Create a Useful Brand Kit in Canva

1. Introduction: Whether you are starting a new business, a blog and social media account, or any other kind of presence online. A brand kit can be a great way to organize your branding materials to ensure that you're making a great impression on your customers or visitors. The purpose of creating a brand kit is twofold. On the one hand, it helps you to visually organize your brand and make decisions about the personality of your project. On the other hand, it's an extremely helpful reference document that you can refer to in the future or share with other people like designers or social media managers if you ever need to hire some help. Canva is a great tool for creating your visual brand kit because it's very easy to use and comes with many of the design elements that you'll need. In this course. We're not only going to create a brand kit step-by-step, but I will share the strategies for making the design decisions in a way that actually creates a useful brand kit instead of just a collection of colors and images you might not know what to do with. By the end of this course, you will have a brand kit that is ready to help guide your business or projects. Next steps, whether that means building a website, designing a social media feed, creating business cards or print materials or whatever else you need to support your ambitions. As a little bonus, you will also receive the Canva template that we will work within this course. You'll find a link to that in the course materials and you'll only need a free Canva account to use it. My name is Rebecca and I'll be instructor for this course. I'm a designer, a business owner, and a writer. And I've created a brand kits for many projects and companies over the years. I'm going to share my best tips with you to help you get great results with DIY skills. So with all that being said, let's head into the course. 2. Elements of a Brand Kit: If you've never seen a brand kit image before, then take a look at this one. A brand kit is usually a single-page PDF with a few key pieces of information on it. At a glance, it will give a visual impression of the brand in question and should leave you with an idea of the general style and attitude of the brand or project. There are four main aspects of a very simple brand kit, a logo and its variations, your brand colors, brand fonts, and the photos that serve as inspiration and examples of the kind of images you want to include in your design work. A brand kit is important because it creates consistency for your project. Anytime you need to create something new, be at a poster or flyer, a product label, maybe a Facebook advertisement or anything like that. You'll be able to reference this document to make sure the design choices are very easy to make and consistent with your overall image. This is important because these visual aspects of your brand set your customer or viewer expectations. If you made a Facebook post that was all dark and moody, but someone visited your website and found it very pastel and cute. They'd either be put off or assume that they went to the wrong place. Brand consistency is key to attracting the right kind of customer or viewer, which is critical to growing any kind of platform. As I mentioned in the introduction, this is also critical if you're working with other people or plan to expand your team in. This document takes the guesswork out of design projects and helps ensure that even if multiple people are creating visual products or content for your brand, it's still all looks related and consistent with all that being said. Let's take a closer look at the brand kit I showed you already. This is a kid that I recently created for a travel blog that I'm starting. All in all this took me about an hour to put together because I took my time making decisions on each of the sections and also designing the logos. They're very simple but effective for my purposes. What kind of impression do you get from this brand kit overall, the design choices here disclose certain things about the brand that I'm creating. The logo is very clean and minimalist, but includes a small graphic detail. The airplane context clues for what this brand is all about. The color palette is all yellows and greens. These colors are associated with creativity and nature, which are accurate keywords for the kind of content that I'm going to be creating. The branch fonts are used in the logo and are very clean, minimalist sans-serif fonts. This style of font is more youthful and modern, which relates to the kind of audience I'm looking to target. And finally, the brand photos are examples of the kind of images I want to include on my website and social media. Notice what they have in common. The general color palette relates to my brand colors. The images, all future greenery, which is something that visually appeals to me. And they are all bright daylight images and focus on scenery or sensory experiences rather than people. These are all aspects that I want to portray in my brand. In the next couple of lessons, we're going to dive deeper into each of these four design aspects to help you make thoughtful choices about your own brand kit. Before we get started, head on down to the course materials and download the PDF that's linked there. When you open the document, it should look like this, and you can click on this link here. It will open up a new page in your web browser that looks like this. That will allow you to open the brand kit template in Canva. If you don't have an account yet, it will prompt you to create one. And you can access this with a totally free account. You can modify this template however you like. The link will make a copy of my template in your account that only you can see in access. As you can see, this template has a lot of placeholders that you will fill in with the content that we come up with in this course. Feel free to adjust it as needed to suit your project. Now let's head into the next lesson and talk about logo design. 3. Logo Design: If your logo is a critical part of your brand, it needs to be recognizable, memorable, and to also represent your mission accurately. Canva is a popular tool for creating DIY logos. Logo design is a very specific design scale and there's a whole lot of strategy that goes into creating a high impact design. I won't presume to teach an entire course on Logo Design here. And you might already have a logo for your brand. Which case, you may want to skim this lesson or skip ahead. But for those of you that don't have a logo yet, Let's talk a little bit about your options. If you're in the market for hiring a designer to create your logo, you'll need to have a budget in mind and your budget will determine the level of experience or designer will have. You can find logo designers on freelance hiring sites like Fiverr or a freelancer, or in Facebook groups offering this kind of service. You'll probably also be able to find local designers, which I think is a great option. Ask around in your business community to see who is behind the local logos that you like. A logo designer might also offer a whole branding kid, in which case you might not need to create your own at all. However, if you're taking this course, you're more likely looking for a DIY approach. Here are a couple of things to keep in mind if it creating your brand logo in Canva, consider whether your project needs a logo that can be trademarked. This means that you register your logo with the appropriate agency in your country to ensure that it can't be reused or ripped off. For some people, this is very important. For example, if you're designing for a brand that intends to have a large market impact or sell products in a big market. However, some people don't find it necessary to worry about trademarking. For example, I have designed brain kits for a handful of my own Etsy shops using Canva and creating logos that can't be trademarked. Because I know I'm only using them to make my store look professional and not planning on taking over the market or the world with these expands, the same goes for blogs and social media accounts that I've created branding kits for. Ultimately, this decision is up to you or whoever owns the brand that you're designing a logo for. What makes a logo in Canada trade markable. It comes down to the graphic assets that you're using. Canvas library of graphics and photos includes millions of assets designed by tons of different designers. Aside from the few basic elements, shapes and lines really, and all the fonts in Canvas collection. You can't actually use anything designed by other people in trademark designs. You also can't trademark any logos made using templates from Canvas logo collection. So the bottom line is that you can create a logo that can be trademarked in Canva, as long as you stick with the basic lines in their fonts, along with any design assets that you import yourself. For example, if you illustrated something on an iPad. But if you're not worried about trademarking, then you can use all the cameras resources as you please. This includes the templates I've linked to Canvas Help page explaining all this in more detail in the course handout if you need further clarification. If you're working in Canada and want to know the availability of a graphic acid that you're using. Here's how you do that. The graphics used in this template are just shapes. We have rectangles and circles here. If I click on them, the only option up in the menu here is to change the color or animate. But if we were to add a graphic acid that was done by designer, we would have some different options available. So let's add one. This big heart icon is obviously not a basic shape and therefore wouldn't be able to be trademarked. But to find out more information about this asset, all we do is go up to this eye icon info once gets selected in the window. And this will give us information about the picture. Here it says that view more by designer candies, That's the designer who made this. And then free means it's available to people who don't have a Canva pro subscription, anyone can use it. However, that doesn't mean that you can use it in InDesign that is trademarked. The type of graphics that you can use for trademarks are circles, squares, lines, and shapes like that. And there's actually a little shortcut you can use when editing in Canva, all you do is tap on these slash key on your keyboard. And it will bring up the magic tab or magic shortcuts. You can scroll through this and see all sorts of different things you can add in quickly in your Canvas design. But note all the different shapes that are here. These are things that are safe for you to use in trademark designs. You can just click on one of them. It will add the shape. You can change the color and the transparency to whatever else you like and use that in your design. Of course, you can always add your own graphics, images or illustrations that you can use as long as you have the rights to use them in a trademark. Now there are three main things that you get to play around with for your logo, the font and text, graphics and the color. All three of these elements should be working together to create an impression of your brand that conveys the right information to your customer. If you're starting from scratch, a good place to begin with is the font in Canvas. You can search through their font catalog using keywords based on theme or style. Think about some of the words that you'd use to describe your brand. Elegant, corporate, funky, playful. Try typing in the keywords to see if there are any fonts that catch your eye. If this is your first time designing a logo, I always recommend starting simple. A black and white logo is really effective for most purposes. You can always make colorful variations or adding a small accent color. Take a look here at the very simple logo that I did for my blog, the creative abroad, I mixed into different fonts here. One. Is clean and minimalist and the other is swooping and playful. These two fonts are a good representation of the tone of my content, practical and informational since I'm working on travel itineraries and tips, and also a little art scene interesting since I'm focusing on travel destinations that relate to art and writing, because this logo is a single color, it's really easy to imagine it printed or displayed in a variety of contexts. As for the graphic element, I added this airplane at the end of the cursive texts to give further indication that this brand is all about travel. By connecting this graphic to the cursive writing, it looks almost like a trail that the plane has flown. All of these visual clues tell the viewer what kind of brand this is, who it's for, and what they can expect to find connected to this logo. The message that it's sending is this is a brand for creative people who like to travel and want to blend those two interests together. Let's take a quick look at some of the local templates in Canvas collection to see other examples. This is Canvas logo template library. And I got here just by going to the camera website and looking under Templates and clicking on logos. Now down if I scroll here, they have a ton of logo designs for you to look through. They even let you search by type. But if you scroll through here, you'll see that there are some that are marked with the little crown and some that don't have that. The crown means that they are pro designs and you need to have a prescription in order to use this template. But you can still use those as inspiration even if you don't have a Pro account. As I scroll through here, there are a couple of specific styles that pop up that I see. Canva templates typically using. These three styles are mainly going to be text with some circle reference or a circle shape, Texts intersecting an image, something like that. Anything in this line, there's going to be text with an image above it. We see that a lot in a lot of the designs. And then there are some that are just text with no image whatsoever. These are just some basic common shapes for logos, especially ones that you'll find designed using a tool like Canva. Because of the level of customization they are able to offer. It's not exactly the same as designing a logo in Adobe Illustrator where you can make everything completely custom to your own liking. You might notice a lot of these logos also have the initials or a couple of letters as the highlight and then the smaller text indicates the name of the brand. So we have that with the Z logo here. We also see it here with n-k and HM. This is an interesting style may be for photographers, hairstylists, a salon, anything like that. Also noticed that most of these designs have maximum two different fonts. And then here we have a cursive font with a name. And then this big M in the word designs are the same font as well. This design, we have probably one font that is done in two different styles. Here we have lots of examples of the illustration above the text. This is where if you wanted to do something like this, you could bring in your own design. Maybe you've licensed it off a site like Creative Market, or directly from an artist, or maybe you've created it yourself. Canvas, a great place where you can pull all those elements together and use their fonts to create your logo, because it's very easy to create variations and to export in variety of formats really quickly. Some of the questions that you'll want to ask yourself about the logo design concept you're working on are, what is my brand all about? What are the feelings and emotions I want to associate with my brand? What visual clues can I use to share my message? What kind of person do I want to attract with my branding? Now, the logo that we've looked at here in our example is what I would call a main logo or into logo. It's not gonna be perfect for every situation, which is why it's a good idea to create some variations on it using the same or similar elements. One important variation is a logo mark. Imagine this like a little stamp. It's usually a circle or a square and contains abbreviated elements of your main logo. Here's the logo mark that I designed for my travel blog. As you can see, I've combined a lot of the same elements in a new arrangement. The letters TCA for the creative abroad are arranged here in the middle using the same font as the word creative. In the main logo. I used a half circle graphic to contain the design and make it feel more enclosed and purposeful. Then I added the little airplane graphic to add further consistency. Let's look at some more examples from Canvas template collection to see logo mark examples. Just went back into Canvas library of logo templates and I just filtered it by circular logos so we can see which might make good logo marks. One of the things that you want to think about is if this logo is very small, would it still be legible? And a lot of these ones who see here are too complicated to get really small and still be noticeable that they are. Now this logo right here with the circle and this one here with DC and are closer to good logo marks. The small font would be possibly not visible in very small contexts, but maybe that's okay. It really depends on how you're intending to use these logos. This logo with the floral image of a woman here could be a great logo mark, especially if you were able to take this text off and maybe your main logo had a variation of this with the same woman image. Again, the same with this logo here. If you took the text off and just use the flower in the circle, maybe enlarged it a little bit. That could be a good complement to a different logo, maybe more horizontal one that had the words but also used either a half circle or maybe the flower in a different context. This circle with an n in it sort of looks like the Netflix and is very practical, Is a logo mark. It would make a great favicon or something you could use as a watermark. However, it is very simple, so you'd want to make sure that you would add something that kind of added a little bit of distinction to it. Circle with a single letter and it could be literally any brand. So you'd want to add something a little bit more characteristic. This is interesting because it has a more interesting font to it and uses a little tiny star icon. Whether it's this first version with the texts that are making the circle or the second version that is just the circle, that would be a good local market. There are three examples here which can be good logo marks. This one is not exactly a circle, but it could fit in a circle and it's a stylized letter. This n again is a single letter, but it does have a bit more personality. It could be tied to a different logo that would be more visually connected. This SD logo is a strategy that I like to use for very simple branding projects, which is just to use the initials of a brand name in cursive font if that fits with the brand, of course, in a circle. Now if your main logo is already a circle or a square, you'll still want to make a logo mark. It should just be a further simplified version. Instead of having full words, try using your initials or making the graphic asset the main focus instead of the text. Logo marks are useful in a variety of contexts. They make a good favicon for your website. They work on Instagram or your Facebook profile images. Or it can make a good watermark for photographs are pretty material intervals. These are places where you don't necessarily want to use your full brand name, whether for size over scale. But you need some visual reference to your business or project. Depending on your skill and confidence level, this part of creating your brand kit can take some time. Don't stress out about getting it right the first time. I'd recommend creating something and then letting it sit for a few days before you work on it again. Sometimes fresh eyes can be the best thing for a difficult design project. You can also ask for feedback from friends or family, but be advised that this can sometimes backfire unless you ask someone with some design, branding or marketing experience, don't let the logo hold you back from making progress on your project. Remember that almost every company you can ever think of has gone through multiple rebranding over the years. It's okay if your first logo is just that. Your first logo. Play with Canvas templates and stick with the principles of simple clear messaging to get you started. And as a last note, I recommend making multiple color ways of your logo. If you're doing a monochrome logo do on that looks good against a light background and one that suits a dark background. This is going to be a lifesaver to have on hand for any future design projects. With all this in mind, let's move on to our next lesson on picking your brand colors. 4. Brand Colors: Your brand colors are an important part of the visual representation of your project, and they convey a lot to your customer or visitor without necessarily realizing it. If you've designed a logo with colors or want to do so that this might be a step you do before the previous one. Decide which aspect of the brand kit you are most drawn towards and start there if you're not sure how to begin. Before we look at some examples, let's talk about color and emotional associations. There are some general principles of what people feel or think when they see certain colors, either independently or when paired with other colors. Let's look at the basic colors first, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, and pink based on the color wheel, these last two should be indigo and violet. But for branding, these two are more common. Red is a color that represents excitement or danger. It's bold, vibrant, loud, and is associated with strong emotions. It's also a color that is associated with good luck. Orange is more youthful and warm. It can be vintage or retro or modern. And Volvo. Yellow is generally a happy color associated with positive emotions and warm weather. It can also be associated with caution, especially when paired with neutrals. Green is a fresh, organic color. It works well for branding that connects with nature, environmental in or a fresh start general, blue is a more cool and professional color in branding, it's used so commonly incorporate design that you could almost call in a neutral, trustworthy, and reliable are two words that you might associate with it. Purple is a color that appeals to very specific niches of brands. It can either come across as very fancy and luxurious or it could be very mystical and spiritual. Lot of this depends on what colors it's paired with. Think purple and gold versus purple and green. Pink is typically given feminine associations and branding, but congenitally appeal to all sorts of tender feelings, love, sensitivity, carrying sensuality. The tone of pink will also make a really big difference. Think hot pink versus baby pink. Black and white are also colors that can convey emotion. White can invoke feelings of calm, blank space, or minimalism. It's literally a blank canvas. Black can be more sophisticated or structural and branding and can evoke feelings of strength or complexity. Both of these work well with other colors and by selecting colors that convey the feelings you want associated with your brand, you can start to pull together an interesting brand palette. Keep in mind that you can also play around with tone pastels versus neon, warm tone versus cool tone. These tone adjustments are what will make your brand colors unique. Now one of my favorite ways to pull together ideas for brand colors is to help them Pinterest and look at the pallets that other people have put together. So let's take a look at how that works, which just opened up Pinterest here in my browser. And this is just my Pinterest homepage. To find color palettes, all you're gonna do is flip to the search bar and type in color palette. These are a bunch of color palettes of people who have put together for various reasons. A lot of them are just for aesthetic purposes. And many of them will be based around a photograph, for example, this one here they've extracted the colors from this photo and have put them down below. This is a good way to try and find inspiration for pictures or palettes that you might want to use. The ones that you'll see on the front page for a search like this, just have color palette are generally going to be trending or popular. Right now. Maybe their style of the colors that are very invoked as season or their pilots like this one I've seen this one for years is populating the particular search term. Some of the pallets like this one here might have hex codes on them. And if they don't, that's okay. I'll show you in a moment how to get the hex codes. If you want to get more specific, let's say that I'm looking for eye color palette with some yellow in it. You can just add that to your search terms. Then it should just show you palettes that have yellow in them or whatever color you search for. These graphics are created by other people or other designers. So you can't take them and just use them for commercial purposes. But you can take the colors from them because colors aren't copyrighted. Let's say that I found this picture here and I really like this color palette and want to use that for my brand. All I'm gonna do is click on it and then right-click and save the image as just to have it on my desktop. In a moment, I'll show you how to extract the colors from this to put them into your brand kit. Sometimes these pallets have hex codes on them, which you can then put into Canada to get your brand colors just right. But you can also import the graphic and extract the colors that way. Interesting to my Canva account here on the brand kit template. I'm just going to click it to add it to the design. We're not going to leave it here permanently, but we're just going to keep it as a reference. What I wanted to do is take these first four colors and put them here. If you want to have more than four brand colors, you just need to duplicate these boxes and add some extras in. First, I'm going to work with this darkest box here. I like to put the colors and ingredients. It's more visually appealing, but you can put them in any order. Click on the box, click on the color here, and this is where you can select the colors that you want to use. Sometimes if you scroll down here, it will identify photos in the design and select the college from it. But that doesn't always work and sometimes it pulls colors not looking for like this, pull the brown from this photo. A more efficient way to do it is to click on this plus sign to add a new color and then go to this icon right here, pick a color from the design. I tap on that, it gives me this tool and I can scroll down and click on this color and it fills the box. You can do that over and over again with each of these different boxes to get all the colors that you want from this design that we found. At this point, I'm done with this image. I'm going to select and delete it, and then I have a brand palette right there. Now I've added the text on top for the hex codes because that's really helpful to get the exact right shade. If someone's looking at this as a reference document to find that I'm just going to click on here, look at the colors again and just click on add new color. You're not going to do that, but the hex code is right here. We need to copy this text. I'm gonna just Command C to copy it. Double-click on this text, and paste it with that extra hashtag. There we go. That's the color-code for this particular color. If you'd found a color palette on Pinterest or somewhere else that you wanted to use that already included the hex code. You can either do it the way I showed you and select the colors or just click on the box, go back to add new color and you can type in or paste the code right here, and it'll do the same thing. Now let's move on to the next lesson to discuss picking fonts for your brand. 5. Brand Fonts: Your brand fonts might seem like a very small detail, but picking these ahead of time can make print and web design a lot easier in the future. Just like your brand colors, you might want to pick out your brand fonts based on what you've used in your logo, or to pick the fonts before you start designing one. No matter what order you choose the men, there are some things that you should consider when picking the fonts to use. First of all, I recommend picking two to three fonts for your brand. In most cases, two works great, but as the three that you might want to consider are a display font, a heading font, and a body copy font. A display font is optional. I only include this one in there in case there is a very unique font that you want to use in your logo probably, which is worth mentioning in your brand kit in case it needs to, it replicated elsewhere. A display font is also usually very decorative. You wouldn't find large pieces of text formatted in this font. You would want to use it very sparingly since these fonts are usually show stoppers. In the case of my blog Brand Kit, the display fonts is the cursive writing font that I used in the word creative. And for the three initials and the logo mark, I've included it for reference on my brand kit sheet, but I wouldn't use this font in much design work at all except for the occasional accent. The other two fonts which are very important are your heading font and your body copy font. These should be fonts that are either similar or look good together and should be extremely readable. These fonts should either be serif or sans-serif. The style that you pick will depend on the kind of vibe that your brand is looking for. The heading font is a little bit self-explanatory. It's the font that you'll use for texts that should grab attention. This might mean that this font is more bold and the other one or has another type of graphical feature that makes your eyes gravitate towards it. The body copy font is going to be your most used easy to read font. Even though this font should be really accessible, that doesn't mean it has to be boring. Consider the context where you're going to be using this font. If you're making branding for a blog or a website than a sans-serif font is going to be the more popular choice for screens. But if you're going to be publishing print books or other physical materials, a serif font tends to be more popular. However, these are not concrete rules and you can definitely break them to suit your brand. Another important point to consider is whether your fonts will show up on the web and across other design tools. Canada has a very big font library that you can choose from. But what if you pick a font there for your brand and discover that you can't find it on your web design tool or in Adobe's font library. In this case, you want to either pick fonts that you can find available widely or pick styles that are generic enough to find similar examples in these other libraries. If you are going to be creating all or most of your designs for your brand in Canada, however, this might not even be an issue. If you are trying to find similar fonts, you can try searching on the website what font is.com, where you can enter the name of the font and it will link you to other ones that are visually similar. In general, I recommend picking simple related fonts for your heading and body copy brand fonts. That way, even if you have to use another website or design tool in the future, you should be able to find something very similar using clean, simple fonts for your heading and body copy also gives your branding and more polished look. So don't be afraid to pick safe options here and don't stress out too much about finding just the right one. Many fonts do in fact look very, very similar in application. When you go into Canada, as we've already seen, you can type in different adjectives to find fonts that they've labeled as such. You can also type in serif or sans-serif fonts that match either of those criteria. I personally like to pick a font with a bold and irregular variation to use as my heading and body copy fonts. That way they are obviously connected visually, but have enough difference to stand out when used together. To put these fonts into your brand kit template. Just highlight the placeholder text and change the font. You can also change the placeholder text to include a tagline for your business or project just to add some flavor to the brand kit design. Now with that being done, the last part of our template we need to fill out are the inspiration photos. Let's take a look at them in the next lesson. 6. Inspiration Photos: Everything in your brand kit is there to provide data. The colors have Hex codes, the fonts have names, and the photos are there to provide visual information. The inspiration photos that you include here should serve as guidelines for your brand and should have particular qualities that you've identified as desirable for the photographs and images that you use or create going forward. For the purpose of this brand kit, you can either use your own photographs or those from the Canvas doc library. These photos are not necessarily meant to be used in your projects or design work, although they can as long as you have the right to use them for your purposes, but rather should be informative for your future visual creations. There are several things that you'll want to consider when picking images for your inspiration lineup. Also, you are welcome to add or remove photos here if you want more or less, I would stick with something between 410 just to ensure that you aren't providing too much or too little data for yourself. First, consider the subject matter. Are your photo is going to be highlighting a product location or people. What sort of objects would be appropriate to see in these photos, you might be developing this guide to help you create social media content or brand photos on your website in the future. What should be in those images? In my example, the subject matter focuses on locations and emotions. We have outdoor spaces as well as a little if cozy indoors. Brand isn't focused on people or particular objects but experiences, and that's what those photos reflect. Next, consider the colors in your photos. Do they align with the brand colors you've already picked? Of course, you don't have to have all your photos in this very strict palette. But there should be at least some general reference to one or two of the brand colors if possible. As you can see in my example, green and yellow are well-represented in these photos, but so are complimentary colors like blue and also brown and gray. Next, consider the tone and lighting of the images. Are they going to be dimly lit? Night photography, vibrant neon's with high saturation, maybe soft romantic filters. This is one of the easiest ways to ensure brand cohesion. It without relying on the same colors or subject in every photo. Is the lighting and tone are the same or similar across your brain images, it's going to look much more intentional. In my example, all of my photos are taken in bright daylight, even the indoor photo. They are all normal to high saturation, meaning the colors are bright and vibrant. Finally, consider the composition of your photos. Unique composition strategy can be one way to create a memorable brand image. For example, if you've ever seen a Wes Anderson movie, you probably see that he loves symmetry in his shots. A strict composition strategy can work well for product-based brands or art projects in particular. For example, having images of a product centered in the middle of the photo every time would be pretty striking. But for most projects like blogs or social media accounts, you're going to mix up the composition between your shots. Instead, consider playing with perspective. This is really important if you're planning on making an impactful social media feed. In particular, a good mix of close-up, medium distance and long distance photographs helped to break up the monotony of a collection of images. In my example, we have two closeups, two middle distance subjects, which is a bench in a bike, and one long distance aerial shot. This variation makes it feel like we're moving around and not static and looking from one perspective only. With these four guidelines in mind, subject color, tone, and lighting and composition, you can select inspiration photos that touch on the breadth of topics that your brand or project will relate to. If, for example, you were starting a makeup channel, you might want product close-ups, macro shots of product application, medium distance images of a person would make a bond and long distance or full body images of a person in an aesthetic setting, perhaps wearing the products in question out in the real world. If you were designing a brand kit for a restaurant, you might want to include close-ups of the texture or a single dish, water shots of the whole dinner table, images of people in the restaurant, maybe behind the scenes, images of the kitchen, or even broader photos of the facility or location. Maybe you're making a brand kit for a writer who wants to build an author platform. Photos of their book, of close them writing or reading. Maybe the books out in the wild oriented bookstore or other images relating to the kind of stories they could all be good ideas. As I mentioned before, the images that you use in the brand kit don't necessarily have to be ones that you've taken yourself. Sometimes stock images are a great choice, especially for new brands or projects, because they can give you perspective of the high level visual goals that you have for your branding. Treat them as aspirational rather than concrete. If that helps you create a better visualization of your branding and the direction that you want to go in the future. Now we've covered the different elements of your brand kit. And in the next lesson we're going to look at using your brand kit in practice. 7. Exporting and Using Your Brand Kit: Now that you've created your brand kit in Canva, you'll want to export it as a PDF and save it to a folder on your desktop dedicated to your projects branding. I recommend saving it as a PDF because this will preserve the quality while producing a file that should be easy to email and reference as needed. Inside that folder that you create on your computer, you should also save all the variations of your logos that you've created. I would recommend having multiple color variations as well as grayscale, solid and transparent backgrounds and both PNG and JPEG versions. All the variations that you create now will save you time if you need them in the future. If you have the files for your brand font downloaded, you can include the files here in case you ever need to send them to a designer or work with them in a new software. Even if you found the font in Canva, try searching for it on Google or use fonts.google.com to see if you can download it for free or for a license fee. Depending on how you're going to be using your fonts and your projects. This might not be totally necessary, but doing this doesn't sure you're checking all the boxes. You can also include the images from your brand photos in your desktop folder as well. If they're meant to just be Style references, that may not be necessary. If you have the photos already or you took them yourself, then you can just drag and drop them into this folder. If not, perhaps you got them from the camera library. I would recommend making a new canvas Document, making each photo a new page in that document, and then exploiting those pages as JPEGs to save on file size. You can then put those photos in the folder to creating a subfolder clearly labeled inspiration images or something along those lines. Labeling everything in your brand kit clearly is really important so that you can easily recall what each graphic is for. And it also helps out anyone who might be accessing it in the future. In terms of the brand colors, something that I like to do depending on the project is to match my brand colors with paint swatches. This is helpful for businesses or projects that have a physical presence like a shot, maybe a booth at an event or market, or any kind of merchandising rack. You could try using a website like encyclopedia.com to put in the hex code from your brand kit to find paint colors. Or you can visit a hardware store near you with your brand kit and look at swatches in-person. This can be a lot of fun depending on the kind of project you need the brand kit for. You can even paint your office or workspace in your brand colors if you're really committed. If you're going to be working with a graphic designer or a web designer in the future. You can give them all the materials you compiled in your brand kit folder. Usually the easiest way to do this is to create a zip folder so you can email them all if you're brand new materials in one single file bundle. To do this on a Mac, you simply right-click on the file on your desktop and click Compress. On a PC, you right-click the folder, select Send to, and then click on compressed. Now a brand kit is different from a media kit, but they can be quite similar. So I'll mention this here. A media kit is a reference sheet and collection of logos, images that you can give to a publication or a media source if they are writing a story about you are featuring you somewhere. Similarly to your brand kit, you could include your logos, colors, and fonts. You'll want to only include images that are taken are licensed specifically for your brand, which may include professional photographs of you or your team. If that's relevant, you'll want to include those photographs along with all the logo variations and your PDF style guide in a zip folder to give to anyone who might want to accurately represent your brand in their publication. Very big companies often include this media kit or branding information right on your website. For example, Instagram has a brand guidance page that allows visitors to download a graphic acid pack and provides detailed instructions on acceptable of their logo and other branding assets. Now this website and guide is very detailed and it provides a lot of legal information which is likely beyond the scope of what you need to create an offer as someone creating a DIY brand kit. However, it is good to note that this is what an advanced version of this process looks like. Now that you have your brand kit finished and prepared, you're ready to start using it for your projects design needs. Whether you're about to start building a website, creating social media graphics in Canva, or designing print materials in Adobe InDesign, your brand kit will be an essential tool going forward to ensure that you're communicating all the right information about your work to your audience. If you enjoyed this course, please consider leaving a review. I read them all and really appreciate a hearing your feedback. I also offer many other courses on design skills, publishing an e-commerce. If you enjoyed learning with me, I'd be happy to meet you again in my other courses. Good luck with your design work and happy creating.