you hide things and keep things all in one place within your water bowl. Really cool product, right? I absolutely love, I love Bobby. I love Rexel of Jennifer. They're amazing. We're amazing to work with as well. So check the brand out if you have a little bit of time. But the icon was simply two things, water and storage in one single icon. Water being a droplet and then storage underneath. That's it. It's literally the symbol of the actual product and the benefit that it communicates in the simplest form possible. Right, Let's do one last one just to drive the message home. Foresight. Foresight is a great example. It's a really great example. I actually designed this logo. In an airport in Australia. And I remember I delivered it to Sean, the founder before I landed on before I boarded my flight. That when I actually left my flight, when I got sort of got to barley, I think I was flying to at the time. This was a good couple of years ago. Now I landed and I just got an e mail back saying, wow, this one. So yeah, I think you liked it, but this has been his logo ever since. Ultimately, Foresight is a cybersecurity company which basically helps to protect their clients from cyber threats. Foresight is a fantastic name that we helped she come up with, which basically means that we foresee all cyber threats, right? We foresee everything. The logo is basically a triangle focused around eyesight. I love you. Google, I love you. Google. Okay, Eyesight triangle, there we go. So if you see here, you'll see the eyesight of eyesight there we go. So you'll see how to actually see anything, the light comes in and it forms like a triangle. So a triangle is connected to sit. So then we basically created a reinforced mark which created the idea of us being able to see everything. So all of these little triangles basically communicated sight. And then we basically times that by nine and created a really cool mark around that idea of that we see everything, everything is seen by foresight, we see everything before it even happens. A little kind of thing as well which you probably might have not picked up on, that didn't even make sense in English. But in the fight is that triangle is then replicated on eye as well. Now the reason that that's really important is, and this is something that I actually go through in the abstract logo design course, which is one of our most popular courses on the platform actually, which you can check out that's on our profile. This goes through how to actually develop a logo like this, Like this exact type of logo where it's a little bit clever, right? It isn't as simple as a word mark, but it brings the word mark, which is this. Because this is essentially just a word mark with an icon which works together effortlessly to create a really great logo system. Okay? Or branding system, whichever you prefer. So the reason that this text and this icon feel so together and so married so well, is that they share a common characteristic being the sharpness of the ships. Okay, so because text is essentially just a ship, all of it is ships. You know that the ses, ship, the eye is a ship. The is ship, The ships are all similar in regards to their sharpness and the edges, and the corners, but also as well, the little eye here shares the same triangle. The exact same triangle, Just a little bit smaller in proportion obviously to the y as the icon. We actually use this a fair amount of time. For example, this here shares the same characteristics as the edges here. Let's check another example out here. The L here shares the same, the same angle as the actual icon. Kindle here, for example, Kindle, The actual here has the exact same rose effect as the actual rose as the icon. Is there any other examples which I can see? I don't think there is, but there should be some more but I just can't find them jumble as well. I mean, this is a little bit of a sort of a different case. But actually, you know, I'll share this one with you and then I'll share one last one with you. This one's form in my favorite. So jumble here we have the J. And the J, which is basically, this was for an online jumble sale. Kind of like bar where people exchange things. So this was an icon, which was basically kind of showcasing ear like a handshake or an exchange of product like a transaction. And then we basically used the Js to represent jumble, right? This is pretty much the exact same as this, just with a little bit of difference. Because obviously this is a little bit weird and it wouldn't really match. But this is probably one of my favorites, kingly, as an actual icon. So if we completely took away this actual icon, but if we just used the word mark the here and the end of the, the end of the key, I've just hiccupped, I apologize. But all of these little icons on the actual end of the letters of the word mark are all taken from a dog's tail, a dog's pa. So we're taking those shapes to make it feel a little bit more like a dog brand. Right. This session has been 21 minutes. I know of covid lots, right? I hope this has been valuable for you. If it hasn't, then I'm really sorry for wasting your time. If it has, let me know because I want to make sure that I can make more of these for you. Because I try to cram it as much advice as possible, but I'm not sure how beneficial it is for you. So let me know, Pop me a quick message or you know, add a comment or whatever. And I want to make this course the best course in the world for visual expression, for branding, to help you understand it, to get the best possible results even if you have zero experience. So please, please, please pop me a quick message, introduce yourself, let me know a little bit about what you're trying to do and I'll see you the next Work with Me session. I'll see you there. 13. Trademarking your Logo & Brand Name: Okay, so just a little bonus lesson in case you want to trademark your logo and brand name. Now, this isn't essential to do just yet because you've just started your business, and your brand name and your logo are not really worth anything. So ultimately, it's kind of like meeting someone for the first time and wanting to marry them on the first date. But anyway, if you really want to protect everything, then there's a really simple way that you can check to see if your brand name and logo can be protected. Now the fastest way to do this is to go to Women Do forward slash TM view where you can check your brand name to see if it's already been red chestered. I've also placed a direct link to this particular website within the course. But all you need to do is make sure that there's no brand names that are similar to yours within your given category and location. And another thing to think about is variations of spelling. For example, if I was a sportswear brand and I tried to call myself night like this, it wouldn't matter because it actually sounds the same as the original name which is already trademark. So it would still cause a lot of issues and objections if you're still unsure I have to do on the checks for yourself and you want to make sure that you don't waste any money with the field application, then you can always hire an attorney which usually costs around 50 to $100 on five to do the checks for you. And one little trick that I think is really, really useful for getting your trademark passed through application is to protect your logo and your name together. This is not only going to help your application to be successful, but it's also going to help you save money. Instead of filing two applications separately personally, I would wait a year and really get the business and running before starting to file things like trademarks and pins and all that sort of stuff. But obviously it's completely subjective, so you can do whatever you feel is best anyway. I hope you enjoy this lesson and I'll see you in the next one. 14. Brand Colour Palette Masterclass: In this lesson, we're going to help you create an incredible color palette for your brand. And we'll do this in four simple steps. First, we're going to learn what a brand color palette is. Secondly, we'll explore the difference between dominant and accent colors, and how they should be used properly. Thirdly, we'll show you exactly how to create your own brand color scheme in just a few minutes. Lastly, we'll show you how to save those colors and keep them safe so they are always ready for you to use. So let's start at the very beginning. Brand colors were first used in 1604, And that's great, but we don't really care about that because it has absolutely no relevance to what we're trying to do here at all. A brand color scheme or palette, is a selection of colors that is used consistently across everything that your brand does. This includes the company's website, logo, social media banners and adverts, just to name a few. Using a brand color palette has huge benefits. Firstly, using a color palette can help a customer build a perception or impression about your brand. It's been shown that different colors can provoke different emotions within the customer. For example, red symbolizing happiness, purple symbolizing mystery and royalty. Blue symbolizing trust. Now, something to keep in mind, which is really important, which will actually cover in a little bit more depth later on, is that in different cultures, colors can mean different things. However, don't worry about that because we have a tool to help you, which I'll come to later on in this lesson. Another great advantage of using a strategic brand color palette is that over time, your customers can begin relating that color to your brand and company and what you offer. This can ultimately help your company become more memorable in the eyes of your target audience. But just take a moment to think about which brand this color represents. 321, Did you get it right? It's fair to say that anybody that's seen this torn of color before will link it directly to Tiffany and core the brand. And this is because the Tiffany and Core brand has been used in that specific turn of blue since the brand first started. Now this is really powerful stuff and we've learned three very important lessons when it comes to choosing your color palette. First is your color palette can help you stand out in the marketplace. Secondly, the colors that you select can help the customers perceive your brand in a certain way. And lastly, if you use that color again and again, it can help you become more memorable over time. Okay, so next we're going to go over dominant and accent colors. Now in really simple terms, typically you should have five colors in your brand color palette. And this should include two dominant colors and three accent colors. Dominant colors are your main colors. These are the colors that you are going to be remembered for. And your accent colors should be chosen second, and they should be chosen to complement your dominant colors. Now your other two accent colors should allow your highlight color to do most of the work. Your other two accent colors should be a little bit more subtle and down to earth. And that is step two done. Now we can start creating your brandz color palette. Just follow the simple steps in this lesson. And you can have a brand new color palette faster than you can say the word paint brush. Well, maybe not that fast, but still pretty quick on that note, let's get started now. The trick to creating a great color palette is first understanding the type of color that you're looking for now. Don't worry about the exact color just yet, we'll come to that a little bit later on. But just keep in mind that different colors have different psychological associations connected to them depending on the culture that you're trying to communicate with. As you can see, different colors are linked to different emotions and associations. Now, it's super important not to overthink things at this stage of the process. Now, some say that finding the perfect color all comes down to, well, there actually isn't any perfect color, to be completely honest. But a way to strategically find a color which makes sense for your business is to first and foremost make sure that none of your competitors are using the color first. For example, if the jewelry brand started using the exact same ducade blue as Tiffany. And then they would simply just be putting themselves in a really sticky situation and they would probably find a lawsuit on their desk faster than you could see the word duck omelet. Now once you have your main color selected, you can start to build your brand color palette around that color. Now the first step is to visit the online tool Color Plus. This will allow you to find color palettes that make sense for your brand strategically, allowing you to select the type of customers that you're trying to attract. The type of emotion that you want to provoke with your color palette, and also even the color that you want your color palette to be based around. The great thing about these color palettes is they've been created by qualified designers. So you know that every single color palette within the options that are given can all work strategically for your branding company. Now not only that, but Color Plus also allows you to download your color palette once you've found the one that's perfect for you. Now the brand color PDF that you can download will not just give you your brand colors and the codes to use them, but it will also show you different examples of those exact colors used on things like business cards, websites, and other branded environments. So once you've found the brand color palette, which makes more sense for you in your company and situation, you can download it and you can even add it to the brand guidelines that we've been filling out throughout this course. I will create an additional bonus lesson after this one, which is completely optional. Which will allow you to simply understand how to add your brand color scheme to your brand guidelines easily and simply with minimal fuss. Anyway, I will see you in the next lesson. 15. Bonus Lesson: Brand Colour Palette 'Work with me' session: So welcome to another Work with Me session. In the last Work With Me session, we were looking at logo designs. We looked at a couple of different variations in regards to how you can create the logo for your brand without you having tons of experience in regards to logo design. We looked at word marks, we looked at adding an icon. And that was that I basically added the Emerton Scott logos to the presentation. So my brand guidelines are coming together quite nicely. But the next step is ultimately the brand color palette. So how can we come up with your brand color palette? Well, much like the previous episodes, I am going to tell you how I came up with the color palette. Four, Emerton Scott, which is this one. And then I'm going to let you know how you can come up with a brand color palette yourself. Okay, So how did I come up with a brand color pallet? Everton Scott. So the way that I came across it was researching Stoic philosophy. So I will look at famous Stoics. Stoics, I cannot spell. It's like 11:00 P.M. right now. So that's why I can't spell any other time, but, you know, that's my excuse. So if we look at, you know, famous Stoics, you know, like, like Greek gods ultimately, right? So that's kind of how they were perceived back in the day. And I started looking at Greek gods and I started looking at Greek warriors. And one of the things that I really noticed quite predominantly is red capes, you know this red here. It was kind of like this, really passionate, really strong, like vibrant, like burgundy red, right? So I was like, that's pretty cool, right? I really want to kind of use that red. So what I started looking for is high end. Oh, types of red, red, and hex. So I started looking at these and I was like, okay, what type of red, what type of red do you think I would like? I kind of like this one and then I think I selected something like this. So that was like 9619. Then I went to abdbyclorcolordby.com and I put, Let's just have a look, let's close this. 96199619. Not too bad. Okay. How do I change this, change color? There we go. 96199619. Okay. So I've got this red here, and then what I would do is I go here and I'd probably look at the different types of colors that were there. So I think I did this one, the triad harmony. And then what I would look at is different ways to kind of approach this, and that's how I found a gold. But it was also kind of inspired by the gold in the armor of the warriors, kind of, you know, outfit. Right. So that's how I came up with the color palette for Emmett and Scott. You can see here, we've got red, we've got gold, we've got kind of a darker red. It doesn't have to be more complicated than that. It doesn't have to be that complicated. When, for example, when you get your hex codes, all you need to do is just click this style, click this here, click here, and there is your hex code for your color palette. So if you send this off to anybody in the world, they know exactly what color this red is. Again, for the yellow or the gold, should I say, color palette. There we go. And here, presto, easy. Okay, you can do this with literally any brand out there whatsoever. You can literally do this with any brand in the world. And an approach that you want, the way to kind of get a color palette which makes sense for your brand, is just to take the pressure off, keep the base color as white. Okay, your primary color is one single color which kind of set you apart from the rest of the competition in your market. Your accent color is a color which complements your primary color, but that is also very different, so it'll stand out. Okay. And if you look at the color wheel, that's why this color wheel is in place because it gives you different options and, you know. Does the red go with blue? Yeah, kind of it does, yeah. You know, let's look at a different one square. You know, you can see that none of these gold together, they just don't look very good together, right? Compound. I mean, these kind of look okay, but not that great. Actually you've got different variations of the red here. Complimentary look. You're literally looking at this. You've got this color here, which literally looks great beside it. Look, it literally looks great. And we could change the gold in here to that and it wouldn't look bad. I don't think it'll look as good as gold, but you know, it still works. It still kind of works, right? So use this particular website, because I always use this website when I'm bringing together color palettes. Color.adobe.com slash create sh, color, hyphen wheel, and then play around with it and find something. Find one color, right? Really, really, simply find one color that you really like. Then a darker version of that, and then just put some other dark versions of that particular color, going down to black. And then an accent color, which is something that complements it and then white. Keep it simple. Super, super simple. Now if you're really struggling, you can use the tool that we built using I called Color Pro Plus. So all you need to do is do that. It's completely free of charge. You just go to L O D B, so Lancaster Academy of Design and Brand.com Click Freelance Entrepreneur. It doesn't really matter, to be honest. Let's say an entrepreneur obviously, because you are taking the brand builder. Let's have a look at this. Then we go to resources. We've also got archetype Proplus and Fun Plus which will come to a little bit later. But Color, this is beta version one. Version two is coming. It is in development. Now you literally just click Create my color palette, we should have. Okay, so we're just going to put David Hunt, obviously put your own name, because obviously we need to understand, you know, who we're talking to. Then we will go to freelancer, for example, Amazon. David. Okay. Yeah. So what are we selling at this point? Necklaces. Okay. Great worldwide to tell us about target audience. Okay, So our target audience is, I would say, spiritual, creative fingers, and passionate. Okay, How old do your tager ones be? Let's, this is why the strategic branding course is so important because it literally gives you, the answer is 33. So yeah, around 33, gender female. Let's get emotional, calm and peaceful. It's literally exactly what is in here. It literally says cam and peace of mind. Calm and peaceful. There we go. Calm and peaceful. What do we want our customers to think about our brand? Luxurious. And then just obviously put@gmail.com Submit. Then it's literally brought together two different color palettes which I can use, which are calming and peaceful, but which also can come across as luxurious. Once I choose one that I like, I simply just press download palette. Just press allow that. I literally have the color palette there. I copy and paste it. That's it. It's already got all of the details in there for me. Copy and paste it. Go to my keynote. Go to my color palette here, which is obviously completely blank at the minute because I haven't done it yet past step. Send it to the back, and there we go. We literally have the color palette there with all hex codes ready to go without doing anything else. It literally took me about 30 seconds to do that, so feel free to use the Color Proplus tool. It's super, super effective and it gives you some great options used a couple of times if you really want to, if you want to kind of, you know, mix and match things and try different variations. But yeah, hopefully that helped you come up with some great color palettes. Hopefully that gives you a couple of ideas. But apart from that, I wish you a great a and I will see you in the next video. Take care. 16. Finding the Perfect Brand Font Combination: So you want to find the perfect typefaces and fonts for your brand. Well, we're going to do that in just a few minutes. And it'll take just a couple of simple steps. First, we'll learn the different types of fonts to choose from. Next, we'll learn the different styles of fonts. And then choose the one that's best for your brand. And then I'm going to show you how to find the perfect fonts for your brand in no time at all. Now, there are four different types of fonts, seraph, display, and script. First we have sera fonts. These have small lines or strokes at the end of their characters, which gives them a more traditional and formal appearance. Seraphonts are excellent for printed materials such as books and newspapers, and academic documents. They convey a sense of authority and are often used for body text due to their readability in longer passages. Sanserophonts are more simple, resulting in a cleaner and more modern and straightforward look. San Seraphonts are versatile and work well in digital media, websites, presentations, and signage. They are commonly used for headings, captions, in any situation where you want to really clean and contemporary appearance. Display fonts are decorative and highly stylized, often with unique and intricate details. They can grab attention and can be used for either headlines or eye catching text. Use display fonts sparingly for decorative or creative purposes, such as logos, posters, invitations, and titles. These are not suitable for large bodies of texts due to being a little bit difficult to read. Script fonts mimic cursive handwriting with fluid and connected letter forms. They're usually quite elegant, playful, and sometimes informal. Script fonts are great for adding a personal touch or convey a sense of elegance and any design where a handwritten effect is highly desired. So now we know the different types of fonts and how they can be used. So how can we find the perfect font for your brand? Well, first you need to decide whether you want to go with one font family or two font families that complement each other. Typically, a brand will choose one font and use a thicker version of that font for their headers and subheaders. Or they will select a font which has a little bit more character for their headers and subheaders, and keep a more readable font for their standard long form content like website copy for example. And well, when it comes to selecting the funds for your particular brand, there are two ways that you can go about it. The first way is to play it F and select one of these font families to use. These are the most common fonts to use for both brands and design agencies, simply because they're the most readable and they just look the best. So you could keep things really simple and just select one font family from this selection and then ultimately use a thicker version of that font for your headers and subheaders, Then a thinner version for your general content. And the second way is to visit the web page for font Pro Plus, which is ultimately being developed to help founders just like you, to find the perfect font combinations for their brand. And also it makes it super easy to choose between one font family and two font families that complement each other to see which works best in your eyes. A really great feature of this particular tool is that it actually helps you to select the emotion that you want to convey with your fonts so that you know that your customers are going to be building the correct perception around your brand. And then take the downloadable PDF and add it to your brand guidelines so that everything is consistent. And that anyone who ever works on your brand, like a freelancer or another creative or an agency, knows exactly which fonts to use and how to use them. And if you haven't been filling in your brand guidelines as you've been working through this course, then what are we going to do? Absolutely nothing. Exactly. Absolutely nothing. It's your decision. But I would suggest that you do start completing the different sections within the booklet. Because by the end of this course, you're going to have a fully complete set of brand guidelines which you can hand off to anybody to make sure your brand is consistent for the long term. Anyway, we're really start to gain momentum, so I will see you in the next lesson. 17. Bonus Lesson: Brand Fonts & Typography 'Work with me' session: Okay, so your fonts, How do we find the perfect fonts for your brand? Now, we actually already touched this in a previous work with me session where we looked at developing your brands logo, right? Which we did. And we found different fonts, right? We can find them easily on Google. Now ultimately your fonts. If you did and completed the fonts lesson in the course, this is obviously a work with me session, a bonus lesson to kind of show you how I think about things personally. Within, you know, the branding realm, you'll find that you generally need three different weights of fonts. Okay, now I generally go for a more elaborate head of font, which is here, which is the main font. And then my subheaders is basically just a thinner version of this particular font. And then my content is something really generic, super, super generic, right? Like for example, if you go to the Emmet and Scott website, you'll see that the actual, the more elaborate font. And then we basically have the more kind of common font as the subheader here, which is a little bit bigger and a little bit more prominent. But then you also have the actual content, which is super easy to read. Okay, Now the general content has to be super easy to read. The reason being is when someone comes to your website, you do not want them to have to struggle reading your content. It's not a great idea. Okay, so what we want to do is we want to make sure that this is super easy to read. So let's start there. Let's start with that particular font. Let's Google. Let's put easy, most common fonts, free fonts. Let's look at these best free fonts online. And the reason that we want the most popular, or the most common fonts for our general content is because we want it to be easy to read. We don't want to be messing around, okay? These look terrible. This looks all right. Is that okay? This must be this one. Okay, let's look at this, because this one, this looks pretty simple and easy to read, especially this stuff. Okay? Yeah, the thinner version is perfect. Awesome. Okay, so how do we download this, Bad boy? Okay. Download this on my Fonts. You can download it anywhere. Okay, Perfect. Download it here Fonts then I think this actually charges you. Okay. Okay. We don't want to I thought this was a free fund. I thought I let you just pressed. Free fund. Why is it not free? Okay. You can go to somewhere like Dondon. I you can find this log fund for free anywhere to be honest. You can get this. You can just you want to have the license for it, but family free, it's going to give you it, right? Funds are not hard to get, You just have to be careful with the license for them, right? That's what's kind of a little bit tricky. You don't want to get caught in not having the license, the commercial license for using it. Okay. So you can download it pretty easily, but obviously we don't want to get any trouble, so we won't be using this for any commercial reasons. General fonts go to anywhere like Google funds, for example. They're all free and you can get the commercial license for those like, they're all free to use for commercial license. So Google Fonts is good. Adobe Fonts is good. They're all free to use as well. Pretty much. But make sure you double check apart from that, just make sure it's super easy to read anything that looks pretty generic, like something like this where it's not difficult to read, just use your own common sense. Because anybody with a little bit of common sense can realize that that particular logo, that particular fond, is easy to read. Now in regards to the sub headline and the actual headline itself, forget about numbers for the minute, because that's not really that relevant. The headline can be pretty much anything. Now, as I discussed in the work with me session for the logo design, you can Google the types of fonts that are quite luxurious, right? So you can check this out. For example, luxurious my spelling. Luxurious fonts. There we go. Free luxury fonts there. We've got 64 to choose from. Let's have a little look at these and then see what is cracking. So we've got this, that's horrendous, by the way. Not bad. This looks all right. This looks all right. It's a little bit too elaborate. We don't want anything crazy then. It's hard to read itself. But This is decent like this is decent, this logo or this fund is actually pretty decent. This one is pretty decent. This one's really good. Look at this, this is awesome italiana, regular crazy, and I think it's free to use as well. So, you know, we've literally, we've literally got the headline fund there and it looks awesome, right? So once you have your funds, make sure that I'm not going to use that one, because obviously, I don't know if it's free or not, but just literally add it to this and just have that organized. So this is your headline fund, this is sort of subheadline Fund, and then you basically have your common fund here. It's not difficult to do this, it's really, really simple. And it takes literally about 10 minutes to do so. Do not overcomplicate it. Do some research in regards to the types of fonts that your competition is using. And then you take a little bit of inspiration. Inspiration. You get what I'm trying to say and save yourself a lot of time. But if you are really, really struggling, then you can use Dad font Pro Plus, which is another tool which we created on the Lancaster Academy of Design and Brand website which we are very excited about. Version two is coming soon. If you're watching this, then we might be on the version three or four by now. But I'll try and update these as much as possible. So just literally click Find my Fonts then all you need to do, let's just wait for this to load Jane Smith. Let's change my name for nice to meet you. So I'll just describe myself. I am a designer and many other marvelous things. What do we sell? We sell necklaces. That is not how you spell necklaces, Scott, what are you doing? Dearie me, I am so bad. Necklaces worldwide. We're going to be worldwide. Worldwide. Baby, tell me a little bit about your target audience. Let's change it a little bit. Ambitious, curious learners. How old will the target audience be? 21. And what gender will the target audience be? Female, Whatever B, B, B feel, how do we want them to feel? We want them to feel exclusive. We want them to feel exclusive. And we want to be exclusive and luxurious. Okay. So this is kind of the same as Google, but just obviously a little bit more focused on funds and the Gmail.com Yes. Okay. And you don't have to give your e mail, to be honest. You can just leave it. But I mean, wow, this is awesome. Right. So anyway, yeah, before I just kind of cut myself off there. You don't have to give your e mail. It just helps us to get back in touch with you if there's anything that's relevant to your particular brand. So, for example, here I'm talking about a luxury brand. And, you know, doing something in regards to being exclusive and luxurious. If we develop a resource which is focused around luxury branding, wouldn't that be great if you got it in your inbox probably, right. So think about it. But yeah, I mean, we've literally got this here, two amazing examples all done for you. Head font, a header, subheadline, your general font. And you can literally download them here ready to go. Like these are beautifully arranged type faces and families that work perfectly together. Pretty awesome, right? And you literally just have to click on these, you can download them, it takes you straight to the page. Awesome, right. I love this tool. It's so, so useful. So hopefully that gives you a little bit of guidance in regards to creating your own brand color palettes and let your brand color. So that gives you a little bit of guidance in regards to creating your own brand fonts and just making them look awesome. But yeah, if you have any questions, let me know. Reach out to me and I will see you in the next Work with me session. See that. 18. Understanding the Power of Brand Codes: And so what are brand codes? Now, in simple terms, it's something about your brand that is super easy to recognize and that is highly distinctive and unique. Now, the theory of brand codes works in real life too. For example, when I'm in my office and I get a smell coming through the door, I know that my wife is probably downstairs cooking dinner. That tells me two things. First and foremost, it tells me that my wife's cooking dinner, and secondly, it tells me that I probably need to order something for dinner. Now, your brand's logo is the most obvious type of brand code. But a brand that really wants to stand out should not just depend on a logo and something to remember when developing brand codes is that having a clear message is super important. And there are two things to think about when you're trying to communicate clearly with your brand using brand codes. And those two things are differentiation and distinctiveness. Differentiation is the positioning within your market, which simply means how different you are to the rest of the options in your market that your customers could potentially choose from. This all comes down to your brand positioning, which you've already taken our strategic branding course, you should already have in place by now. Now, distinctiveness is how unique the brand codes are that you actually use. They should be really easy to recognize and connect to your brand. These should be thought of as symbols or assets that can be used throughout your brand's advertising and communications. Which directly connect back to your brand and what you're all about. Sneakers is a great example of using brand codes in the right way. In 2009, the brand actually lost quite a lot of market share. And this simply being down to the fact that they weren't using their brand codes properly. And they also were very unclear about what they were trying to see as a brand. And after speaking to customers and realizing that they were actually buying the sneakers bar to combat their hunger, they realized they had to play on that immigraz, their advertising and brand codes which led them to the campaign of, you're not you when you're hungry, which catapulted the brand back to success. And well, we all know that we're not quite ourselves when we're hungry. And unfortunately, that happens quite a lot when your wife can't cook very. What did you say? Nothing. Now, the reason that the sneakers brand could become successful again is because they started to understand the message that was both clear to what the brand was about, but also that could connect with their target audience. And by understanding the message that they wanted to convey better, then they could use their brand codes more effectively. And brand coords can be anything from a color, a highly distinctive font, a shape, a sound, even patterns. Anyway, I'm sure you're eager to start creating brand codes and thinking about what types of brandcords make more sense for your brand. So I'll let you get on with that and I'll see you in the next lesson. 19. Bonus Lesson: Brand Codes & Photography 'Work with me' session: Okay, so welcome back to the last Work with Me session of this course. Now I'm going to literally cram brand codes, models and photography reference and also product photography. And one work with me session. So we're going to slam through everything and I cannot not wait, this is probably one of my favorite parts of the visual expression phase of development, right? We want to visually express our brand in a really creative and, you know, memorable way. So with a little bit of magic, I am going to exchange these with these that wasn't quite magic. That was just copy and paste. But that's fine, let's just delay that and just pretend that never happened. So we're going to go through brand codes first. Now obviously, if you went through the lesson in the course, then you'll know what brand codes are. Brand codes are essentially little things that we can do with the brand visuably, Sometimes not visually, sometimes through our voice, which can ultimately help us stand out. For example, let's look at some examples on Google to check these out. Brands for corker caller still can't spell okay images. So for example, brand codes for Coca Cola could be let me and I haven't actually checked this out beforehand, so I could just be on a wild goose chase here. But one of them is 100% the color red. So that color red within that particular market is a brand code. Okay? So color can be a brand code, which is actually on here. The main brand color is a brand code. It can be a brand code if it's distinctive enough. Another one is the logo, right? The actual logo. That's a brand code. It's somewhere, it's a way to differentiate from the competition, your logo. Right? And it depends on how distinctive the thing is. Okay, so for example, if you look at Snickers has got some good Bran codes. Sneakers for example. They basically did lots of different creative marketing around you're not you, when you're hungry. So they basically did sneakers with different types of packaging, you get the idea, but they have different Bran codes. So for example, they've got the color, which is the Panton color here. They've got this shape. They have the logo and they also have this kind of caramel breaking apart with chocolate and the nugget or kind of biscuit base that they have. Okay. Now we also have the product and the actual product that's being sold with Snickers. Again, you'll see that the actual product here, it has a distinctive feature about it. Okay. The distinctive feature is the caramel breaking apart. Another one is K cat. K cat out of the right where the Kcat break apart as well, they have that. What's another great one, actually for a distinctive thing, rice crispies. If you're not sure what rice crispies are, they're basically these kind of bars. And there used to be a cereal, but I think they'll just do bars now or they might still do the cereal. I'm not sure where you have these kind of rice crispies, kind of this melty kind of pull to it. Okay, so the actual product can also be a brand code, but it depends, it depends on what the actual product is. So if you have products distinctive, you can use it as a brand code. If it isn't, that's fine. You don't have to have it as a brand code. One brand code that we have for met Scott is the actual packaging. So you can see here the actual packaging is extremely distinctive, right? Like like the ribbon, you know, the actual, the little brochure, the actual look and feel of the actual inside of the packaging. It all comes together so nicely and we put a lot of effort into actually developing the packaging and the opening experience. So listen, you don't need eight different brand codes. But having like, like your logo, a color, maybe a font, and then one for your product is more than enough. It's more than enough. Okay? If anyone tells you you need more than that, just tell them to bugger off because they haven't got a clue what they're talking about. So have four. Those four are fine. Okay. Just make sure your color is distinctive. Make sure your logo is unique. Choose you choose a font which isn't commonly used in your actual industry. And then find something unique about your product which you can show off visually. Okay, so that is the brand code section all tied up. Now this leads us nicely onto product photography and also the aspect of, you know, models and stuff like that as well. Now, I always tell my clients pretty much the exact same advice when it comes to product photography. You can either try and figure out exactly what your unique style is, or you can take inspiration from guys who are already doing it really, really well, the best of the world at it, then put your own little unique spin on it. Okay, so for example, we looked at Tiffany Inc. As being kind of a very, very strong brand in the luxury jewelry space. And we looked at their necklaces to see what they were doing. They had some really strong necklaces that we really loved and we took a lot of inspiration from the lifestyle. Photography is really great. There's another one called Brian Anthony's, which have some really great product photography as well, which we really liked and we basically took inspiration. So we would look at this for example. We wanted really clean images like this. Okay, we basically put a spin on it by just using a different background color and a different kind of texture on the background. But we actually used a very similar sort of style of photography for the actual lifestyle photography. This looks, this looks great, right? Like this is literally not that far behind Tiffany Co's level of photography, right? And you can see here that the background color of this is the same as this. It all looks and feels coherent. And if you look at ours, it's literally exactly the same color, right? So that's really important. That's super, super key, right? So keep that in mind, because this is going to really help you to make sure that all of your product photography looks and feels really credible and really trustworthy. Take inspiration from the likes of Tiffany Co, and you know, if you're a jewelry brand, obviously if you're not a jewelry brand then like look at your competition and what they're doing. Well, learn from it then. Do it better. That's basically, or do it as well as you can. You know, these guys have, you know, hundreds of thousands to spend on product photography every year. You probably don't have that right, you probably don't. So use their knowledge, learn from it, and then move forward as effectively as possible with your skill set, your resources, and who you know. Because you know, you don't need this level of product photography to actually get sales. You don't, you can, you know, get sales, you know. I mean, we get sales with Emet and Scott and this actual image was taken on a chair and then we cut it out in photo shop and we basically changed the color of the background. It was taken on a chair, and I have video evidence to prove that, and I can share that with you if you really want me to. It was taken on a chair in my apartment and the photographer who we're working with literally took this image and we edited it in post. So, you know, really take the time to think about what your competition are doing and how you can learn from them, and then collect some of their images that you like. You know, this is actually our image. But it looks, you know, it looks pretty, you know, similar in some cases to the Tiffany and Core brand that inspired it. Okay. It's really that simple with models. So that covers off product photography a little bit. Now, models are a little bit different when you're looking to acquire models and do you campaigns and photo shoots. The best thing to do, in my experience, is to just get as much inspiration as possible. What I mean by that is go on on the likes of interest and just look at all the different brands out there. So for example, jewelry advert, right? Again, I'm just working from a jewelry brand. I'm looking at this, I'm like, okay, I mean, this is pretty cool. I'm going to check that out. That's pretty eye catching, but I don't really like it. This is awesome. Okay? This is pretty cool. This looks cool, but it doesn't really catch my eye too much. This is awesome for me. Anyway, I really love this. Look. Check this out. Damn like this. This is amazing. Look at how great that photography is. Look at that. So cool. And one thing that I really love as well about, you know, choosing the right, you know the right models for your brand, protectively. Do this better than anybody there you. So advert, check out their adverts. See what they're doing. Learn from them. Learn from your competition. It's the only way to learn at a rapid pace, okay? And then do your own thing, put your own little pizzas on it. Look at this for example. What does this particular advert communicate? It communicates that you have a father and a son, you never actually own a protect flip. You mainly look after it for the next generation. What does that say? It says that you have a family of values, you know, you're going to look after the next generation. Your son is like the heir to all of the hard work that you've put in throughout your life. All of these things are super important, you know, like these are like this is here. If we look at all of the all of the different examples of Philip adverts you never actually own at Philip, you merely look after for the next generation. Same idea, exact same idea for women, men. These models are the ideal people that the people who they sell these watches to want to be like handsome, rich, successful, healthy. Those four things, right? Or, you know, pretty, whatever, beautiful. That is what it means and what part Philippe stands for. Right? Whether you're a man or a woman. It stands for success, it stands for, you know, that different level of that different standard of living. This is, this is a joke, by the way. This isn't, this isn't a real advert, thankfully. But look at it like it's a very beautiful advert, right? This is beautiful, beautiful imagery. And it's beautiful advertising. As well as a mosquito mocking me right to my face. Oh, I missed it. So yeah, when you're choosing models, choose them in a way where you are basically selecting the models and the people. So think about who your target audience wants to be like. There's a reason why people, brands, pay celebrities tons of money to get them to basically represent their brands and their products. The reason being is people want to be like the celebrity, most people want to be like celebrities. Right? Unfortunately I don't, but most people do. And that is the sad reality of it. So why not pick the celebrity that the person desires to be like to sell your product to? It's as simple as that. So, and it doesn't have to be a celebrity that you actually select. You can, I mean, none of these guys are celebrities, but they are presenting a way to say, you know, like you never actually want to protect Philip. You merely look after it for the next generation. That was the worst Italian, French accent I will ever do in my entire life, but I am trying my best. Okay. I am very tired that it is almost midnight and I am trying to entertain you while I tell you about brin codes and lots of other I'm want to stop that, say it's terrible anyway, I'm really sorry if your friends are Italian and I've just completely butchered that accent, but I did try my best. I love you guys. I love Italy. I love France. I miss you. Okay. Look at these models. They are the ideal or who your target audience wants to be like. If you have any questions in regards to this in particular, let me know because I want to help you guys. I want to help you as much as possible. And I'm always, always answering e mails, questions, messages on every platform. So let me know if you have any questions whatsoever. I'm more than happy to help. And I will see you in the next lesson in the course. Make sure you share your presentation and your guidelines after you've finished it, because I need to give you feedback and I really want to see what you've came up with. So anyway, thank you so much for your time. This is the last work with me section in this course. But make sure if you're investing in your branding, that you check out the three following courses within the Brand Builder program because they are awesome. Just as awesome as a. But make sure that you check out the three next courses in the Brand Builder Pro Program to see what is going to be helpful for you. Because listen, the Brand Builder Pro program has helped so many people and it is so valuable for someone trying to start a brand. And literally starting from scratch, we've got website design, we've got strategic marketing even on zero budget, and we've got brand building once you've got everything in place. So anyway, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. And I will see you in the next lesson. See that? Thank you. 20. Social Media Branding 101: Making sure your brand looks super credible and trustworthy on social media is super important. Even as a person when you see someone on their feed, maybe sitting down watching Netflix with their dog, you say to yourself, listen, I could trust this person. They may be a murderer, but at least they are like dogs. Anyway, what I'm trying to say is first impressions matter. And building up that trust and credibility with customers is going to help them buy from you one day. So we'll start with Instagram and we'll work through all the social media platforms to make sure that your branding is perfectly formated on every single platform. And make sure you stick around. Until the end of this lesson, we'll be showing you how to make sure that all of your branding is absolutely perfect. Using our free social media branding tool, Instagram and Tiktok are the easiest to get, right? All you need is a profile image which has your logo, which has great contrast, and which is scalable. For example, using these colors will not work because it's really hard to see your logo. So make sure you offer colors in your color palette that contrast really well. Also, if your brand name is more than five or six letters, you may have to use your icon instead of using your actual brand name and wordmark. Now, in regards to making branded posts for social media, this is something that we cover in the strategic marketing section of this program. So this is going to be the fourth course within the five step program. So if you're interested in that, then feel free to check that out, because it's really going to help you get your social media where it needs to be far sooner. Moving on to Facebook, Youtube linked in an X. You can use the exact same approach for your profile picture. The only difference is you've got a few extra pixels. So you can be a little bit more generous and you could actually include your entire logo if you couldn't before for Ticket Top and Instagram. Now obviously for those platforms, you have a banner which you need to design. Now, this obviously depends on your objectives as a business and the type of business that you actually have. For example, if you're a real estate company, the objective that you have as a business is to allow people to get in touch with you. So your contact details need to be front and center on that banner to make sure that no matter where people's eyes are, they know that that banner includes your contact details in case they want to get in touch with you in regards to any properties. And likewise, if you're selling a product in, in a commerce company, you want to make sure that the photography of your product is great and you can just showcase that as part of your banner. I would recommend you use the social media branding tool that we include in this course. This is going to help you stay well within the safe zones when you're actually creating your banners. Because when a customer is looking at any platform on a mobile or a desktop, it's going to be very different and the size of the banner changes. So make sure that all the essential content is well within that safe zone. Because if you put it outside the safe zone, then there is a chance that it could be cut off. So keep in mind that on some platforms like Facebook and linked in, for example, the profile picture sometimes overlaps the banner. Now we've already thought about this and on the social media branding tool, this is clearly showcased on every single platform where there is a possibility that your profile picture could overlap onto your banner. And another thing worth remembering is making sure that you're consistent with your fonts and colors. Consistency is really key when building trust when speaking to customers, but also people in real life too. I want to make sure that we are building the best plan possible for you in your business. So I'll see you in the next lesson. 21. Introduction to Website Branding: Okay, let's get one thing straight. You're not a website designer and you don't want to be unless you are a website designer and you just start a new brand. Which in that case, this could be pretty awkward. But what I'm trying to say is you're an entrepreneur trying to build a brand. You're not focusing on becoming an expert in web design unless you already are an expert in web design, which in that case, just completely ignore everything I've just said. Now, when building a website, there are some things that really matter and there are some things that just don't like. For example, in today's age, you do not need to know how to, to build an incredible website. And building a website is not difficult. It's not hard. What you do need is a digital asset customers can trust when they come to your website so that they feel comfortable buying something. And with that said, we're going to cover all the most important points in this course to make sure that your website is fully branded and a customer can come to your website and feel like you're credible and established. Now by the time you're watching this, you may already have a website or your website may already be branded to some degree. But if you're just starting, then it might be worthwhile checking out our digital presence course, which is part of the five step program to help you build the best brand possible. But whether you end up investing in the digital presence course is completely up to you In this course, I want to make sure you have all the information that you need to make sure that your website can be branded perfectly. And it all starts with using brand colors correctly. 22. Using Colours in Website Design: Have you ever visited a website and just been put off by how it looks? You see it for the first time and it's slow and groggy and just not very nice to use. And you just kind of think, you know, this could be a complete waste of my time. I mean that brand or business could literally offer the best service or product in the world, even though that website doesn't look great. Anyway, when a customer first comes to your website, they need to feel that you are trustworthy and credible. So using color properly is one of the easiest ways to really start to build that credible feel, to make you look established, and to build that trustworthy customer. And the most common mistakes most founders make when it comes to designing their website are using inconsistent colors. Or they pick too many colors, or they apply these colors in the wrong places. So how do you use color properly on your website? Well, if you follow the points that I'm going to go through with you in this lesson, then you'll not only be able to design a website using color properly, but you'll also be able to fix a website which currently isn't using color properly. And the first step is to use your brand's color palette consistently. If you decided to use your color plus tool to create your color palette, then there's a good chance that you already have a really great idea of how to use that color palette as part of your website design. But always remember that the mean color on pretty much 99.5% of websites should always be white. This is going to give your content on your website room to breathe, which is going to make it nice and easy for the customer or visitor of your website to understand and digest all of the information that you need them to. Having too much color on your website is going to distract away from the points of the website that you want to drag your customer's eye to. And it's been proven by various studies that reading white text on a colored background harder and it fatigues the brain faster than reading colored text on a white background. This is a tiny detail which could help you keep your customer's attention longer, which could then eventually result in more seals and profit. Now a great rule to use when using color on your website is the cab rule. Cab standing for court Action, Additional, and base. Now your base color should be something like white, for example, or a super, super light color, or a gray. Now this is going to help the rest of your content to really shine and it's going to help it stand out. Because you don't want to distract people away from where you actually want them to be reading or clicking. Your call to action is your accent color for your brand. This is the accent color that complements your main color best. This color should be used in places such as call to actions, buttons, links, and anywhere else where you really want to drag the user's attention to that particular element. And finally, we have your additional color, which is usually a far darker version of your mean color. This is usually pretty close to black and it's used for your footer and all other standard pieces of content. Now remember, the photography and the graphics on your website are going to make up around 70% of the actual experience for your customer. But don't worry about that just yet. We're going to cover that in a little bit more depth later on in the course. But for now just focus on using the cab rule. And if you're working with the website designer, just make sure that you forward on your color palette to them. And let them know how to use it just in case they're not sure. By giving the designer your color palette, they should be able to create a few variations for you so you can decide which one you like best, unless your website designer does not have a clue what they're doing. And in that case, you may be in trouble and remember the things that you're learning in regards to using your color palette on your website are going to be applicable for your advertising and any other branded elements. Again, we want to make sure that everything is consistent with your brand colors across every single touch point that your customer may engage with. Now you know how to use your brand colors. Let's move on to the next lesson in the course. 23. Website Typeface Mini-Masterclass: Now, the fonts you use in your website should make it super easy for your user to read all the information on your website, but also get where they need to be. But how does a font play such a huge part in the user experience? Well, size really matters. And obviously we're talking about fonts here. But not only size, but also how you use it. At least that's what my wife keeps telling me. Anyway, if you've already found your fonts using the font plus tool, then you should have a pretty good idea on how to use them already. But just in case you need a little bit of extra guidance, you could always go to different websites that you respect or that look good or that you think look good. And then basically see how they use their typefaces and fonts to see the sizes that they use. Or you can just follow the simple steps that I'm going to go through with you in this lesson to make sure that your font sizes are perfect every single time. Now, there are only three different decisions that you need to make when it comes to selecting font sizes and weights. And those decisions are your headline, sub headline, and general content. Now, headline should be the thickest out of the three variations. And also if you're using a separate font for your headline and your general content, then that specific font should only be used for your headline. It should never be used for your subheadlines or your general content. So please keep that in mind. Now, the weight doesn't have to be super, super thick. Don't go overboard, but just make sure that it stands out when in comparison to your subheadlines and your general content for the size. Your headline should be the biggest out of all three. The general sizing for a headline font is going to be 22-30 pixels. So play around between that spectrum and see what you think feels best. Now the beautiful thing is about what I'm going to teach you in this lesson is no matter which number you choose for your headline font, everything else is going to fall into place perfectly so. Do not worry. So once you find the size for your general headline, the next step is to find the font size for your general content. And the easiest way to do that is to divide it by three and then plus two. So for example, if your headline is 30, then you would divide it by three, which gives you ten. And then plus two, which gives you 12. This would be the size of your general content, which I'm sure we're going to all agree looks pretty good. We should charge more for this course. General content weight should be quite thin, although not too thin. Because if it's too thin, then it's going to be unreadable on your website because most people now are actually browsing the Internet on their phones. And finally, your subheadline should be somewhere in between your general content and the size of your headline font. And the best way I like to do it is to basically take my headline font, which is usually around 30, and then take away the size of my general content, which in this case is 12. So that would basically give me 18 for my subheadline font. Now one thing to keep in mind is everything that I'm teaching you in this lesson is all just a guideline. So if you want to go a couple of font sizes higher or a couple lower, it doesn't really matter to stay within that boundary and you should be okay. And once you finish maybe one or two pages of your website, just take a step back and just run your eyes through it. And if it looks good then it probably is also as well. If you feel like the text on your website is kind of a little bit scrunched together and it doesn't quite look like it's as airy as it should be. Then try to adjust the spacing between the lines of your text. The best way to do this is usually to times it by 1.5 So for example, for my headline text, if my headline is 30, I would times it by 1.5 then the spacing between my headline will ultimately be 45 pixels. This is going to give you plenty of space between each line of text to make sure you use it and read it effortlessly. Anyway, that should be pretty much covering everything regarding fonts and ty faces. So I hope you enjoy this lesson and I will see you in the next one. 24. Applying your Logo Perfectly: And so once we have your website's colors and fonts looking good, now it's time to add the icing on the cake. And before you say anything, there is no cake. It's just an analogy. What I'm trying to say is once we add your logo to your website, well, your website is going to look like well, your brand's website. But there are a few things that really need to be done properly to make sure that your website is perfectly branded with your logo. First and foremost, make sure that your logo is not pixelated. Your logo needs to be perfectly clear, so if you're getting your logo designed by somebody else, make sure that they understand that the logo is going to be used on your website and it needs to be perfectly clear at all times. This is super important because if someone comes to your website and your logo is pixelated, then how does that represent your business? It's going to basically suggest that you don't know what you're doing and that you cannot provide an excellent service. So have your logo export in either high quality PNG or SVG format. And then add it to your website and make sure it looks great. Now if your navigation bar is white, then add your logo to the navigation bar using the exact same colors as you will be throughout every single environment that you'll be applying your logo to. However, if your logo is on a transparent background or it's on a colored background, you need to make sure that your logo is all white. In terms of sizing, your logo should be around 250 pixels in width. That should make sure that the logo is big enough, but not too big to take up too much space. Now, make sure that your logo has space to breathe on the top, bottom, and sides. If your navigation bar is too cluttered and there's too many options there, this is going to, first and foremost, make your user confused when they actually visit your website. But secondly, it's also not going to let your logo shine and stand out. We cover how to create the perfect navigation bar within our digital presence course, which is all part of the five part program for building your brand. So feel free to check that out if you want to, but just make sure that your navigation bar feels clean and sophisticated. Delivering the best user experience is always the most important thing when you're building your website. So just make sure that you're not making it a confusing experience for them. And lastly, make sure you're using the full logo for your website. You should not be using the logo with your slogan below. You should just be using the name of your brand, the full mark, which your designer will be able to give you fairly easily. And once your logo is perfectly format, then your website should be looking pretty tasty. Speaking of tasty, I still got some of that Japanese cheesecake in the fridge from last night. Anyway, thank you so much for your time and I will see you in the next lesson. 25. Choosing The Perfect Models for your Brand: Okay, So you're not going to like what I'm about to say to you, but there's nothing I can do about it. Apparently, eating too much cheesecake can make you fat. But another thing that's true is that as customers we like to relate to and connect with people like us. Most humans are sheep and we are gathering data in our brains every single day. And they're making most of our decisions subconsciously. Now, why do you think brands are more than happy to peer millions for celebrities and well known people and beautiful people to represent their products? Now what I'm about to share with you is going to help you to find the perfect models and create the perfect photography for your brand to help you sell more product. And this is a huge opportunity for any brand who understands who their target audience is. And as simple as it sounds, all you need to do is select a person to model for your brand who is a direct representative of your target audience. And this will be able to position your brand in the most desirable way possible. Examples of this can be found in advertisements every single day. Look at adverts from brands that actually know what they're doing, and you'll see that the actual models that are used within those particular advertisements and focused on those particular geographical locations, are the perfect representative of their target audience. And who their target audience desire to be like. Once you see this, you'll never unsee it. And these are some of the small details that most brand owners do not understand and they never know. And it's super important that founders of start ups and ambitious people know this sort of stuff so they can implement it into their own business. So use this to your advantage because people are just more likely to relate and connect with someone if they are from the same background, from the same ethnicity group, or they just have similar interests. So take your time and find the best models to use the similar to me effect for your advantage. Anyway, I'll see you in the next lesson. 26. Perfecting your Brand's Product Photography Style: You could have the best website in the world. But if your product photography doesn't look good, then nobody is going to take your brand seriously. And no one will buy anything. And listen, I understand you don't want to be a photographer. I get that. Maybe you are a photographer, but that's beyond the point. But as a founder who wants to sell a product or service, you need to be able to represent that product in the best way possible. And product photography is one of the best ways to do that. So how do you get good at recognizing good product photography from band product photography? Well, it all starts with a little bit of research. And what if I told you that you could get someone else to do all the research for you? So all you needed to do, just click a few buttons and you could get the best examples of product photography for your particular product, your exact product, easily within a couple of seconds and it's all free. Well, this is all possible with this incredible new tool that I've been using called Google. Yes, you heard me. Google. Now, all of the best brands in your market have already went through tons of iterations in regards to what types of product photography look best. So for example, if we look at some luxury jewelry brands, you will see the same types of images over and over and over again. So if I'm a jewelry company, then I learn from this and this becomes my standard. So I don't need to worry whether my product photography or style is good or not. All I need to do is choose the style that they're using and then use it myself with a little bit of a twist to make sure that it's representative of my branding. Obviously, it's using my product. Now obviously this isn't just copying your competitor's pixel by pixel, but take inspiration from them, because as a founder, you've got 1,000,001 other things to do. So you need to make sure that everything is up to standard as quickly as possible and use this for pretty much every aspect of branding. If you have a brand which you are super passionate about and that you really like, then take inspiration from them. It's not copying, it's just learning from how they're doing things and studying them so you can do things better for your own brand. And this is going to help you to accelerate your journey in Mcgarster brand building. For example, I have a folder dedicated to Apple copyrighting because their copyrighting is just incredible. But the truth is, you can never have enough good ideas. So next we're going to go through your brand guidelines and make sure that every single section is filled out perfectly to make sure that you have everything that you need to move forward and make sure your brand is always consistent. I'll see you soon. 27. Finalising your Brand Expression: So if you've been completing your brand guideline document as you've been going through the course, then you should have something that looks a little bit like this. And this document is going to be super important to making sure that everything about your branding, especially your visual expression, after doing this course is perfectly on point at all times. And once you filled out your brand guidelines, I want to make sure that you've completed everything perfectly. And the best way to do that is to share it as a project on this course. And by doing that, it's going to allow me to take a look at your brand guidelines and make sure you haven't missed anything. And also give you some comments on things that you've done. Right? Obviously your brand expression is super important, otherwise you wouldn't be here. Right? You know that your brand has to look good at all times. But I also said that your brand is a little bit like a jigsaw. So we need to make sure that every single piece of your branch jigsaw is perfect. So we get that overall picture looking great. And your brand expression, which we've covered in this course, is just a few pieces of the jigsaw to get that finished result that we're looking for now. The good news is we've made the process of making every single piece of your branch jigsaw perfect. Super, super easy. And using the Brand Builder Pro program is going to help you get through each stage of the brand building process perfectly so you never have to come back and do things twice. So if you haven't developed a brand strategy yet, I would really recommend going back and taking that course. It's going to help you to communicate so much more effectively with your brand. It's also going to help you to find your brand purpose, your brand vision statement, mission statement, values, and tag line. And also it's going to help you to understand your competition and your target audience better than anybody else on the market. But if you've already completed your brand strategy, the next natural step after completing your brand expression, which is this course, is to develop a digital presence for your brand. This means building a website which is not only going to serve you for the next year or two years, but to serve your brand for the next decade or two so you can grow into your website and look professional and credible over the long term. So I'd love to continue the brand building journey with you with our digital presence course, but either way, it's been an incredible time with you. Thank you so much for your time and I will see you again soon.