Visionary Branding: A Comprehensive Branding Guide for Creatives

1. Trailer: Hey friends, I'm Nadia Pion and this is my first Skillshare class. I'm coming to you from Cancun, Mexico, even though I'm from Miami, Florida, because I just wrapped up my third creative business retreat with two friends where we focus on authentic branding and growth strategies for creative businesses. Some of my clients have called me their brand therapist, that's how into I am about building brands that feel like who they are, and truly aligns with them from the inside out. During our class together, we're going to be developing just that for your creative business. We're going to work on creating a strategy for your brand foundations, working on your visual identity, and how to bring it altogether. By the end of this class, you'll be walking away with a clear vision for your creative business, a consistent way of telling your visual story, and best of all, your final project will be creating a brand board so you can see everything for your brand in one place. Let's get to it. 2. Introductions & Mindset: To a visionary branding course. My name is Nadia Payan and I'm really excited to take you on this branding journey. In a way that is authentic to who you are, and really showcasing your creativity for your creative business. First things first, who am I? I'm actually an art director, a graphic designer, and a brand strategist. For the past four years, I've had my own business. Before that I actually worked in advertising, working with really huge brands. Fortune 100 companies, doing TV commercials and just fun stuff like that. About four years ago, I left my job and started doing brand strategy for different small and mid-sized businesses. Really focusing on branding with soul. That's really what we're going to be focusing on in this skill share course. I actually totally believe, oh, I'll be checking my screen for some help throughout this course. If you see me look down, don't freak out, it's just part of who I am. One of the things that I did want to tell you all is I do completely believe in the ability to make a living out of your creativity. That's essentially my whole goal with this course. Is for you to find ways to share your story in an authentic way. Grow your business in a way that makes sense for you, and not having you try to be something that you're not. That's visionary branding course. Essentially what this is is I'm taking the process that I would do with my clients, and sharing them all with you. Basically, what's the point of this class? The whole point of this skill share course, is to get you started with a solid foundation for your creative business. When you finish this course, you'll be clear on your core brand pillars, your color palette, the look and feel for your brand, and your tone and voice. As a final step, you'll have created for your own creative business. A brand style guide that you can follow and share with other creatives that you hire as you grow and build your business. Before we get into it, I just want to do a mindset check with you all. This guy that I follow online, his name is Paul Jarvis. He's super inspiring. I took one of his courses and he totally came up with these amazing points, and I want to share them with you. Before you get into this course, one, switch up your thinking. A lot of times people go into the process of branding. There's going to be some things that you've probably learned before. Then some things that are new, for the stuff that's familiar to you, or that you've read and blog posts, or that you've seen on the Internet. Think to yourself, what can I learn from this that's new, instead of I totally already know this. Just make a switch. Tip number 2 for your mindset coming from Paul Jarvis is be open. Be open to trying things that you haven't been before. Be open to experiencing something new. I take all the regular branding process, but I add my own twist to it. Sometimes the process might seem messy, and doesn't always make sense, but I promise it'll make sense at the end. The third thing is do the work. There's no promise of get rich quick in this branding course. A lot of times you hear these like, "Oh, how I reached six figures over a week or overnight or whatever." Branding will get into it a little bit later, but it's totally a long-term strategy for building your business in an authentic way. Do the work. Then mindset check number 4 is feel free to disagree with what I'm telling you. I mean, at the end of the day it is your creative business. I'm sharing with you what I know, and what I've practiced with my clients. Trust your gut, if something doesn't feel quite right, or doesn't feel aligned with your business. Feel free to take what I'm sharing with you all, and flip it on its head in a way that works for you. Number 5 is do things one small step at a time. A lot of times we can think to ourselves and you'll see once we get really into it, there's a lot to go into a brand. It's so much more than just a logo. Just, I'm going to do my best to take you through everything little by little. Then that way you can complete small steps. Eventually by the time we're done with the course, you'll have experience, or you'll have been able to create an entire brand for you. Or for yourself, or for your creative business. 3. Clarifying Your Vision: Now we're going to go into clarifying your vision. For this, one of the best things that I have done with my clients is actually a guided meditation. It comes from this like spiritual business coach that I follow online, her name is Hiro Boga, and she introduced me to this concept that's really, really cool. I was reading one of her articles and something came up and I want to read it out loud to you. She explains that ''Your business essentially has a soul. It's intimately connected with yours, and yet at the same time, separate. It has its own unfolding and pattern, and it's own way of taking shape, and it wants to co-create with you''. What I took from this is, a lot of times, especially as creative people, we get so intertwined with our work because it feels like it's coming from a place from deep within which it is, but it's a little bit different when you're talking about building a business with your creativity. There's what's coming from you, and then there's the business that you're running, and obviously, the two are super related, but at the end of the day they're separate. You can build a lot of different types of creative businesses, and this meditation gets you in touch with that idea that you are not your business, but you are your art. Next up, we're going to be doing our guided meditation for you to get in touch with your business, your creative business, so find a comfortable seated position, maybe on the floor or on a chair. If you're sitting on a chair, make sure both of your feet are grounded on the ground, flat on the floor, and just relax into your chair, or just relax. Start by taking one deep breath through the nose and out through the mouth, one more in through the nose, and now through the mouth, grounding yourself in this present moment. As you take every breath, start noticing different sensations that are coming into your body, into your mind or feeling sensations, so thoughts that are passing through your mind, words that are coming through your thoughts, sounds that you might be picking up, sense that you might be smelling, the taste of the roof of your mouth against your tongue, and the sensation of your clothes against your skin. Just getting into the present moment and taking a moment to invite your business to join you. As we move through this meditation, we are first starting with today, this moment you in your business right here, right now. Noticing what's yours and what your business wants to co-create with you. We'll actually be doing a little bit of, what I like to call time traveling, over the next few minutes. When you're ready, start thinking back, back to one week ago, and one week ago from today, you opened your eyes as you woke up for your day and your head was against the pillow, what was the first thought that you thought of? Waking up. What was a sensation you had when you started your day, where you excited one week ago from today? Nervous, anxious, stressed, or looking forward or joyful or grateful for what's to come? As you move through your day, just start remembering what were your thoughts, what were your sensations, and what came from work that you're doing in your creative business. One week ago from today, you move through the morning with your regular morning routine maybe making breakfast, having coffee or tea, tasting the coffee or tea against your tongue, noticing the thoughts that are coming to you, noticing the feelings that are bubbling up as you remember your life and your business one week ago from today. Moving through the day one week ago from today, you continued on with your morning routine. Maybe you went into your home studio or to an office, your day job while you're starting your side hustle as a creative business owner, whatever that might be, and notice the feelings that you had, or the things that you saw, or the thoughts that you had as you move through your day one week ago from today. Pausing for lunch, what did you eat for lunch one week ago from today? What did you have on your mind? Who did you have lunch with? Was it with yourself or with a colleague, a potential client, someone you just wanted to catch up with on your creative projects? Noticing what comes up as you remember, specifically within your creative business, those are all hints of your business speaking to you. Moving through the rest of your day, one week ago from today, just remembering the sensations, the thoughts, the feelings, and utilizing all your senses, sight, taste, sound, touch, and hearing, what comments did you hear from your friends, from your family, from co-workers, from colleagues, from clients about your work, about your business and about your vision for your creative business? What foods were you ingesting? How are you treating yourself? What kind of self-talk, where you having? One week ago from today and just getting used to this process. One week ago from today remembering, and moving through the rest of your afternoon. As your afternoon continues on and your day starts to come to a close, just take note of your evening rituals to wind down your day as an artist and creative. Or perhaps you may be winding up depending on the type of person that you are, and just noticing the sensations as you either unplug from your work or step into your work, are you feeling satisfied, excited, discontent, at ease, at peace and all of that is just information that's coming to you one week ago from today. As you close your eyes and get ready for bed and your head hits the pillow one week ago from today, notice the sensations in your body. Notice what you may have thought of was the business the last thing you thought of or were you thinking about your next creative project or are the two intertwined, just noticing all of that as you close your eyes one week ago from today, and go to sleep. Now, we're moving forward, inviting your business along six months from today. We're traveling forward in time six months from today. Then that way you can get in touch and co-create with your creative business. You open your eyes and it is six months from this moment into the future. Notice your first thought, your sensation as you open your eyes and your head is against the pillow, and you're in direct contact with your creative business. Notice what you are feeling, what you're thinking, what you're seeing, what you're hearing. Are you in a new space? Are you in a new home? Did you fall asleep in your studio and just wake up there because you've been working so much and you're so excited about your next projects? Just taking note, moving through your morning routine and noticing all the different feelings, all the different thoughts, and engaging all the senses. Notice what is yours and what is your business? Is there a new project that's coming up as you move through your morning six months from today? Are you meeting with clients or you just in the zone in your studio working on your project? Just noticing everything that you're doing six months from today and taking it all in as information that your business is trying to tell you. Moving into your lunchtime six months from today, notice what time of day it is, whether or not you're ravenous because you lost yourself in your work or ravenous because you are stressed or just normal on your regular routine. All of this is information that your businesses trying to tell you. Noticing whether or not you're at peace with a routine or actually anxious and trying to create something new. Moving through your afternoon. Perhaps you're eating lunch with someone, perhaps you're meeting with someone. Perhaps you're seeing a potential client or creating a new project, or perhaps you're just chilling and having a quiet lunch alone with your cat or your dog, or your fish or your bird and or no one. Just being there enjoying your afternoon lunch, taking a break from your creative business, six months from today. All of this isn't just information, don't place any judgment on what you are seeing or feeling or if it's positive or negative, just take it in as information. We're moving towards through our afternoon six months from today. Just noticing what else you're up to. Are you running from place to place? Are you in a really frantic high-energy mode? Are you hunkered down and super focused and working on your work, on your art, on your creative business? Are you taking a break? Are you actually on vacation six months from today because you already launched something and it's done really well. All of this information as you move through your afternoon, taking into sensations, using all of your senses and noticing the thoughts that are moving through your mind. This is all information that your business is trying to tell you. As your day comes to a close, notice how you feel at the end of the day, six months from today. You and your creative business hand-in-hand co-creating, making something interesting together. Are you feeling relaxed, at ease, content? Are you feeling excited because of what's to come and you're brewing new ideas and you're just getting inspiration null download after inspirational download and you can't stop writing and you're burning the midnight oil? Or are you realizing that your business might need to be tweaks because you're feeling stressed or something's just not aligned? All of this is information, six months from today that your business is trying to tell you. As you get into bed and lying down, when you close your eyes and your head hits the pillow. You start moving forward, forward, forward, forward. One year from today. One year from today, you wake up, you open your eyes and notice the first thought that goes through your mind. Is it just something about your business? Is it about your work, your creativity, your artistic endeavors? One year from today and we're just doing the same exercise moving through your morning one year from today, engaging all the senses. What are some of the thoughts that are coming to mind? What are some of the sensations that your feeling? Are you feeling fulfilled, at ease, content? Are you excited to get to your next meeting or about the new project that you're working on, or you just enjoying the fruits of your labor for the past year because you've launched new things or you've tried something new and they've been a success. Or they've been a failure, or what I like to call, you know, a learning experience? You're perhaps figuring out how to make changes to that now, one year from today. Notice what's different about your business and your creative work one year from today. Perhaps your lunch now, one year from today, is all about meeting with a team that you've been growing. Or perhaps you've made an intentional decision to stay a solopreneur or micro-business, a freelance artist, or a freelance creative. All of that is just information not placing any judgment on it. Just noticing one year from today, what you are picking up. Noticing what you're having for lunch, your diet change, or did you go for something different? Are you celebrating? Are you getting more regimented and into a routine? All of this happening one year from today. All of this being your creative business, trying to give you information about where the two of you should go as a creative. Moving through your afternoon one year from today and taking note of who you're seeing, who you're talking to, the thoughts that are running through your mind, the words that are coming out of your mouth. All of this is great information one year from today, what is happening as you move through your day. As your day starts to wind down one year from today, notice what else you're doing that might be the same or might be different, one year from today. How are things changing or how have things changed between you and your business, your art, your creations, and your own inner self? Are you feeling more like you're getting paid to be you? Are you feeling like you're still well on your way to that place? As your eyes close at the end of your day one year from today and your head hits the pillow. Just taking one more deep breath and slowly bringing yourself back to the present moment. Whenever you're ready, feel free to open your eyes. I highly recommend grabbing a sheet of paper or a pen, or even your iPhone if you're a verbal processor and burst out those voice memos and take a recording and just take note of everything that you and your business have just gone through over the course of the next year. It's all information. It might not happen exactly the way you're seeing it, but it does give you a better idea of what's yours and what's your creation and what your business is wanting to become. 4. Your Unique Vibration: [MUSIC]. So let's get into talking about your unique vibration. Chances are you are exploring different techniques or different parts of your creative craft, your trade, whether that's painting or writing, or graphic design, photography, videography, whatever, and a lot of what people often overlook when they're talking about the branding is what they uniquely bring to the table just by being themselves. So your unique vibration is us starting to explore that concept. Before we get started, I have a little worksheet for you. You should be able to download it and print it out. It should say 'The Overlap' on the top, but go ahead and grab that and then we'll get to use it as we move along with this lesson. First off, your passions. When we're talking about your unique vibration, the first thing that comes into play is what are you passionate about? Just take some time and write out what they are. This can be both personal and professional. So it's not just, "I'm passionate about painting because I'm a painter or I'm passionate about abstract art or whatever," but also other things that you might not really think about when you're thinking about your creative business. So for example, one of my passions is cooking and I'm a Graphic Designer by trade, but I totally love to cook and I like to get into it and we'll go into more of my examples later, but that's just for you to start thinking about it. So how do you identify your passions? First off, what do you really love? What do you do without anyone having to tell you to do it, or no reminders? What fires you up every single day? So that's a great way to figure out what you're passionate about and then another question you can ask yourself is: What do you get lost in? So what are some things that when you do them, you go into that state of flow? For a lot of creatives, it is like their actual creative craft but there might be other things too. For example, one of them for me is, I'm actually a classically trained Violinist and I forget about it, but then whenever I get to jam out with other musicians, even though that's not having anything to do with my business, I get lost in music, and so that's where I find some flow. Next up is, what are you curious about? So start writing down maybe lists of different types of things that you've just like wondered, I wish I could learn more about it. Maybe pottery, or a subject matter, or maybe you're really into physics, or science and don't get too deep into it, but just any subject that you wish that you can learn more about. The last one is: What did you do when you were little because clearly, little kids are like the truest forms of themselves. There's no lies. They're just themselves all the time, even when they're trying to fake it. So when you think back to what you used to do as a little kid, that's probably stuff that you were really passionate about and really into. Trust that. So skills are something that you've taken the time to learn and are working towards mastery on. Basically it's things that you've spent time and energy to develop those skills over time, whether in traditional ways like going to school or studying it or non-traditional ways just through sheer- I can't remember who the author was, but this concept of clocking in 10,000 hours, you might not need to go to school for something, but if you've clocked into time, chances are you've developed that skill. So let's talk about how to identify your skills. Here's some questions to help you figure out what are the skills and we'll get there but there might be some things in common hence why this little sheet of paper over here has an overlap section. So back to the skills. What are you good at? What are people constantly coming back to you to find out more about? What have you been taking time to learn throughout the course of your life, either socially, professionally or personally. I know someone who's really into the Enneagram and they know all about it and people are always asking her to tell them more about what she thinks they are in the Enneagram, even though she's completely a painter and her job has nothing to do with the Enneagram. It's just something that she's taken the time to learn personally. So any kind of skill. It might not be something that you've done in an office. It might be just something that you've taken the time to get really good at. Also, what do people praise you for? This is a great question if you've ever worked in a group setting or a team setting. People can't help themselves. At some point, you've probably got a compliment from one of your teammates, or a boss, or someone that was on your team that you were their boss and they're like, "My gosh, you're like so good at blink," or it could be listening. It can be holding space. It could be your actual craft like, "My gosh! You're so good at design," or "You're so good at painting," Actually, when I was working in advertising, the thing that I was really good at was any type of commercials that might make someone cry but more because they felt touched with their heart, like the sarcasm stuff I was not very good at, but people would come to me if a client wanted heartstrings basically. So think about all the different places, organizations that you're a part of, past jobs, groups that you're a part of, friends, and going back and just taking note of what people would come to you and say, you're really good at this. Those are skills. Another question is, what do you do effortlessly? So some skills, they basically don't need much for you to get into. You can just naturally have them. If you think of someone who has like a really good huger, I don't know if they've really developed that skill, but it is a skill that people appreciate, or a really good listener. Just things that come to you naturally and easily or an analytical thinker. These are all things that might just be in your nature that are skills that you have. The last question you can ask yourself is, what do people specifically come to you for? So this can just be people in general in your life. Maybe you're getting client work like clients are coming to you for this specific thing or the specific skill. I know with my business, doing branding and design, I developed a niche for myself where clients specifically came to me for essentially branding with soul, so then that way it was really authentic instead of some fake superficial authenticity. So we're going to go over the worksheet that you have about the overlap. First, you can see that there's two circles. One is your passions and one is your skills and of course in the middle, there's the overlap. It's pretty self-explanatory. I actually started filling it out as myself and you can start seeing some of my passions and some of my skills that are popping up on the screen. Some of my passions are like personal growth, social justice, making stuff, people, art, creativity, travel, music, plants, and cultures. Some of my skills that you also saw popping up are things like graphic design, guard direction, branding, violin, seeing people's magic, being able to hold a broad vision like big picture thinking, life advice, teaching, storytelling, and the language, French. Once you have that clear on your own worksheet like, what are your passions and what are your skills, then the next step is actually taking that and making a little list of where you wrote things twice, because that's the overlap. For me, I realized it's not a lot of science here, so it doesn't have to be perfect, but maybe you have something under skills that you realize, "I'm also passionate about that." Put it in the overlap. So for me, you're seeing it pop up on the screen. I've got seeing people's magic, people in general, I love people, personal growth, making things, graphic design, social justice, branding, holding a broad vision, big picture thinking, teaching and art direction and that's where the overlap is for me. So once you're clear on your overlap like this overlap section of your worksheet, then that's when magic can happen. When you look over your overlap, you can start seeing ideas for different services packages, programs, just new offerings for your creative business. Because once you start combining those things, that is your unique vibration, your magical powers, your skills, and tying it back into your creative business. It's really cool. So on the worksheet, you have a space to be able to look over your two circles and then write down like three business ideas that you can get just from looking at where your overlap is. So just to overview your passions are what you love doing, no matter what. Your skills are, things that you've learned over time or have developed or refined, either traditionally or non traditionally and your unique vibration essentially exists in the overlap of those two things. The overlap of your passions and your skills and once you're clear on what that is, you get clear on your magic, essentially. This becomes a really important marketing differentiator and you can start coming up with ideas of something that only you can come up with. Once you're clear on the overlap, different ideas for programs may be a new concept for your art, or a new direction, or a new offering for clients, or just something new for your business. That's the power of overlap of your passion things. Yes. [MUSIC] 5. What Is Branding?: What is branding exactly? A lot of times, without meaning to you, there are basically three stages of branding. Stage 1, getting completely overwhelmed, you just sit there and you're, there's so many things to do with my brand. There's so many components, I can't even imagine, so you just get overwhelmed. Stage 2 is self-doubt. That moment when you are could it really be me. Some people know this as imposter syndrome. Where they're just everything that I'm making and everything that I'm doing must be wrong. Welcome to stage 2 of branding. Stage 3 is paralysis. Paralysis is when you completely freeze up and you give up and nothing happens. I'm joking, obviously there's a lot more to branding than that, but I just wanted to say what we all know to be true. We all go through those stages, just try to get through it and we can go into what branding really is about. A lot of times people think to themselves that branding is design. Design is one component that makes up a brand, but it is not the whole brand. Now that we've got that cleared out of the way, what is branding exactly? I actually have this definition written by marketing guru, marketing author named Seth Godin that I absolutely love. Seth says, we're on first-name basis like that. Seth that says, " A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories, and relationships that when taken together, account for consumers decision to choose one product or service over another. Now I'm going to read that one more time, just hope it lands because this is really important stuff. Seth's definition of branding is a brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories, and relationships that when taken together, account for consumers decision to choose one product or service over another. Super powerful stuff, essentially to me, what this means is a brand is what makes up the experience of your product or service. It's not just the design or the color palette, and we'll talk about those things. It's about the experience that you're creating for someone with your product or with your service. Let's break it down some more. Expectations, all the things that make up a brand. So expectations, stories, memories and relationships. Expectations are what people believe they will get when they buy your service or your product. The stories are anything from a brand's origins story to how they define their company culture, to stories that you tell your customer or your client that makes them feel connected to your brand, that's stories. Then memories, you are already exposed to certain brands like maybe growing up as a kid or you've just interacted with a certain brand a few times. Basically your memories evoke a sense of nostalgia or a feeling of familiarity, or reassurance. That is a brand with memories like someone having memories tied to a brand. Then relationships, relationships are for example, a brand that you like collaborates with a celebrity that you love then you start relating that brand with that celebrity. That's what it means to have the experience of a brand in terms of the relationship. Again, all of these components, the expectations, the stories, the memories, and the relationships, they all basically make up the experience that you have of that brand. What does branding get you? Because we're all doing this in order to grow our creative businesses. Some of the things that branding gets you is more clients or more customers, more time, because without branding, your have to do all the leg work for selling yourself. Once you have branding in place, your brand does a lot of that communication to potential clients and customers for you. It's almost like having an extra sales person on your team. When you're a team of one, that's really important. Also some more clients, more time, more money, which is part of living a creative life hopefully is having a flourishing creative business and more energy. Again, having a well oiled machine that is your brand, only allows people not to have to reach out to you every single time they want to get to know you, but just be able to feel you essentially or understand what your business is about without having direct contact with you, and that saves you energy. Why does branding work? It's actually a branding equation that I'm going to share with you all now and it's not very complicated. I'm not introducing advanced mathematics into this course, but essentially branding does work like math. Branding allows for consistency and authenticity to come through. When those two things come together, they lead to legitimacy and purchase. As people see you show up in a consistent manner, always showing up in a certain way, and in a way that is true to you, they begin to trust you over time, they begin to realize that you're in it for the long haul, you're not just in business one day and out the next. As they trust you and they feel that you're more legitimate, they feel comfortable, it takes away the risk that they would feel if they didn't feel that comfortable with you. It takes away the risk and it basically leads to them purchasing with you either a service that you have or an art piece that you have, or it could be anything from like a product to a high-end service, it's always the same. Consistency and authenticity lead to legitimacy and purchase. Branding is really a long-term growth strategy, it's not something that is going to change your entire business in the next 24 hours. It takes time to be able to build yourself into your brand and have a clear brand and build that legitimacy with folks who are interacting with your brand. It takes time to create an experience, the takeaways for this lesson. One, a brand is made up of expectations, memories, stories, and relationships. The combination of all of these things are what create a consistent experience for someone with your product or your service that is what branding is all about. To hit the nail on the head again, branding is about creating an experience and just to reiterate designers and essential part of that experience. But it is not the only part of what makes up a brand. Branding is important because it leads to more clients, more time, more money, and more energy. Finally, consistency and authenticity lead to legitimacy and trust. People learn to trust you as they realize that you're in it for the long haul. You're not looking to have a business one day and quit the next, you're really trying to build on something and create something real. That's when folks go from someone who is just kind of eyeing you to someone who is buying from you. 6. Your Brand Pillars: Now, we are getting in to my favorite part of the whole branding process, which is your brand pillars. Your brand pillars are the core values on which you are building your brand. I'm going to say that one more time. It's the core values of your brand, of your creative business, and this is the foundation of everything that you're building from here. The way that I approach brand pillars, a lot of other companies might just put out some words that they think feel nice, but the way that I do it, especially when you're talking about a creative business, is making sure that the values are coming from within you. That they're actually values that you carry as an artist, as a creative who happens to be running a creative business. Hopefully, you have this worksheet printed out. At the top it says, "Your brand pillars," and we're going to go through the exercise of unearthing your brand pillars together. One of the first things that you see on your worksheet is a word bank and what I'd like for you to do is these words are all like feeling words that have values tied to them. I'd love for you to look through them and circle the ones that really feel like they're part of your non-negotiable values in life. These are things that you totally stand for, that you care about, like this is you. This is what you are about. Some of the words on here are like joy, honesty, faith, entrepreneurial, wisdom, rebellion, respect, inclusiveness, and there's a whole lot more. Just take some time. The way that I do it is first, you'll circle everything that feels good to you, and then you want to whittle it down, you want to start bringing it back to 3, 4, or 5 core words that will be your brand pillars. These are your 3-5 values that you would take a bullet for them, it's the most important stuff. Sometimes people get a little stuck here because they're like, "So many of these are good for me. So many of these are who I am." Here's what I have to say about that. We're not talking about all of the ones that make up who you are, we are talking about the most important ones. Be very in touch with who you are, your inner self as you start looking through the ones that you circled and choosing your top 3-5. It's going to make all the difference. Now that you have your 3-5 words that you've narrowed down, look over them and know that you've just unearth your brand pillars. These 3-5 values are the foundation on which you are building your brand. If something feels off than obviously circle back and see which word makes more sense for you, but ultimately, this is it. Congratulations. Next up we're going to go over some examples of different brand pillars for a couple of different bigger companies so you can get a better sense of how it all works. The example that I wanted to share with you-all is Apple. We all know about Apple. Just take a moment and think to yourself, what are some words that you can think of that probably Apple holds to be a value or a brand pillar of their brand. For me, some of the ones that come up what I think about Apple are: innovation, progress, and simplicity. It seems like everything that they're creating are with these three things in mind. The next example that I have for you is a clothing brand called Patagonia. Patagonia is a clothing brand that's like for adventure seekers and they do a lot of like outerwear and they also I think they do like a lot of sustainability stuff too, so the materials come from recycled materials to be able to make their clothing and it's very interesting. Even just hearing about Patagonia, I hope that you can start piecing together some of their brand pillars. For me, three of their brand pillars would be sustainability, adventure, and connection. Connection to the planet, connection to the earth, connection to living in unity with everything, even though they are clothing brand, which normally you wouldn't think that that would be part of their whole thing. That's Patagonia and their brand pillars. Now that we've gone through those two examples of Apple and Patagonia, check out the next page in your worksheet. Actually it's the next two pages. The next two pages. There's room on this page to answer a couple questions for each one of your brand pillars that you've justifying for yourself. One is, what does this word mean to me? The other one is why is it important to me? Now, when you're going into these questions and filling out this worksheet, really go deep. When I say, what does this word mean to me? I don't mean the definition that you can find that the dictionary. Say, for example, if one of your words is freedom, try not to come up with the definition that you would read in the dictionary. Instead, come up with why it's so important to you? Oh my goodness I feel like I'm repeating myself, but what does it mean to you? Maybe freedom to you means the ability to do whatever you want, whenever you want. Maybe freedom to you means being financially stable and knowing that all your bills are taken care of and that you're making money while you sleep and that is freedom for you. Maybe freedom for you is having a super flexible schedule so then that way you can do your creative work and have your creative business, but also have time for your loved ones. Maybe freedom for you means something entirely different, that is just your own. All of them are right answers. There's no way to get these questions wrong. The more specific that you can get, I've had people even fill this out and include stories that they had in their lives, and it changes everything. Even if you have a specific story, just write down a note. You don't have to write down the whole story, but just write enough for you to remember. Like when I was little and I was on a swing and I would go and then when I would jump off and land on the grass, that moment where I was in the air, that's what freedom means to me. Then do the exact same process for why is it important to me? Why is it important to me can go back to your personal feelings and thoughts around that word, like maybe to go on the swing example, maybe you had a tough childhood and freedom ended up being important to you because that split second when you were just going through the air just made you feel alive and so maybe freedom is important to you because it makes you feel alive. Again, there's no wrong way to answer this at all. They're all right answers. I cannot express this enough. If you were to take it up another notch, here's a little secret question that you can answer on this forum or on another sheet of paper to take your answers to an even deeper level. That question that you can answer is, why is it important to the world at large? The reason why this makes it super juicy is because once you get clear on that, to use the freedom example again, now we know what it means to you, now we know why it's important to you. You had a tough childhood upbringing with this person that I've just made up and that moment of weightlessness was when you felt the most free. Then why is that important to the world at large? Maybe you can find ways to lessen the weights that people feel in their everyday life. Suddenly we're taking this very micro example, this very small story that could play a role in your brand that's aligned with your brand pillars, and tying it back to all the people on the planet that can totally relate to you. This is so powerful to be able to build connection between your brand, what you represent, and what you have at your core, and the people on the other side of your screen, your potential clients or potential customers. Knowing kind of those three levels. What does this word mean to me? Why is it important to me? Then why is it important to the world at large if you want to go super A++. That's how you start adding depth to your brand pillars and understanding how they can start showing up and play a role in your business. We'll get more to that in a moment. Now that we've gotten our definitions and why things are important to us and our values written out, we're going to add a whole other layer, I'm really into layers, around your brand pillars. So we're going to give your brand pillars weight. We're going to use this worksheet that should be with all the other brand pillar worksheets. This one's called giving your brand pillars weight. You've got this nice big blank circle, and here's the thing. Yes, we've just narrowed down your values to three to five non-negotiable words that you've just added all this meaning to. But I'd like to even see us get deeper. What that means is you'll be taking those three to five words and giving them different values. Here's an example. Actually, I've got more examples on the slide for you to check out. Sometimes, say for example, I know, I can tell you about a past client of mine. I had a musician client who was a rapper or he still is. With him there was certain types of values that lined up really well with his music. He had values like discipline, values like focus, and that worked really well with his persona as a wrapper in the music that he was making. The other thing he had in his brand pillars was the value of family because he's a dad of two children and he does everything for his kids. That being said, here's where you end up co-collaborating and co-creating with your creative business. Where what you want to do is see whether or not certain values will take up more room in your business than other ones. In the example of this rapper, family made it to his top words. Everything that is in your brand values are the most important things for you and we're not questioning that in any way. But because of the type of music he was making and because of the type of rap that he was doing, family ended up being a smaller piece of his pie, and discipline and focus were much bigger pieces of his pie. That's where you can start seeing the nuances. This is kind of grounding it in your creative business versus something else. Take a moment and actually I'm going to show you some examples. Here on the screen you can see some examples of different clients that I've had over the years and what their values were, and how they decided to split it up for their businesses. I'm hoping that you can see that there's no wrong answer. Some of them have equal parts. One of them even had the word simplicity all around, encompassing all of the other values that they had. There's just no wrong way to do this. It's all based on you and how you feel about your brand pillars in your brand values. Always remember your meaning and your experiences around your brand values are how you create a really unique brand, a really authentic brand, because it's actually coming from inside you. It's not coming from some textbook about how to brand your business or how to be an artist business or whatever. It's coming from you, and that is the best differentiator that you can ever have for any brand. Trust me, when I say, it's what the big companies wish they could do. What you've naturally got, which is being able to tap into yourself, tap into your inner self, pull out those core values and use them as a foundation for your brand. Let's go over the takeaways for this lesson. One, your brand pillars are rooted in your values. As business founders, we actually can't help it. We end up infusing our businesses with our values, whether we're aware of it or not. This is actually just us going through the process of harnessing that and making it more intentional, because it's going to happen anyway. This way we're aware of what's happening and we're working towards it. The next takeaway is defining your pillars to unearth your own uniqueness. It's in those definitions and in the experiences that you wrote down in your worksheet that really creates ways for you to message your brand. We'll go into more details around that later, but just trust me when I say this is how you create a brand that no one can imitate, it's so powerful. Another takeaway is, you can add another layer of uniqueness by understanding the weights of your brand pillars. So that was that pie chart that we did together. That just starts to let you know, even like how I'm going to talk more about this value or I'm going to try and see how this value A can show up more in my business than value B because it's actually a bigger piece of my pie. Then the last takeaway is, your pillars are your magic. There's no other way to put it. It's the secret ingredient in the recipe that is your brand. Let them shine through everything that you do. It will be appreciated, and we'll get into more about how it will help you find the right clients and customers later when we go into target market. But just trust me when I say it really does. The people who come across your brand and fall in love with it will really become loyal to you and those who come across it and don't feel it will just fall away, and that's going to save you so much time and energy. It's a really powerful tool to build a business around your brand pillars. 7. Finding Purpose In Your Brand: We are going into finding purpose in your brand. There's another lovely worksheet for you, with a few pages actually, that you'll be using for this lesson. At the topic says finding purpose for your present or in your brand so pretty self-explanatory. Let's go into it. There are basically two ways to influence human behavior, you can either manipulate it, craft something, make something happen super sneakily, or you can inspire it. I'm guessing that if you're taking this whole course around branding, coming from a place that's true to you, that's super authentic, chances are you want to inspire someone to take a certain behavior. Purpose can feel like this over the top, overwhelming thing that you've got to figure out and there's just a lot of buzz words around purpose right now and sometimes it can feel a little overwhelming. But for most of us, starting our business, especially a creative business, there's something within us and we've already talked about it in past lessons around you being in this co-creative relationship with your business. There's something in us that just wants to make the business happen. Your creativity could be a hobby really easily, but you're choosing to brand it, to grow it, to turn it into a creative business. For a lot of us, it's stemming from this desire to create some type of impact or to live out what I'm going to call our purpose, our why. Your purpose is your why. It's that simple, not this over complicated formula or anything like that, your purpose is your why. There's this guy, his name is Simon Sinek, he has an amazing TED talk all about finding your why. Please watch it if you're able to, it's on YouTube, it's excellent. One of the things that he says in that TED talk is, 'People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it. And what you do is simply proving what you believe.' I'm going to say that one more time, people don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it. And what you do simply proves what you believe. I think this is genius. Why do you do what do you do? Seriously though, part of this exercise is about uncovering your why. When you look at your worksheet, you're going to see different questions like, why did you start this business? What do you feel called to bring into the world? What do you believe about the world that is leading to creating this business? Then just simply why do you do what you do? You might find that you're repeating certain things, definitely do all the exercises and then look over your answers to see what commonalities are coming up. That's going to be super key, and the things that are repeating, that's your answer, that's your why. I'm actually going to circle back to a painter friend of mine again, who is a watercolor artist. When she starts thinking through why it is that she paints all the time and why it is that she decided to build an art business, what comes through every single time and every conversation is that, it brings her immense amounts of joy to paint. That's not true for everyone, some folks might end up with a piece of paper and some paint in their hand and be like, whoa, what are these? But for her, it's like an act of pure joy. Joy is her why, which means joy is her purpose, and as long as she's able to link her painting, her joy, as her purpose in her brand, people will pick that up and feel how real it is and that is so powerful. That's the power of your why. 8. Your Mission Statement: Let's now go into your mission statement. Exhibit A, a beautiful worksheet, that is also called finding purpose in your brand, and at the top it says your mission statement. We're going to go over this right now. Your mission statement is essentially a declaration of your why to the world. It's very, very simple. It's super easy, promise. I created this worksheet and you can just complete and fill in the blank. I made it as simple as possible. On the worksheet, there's, I love blank, I believe blank, I am committed to blank, and I want to create a world that blank. This is just to get the ideas flowing in your brain about where you can create a mission statement for your business. But honestly, as you fill it out, now that you know your pillars and now that you know your "why", it becomes really powerful and any one of those answers could become a mission statement. The one that I'll let you know most people like to pick the most is, I want to create a world.blank. I want to create a world. In the example of my friend who's a painter, a watercolor artist, she might say, I want to create a world that experiences joy through painting. That sentence could become super easily like a headline on her website, a part of her social media bio, or even just something that she says over and over again as she interacts with her clients and her customers. You can feel. For her, it's super authentic to who she is and it's such a powerful and simple statement. That is how a mission statement should work. I created room at the bottom of your worksheets so then that way, you can just take what you wrote on top and make some drafts. Essentially, you're just combining, mixing and matching, chopping it up to create your mission statement, or maybe it already exists in one of those fill in the blanks. 9. Getting Clear On Who You Serve: Okay, now we're going to go into getting clear on who you serve. Understanding exactly who your clients and customers are and what motivates them is going to make a world of a difference in your business, it changes everything. When you're clear on who you serve, which is, by the way, in marketing terms, it's your target market. I never want a target to be or a market to be a target. But yeah, so I call them the people that you serve because they're humans. But basically when you're clear on who you serve, when you're clear on your target market, you're able to help them, love up on them and communicate with them directly through your creative business. So your target market, the people that you serve, this community of folks, they are made up of the people that you actually want to connect with. The only exception to this could be if who you want to connect with is children, in which case, you may want to look at their parents. Because the children are probably not making purchasing decisions on their own, but they will have a heavy influence on the parents who are making the purchasing decisions. So that's just a little nuance I want to throw in there. But essentially, whoever you feel like you should be serving, that is your target market. A lot of times when people first start out, they come to me and they say, "Oh my gosh, I want to serve everyone, like everyone is my target market. I can make a difference for everybody." I just say, "I just need to make a sale. So honestly, anyone could by my prints, anyone could buy my shirt, anyone could buy my photos. I just need to get it started." That's probably one of the worst things that you could do for your business, is thinking that you're going to serve everyone because you can't be everything to everybody, nor do you want to be. So what I want you to do is get clear on one person, one single person. That is your dreamiest clients, you're dreamiest customer and focus in on what you want to tell that one person because I promise that there's a whole sea of people that kind of fit the bill of that one dream person and ultimately, when you're trying to talk to everyone, it gets really confusing. And the fact of the matter is the confused customer just doesn't buy. So you might think in talking to everybody, that you'll reach more people and therefore, you'll see better numbers in terms of your sales or your products or your services or whatever it is that you're creating with your business. But all you'll actually be doing is confusing people and if you've ever been at the grocery store looking at an aisle and there's a million jams or a million options, a lot of times you might not even grab one, you might just walk away and that's what happens when you're thinking that you should sell to everybody. So get clear on your one-person. Here's the thing, the risk that you run is that if you're talking to everyone, your dream client, the person who totally loves your brand pillars, loves your work, loves what you're about and aligns with your why, and that would bring you so much satisfaction and so much joy to serve, they might just walk on by not even noticing that you're there because you're talking to everyone. When you write to a single person, that person feels singled out, that person feels like this service or this product that you've created, this painting, this photo, this book that you wrote was made just for them and I hope you've experienced that in your own life when you've bought something and your just like, "This is so special to me." That's what you're creating when you get clear on who your dreamiest client is, your dreamiest customer is and taking the time to write just to them. Key takeaways for this lesson, knowing your target market, knowing who you serve is a game changer for your creative business. It gets you so clear and knowing them doesn't mean targeting them, it means loving them. It means creating things just for them. It means making them feel special and who doesn't want to be on the other side of that equation? I know I do. Okay, the second point is a confused buyer doesn't buy. When you're talking to everyone, you are talking to no one and that means that there's probably your dream clients that are just walking right by your services or your products not even noticing that you're there and we really don't want that. That's the whole point of this class. 10. Defining Your Target Market: Now we're going to go into defining your target market, and what you're going to want to look for is this worksheet that says your target market. Another one that we're going to get into later on is called Real Humans, and the last one we're going to get into is called creating your muses. I believe all of them are under this category that says, "Who you serve at the top". Look for those and get those ready for this lesson. Let's get into it, your target market. When you are thinking about the people that you serve, you want to really deeply understand them. This means really this is your community, these are your people, you're here to do work for them. We're going to go through different questions that you can ask yourself to define around who they are. Some of the questions are, who are they? Think about like their age, their gender, their family life, their hobbies, their friends, their have any if they're a loner. All that type of stuff, what they like to do for fun? One question I'd like to ask my clients is, for your target market, what did they do on a Tuesday night? Are they out drinking at a bar, happy hour? Are they home playing solitaire? Are they spent playing with their kids? All of this is good information. Another question that you'll ask yourself is, where do they live? It doesn't have to be like, oh, they live in Austin, Texas or where I'm filming this right now in Cancun, Mexico. It doesn't have to be that specific. Instead, think about, do they live in a large urban area or a small city or a village somewhere and get into where they reside in that way. Another question you can ask yourself is, how did they dress? What accessories do they wear? Actually, on the target market worksheet, I included these little characters here. It says draw here, and if you're more of a visual thinker, you can either write it out or you can literally draw their alphabets on here, it's pretty great. Also ask yourself, what do they believe in? What job do they have? How much do they make at that job? Are they satisfied with that job or the yearning for something else? A few more questions that you can ask yourself are, What did they love to buy? How did they love to buy it? What did they just genuinely enjoyed doing? Like one of the things that they just really enjoy it, do they enjoy a good meal? Are they a foodie? Do they enjoy quiet time and their own, that thing? You can also ask yourself, what social media platforms are they on? This one's really key, everyone, because if you know where they like to hang out on social media, you also know where your business needs to hang out on social media. Catch my drift. Then finally, what do they invest in? Like, when you understand where they're spending their cold hard earned cash, and you understand why they invest in these certain things, that is a great opportunity for you to see where your business can fold into that in a natural way. Someone who really values or it might be an art collector and that's what they invest in is, they might spend thousands and thousands of $ to have their private collection. Someone who values travel might live in a tiny, apartment, but they choose to invest in flying around the world and first-class because they really want that experience. It's just interesting to play with that idea, and all of these to come up with a profile of who your target market is. The next question for you is, do you know your target market in real life? Chances are you do. That's this worksheet. The second worksheet is called Real Humans. The thing is a lot of times when we talk about the host, this whole target market thing, we start thinking to ourselves, oh yes, I can reach men and women ages 18-25, living in small urban areas like Austin, Texas, and bla bla bla. But there's no personality there, there's no realness to that, and so much of what is awesome with having a creative business as being able to add that level of authenticity. How do you get to know these real humans? One is by listening, by asking, and by testing. I'm going to go into that. In your worksheet, you actually can go over and brainstorm and see if you know anyone in real life, that more or less fits the mode of your target market. You're going to want to have both of them out, like both worksheets out. Your target market 1 and your real humans 1. Look over your target market info and then see, write down names of anyone that reminds you of your target market. Now that's done, you have a shortlist of maybe some people who are like your target market, and oh, actually pro tip, if you don't know someone that fits your target market, chances are you know, someone who knows someone. That person's name down and be like, "Oh, can I reach out to Francesca and ask her if she can introduce me to Dylan", because her friend Dylan does match my target market, they do. What you're going to do is reach out to those people and schedule 15-minute calls. I know it sounds so scary, but I promise it's worth it. You come along with me for this ride so far, please keep going. This one takes a little bit more commitment and follow through and follow up. It's going to be so good. What you want to do is you want to reach out to them, let them know that you have this creative business that you are getting clear on what you're offering and then ask them, if they'd be open to just having like a 15-minute conversation, don't make it longer. Time is really valuable,15-minute conversation with them just to answer some questions. When they say yes, because someone always says yes, everyone, I promise, at least one person will say yes, chances are multiple people on your list will say yes. You schedule that time, you can use face time. I think it's actually really good to do those sessions using video. If you're able to Face Time them or Skype them or use, these video conferencing platform that I use for my business called Zoom, whatever you have access to, that is ideal. If you don't have access to any of them, it's totally okay, just do a phone call. Phone call is better than no call. What you want to do when you get on that call, is actually use your target market questions, and ask them a little bit about themselves. Really all you want to do is have them talk about their lives for about 15 minutes. That's going to start giving you so much information about what you wrote down, and if it's aligned or if maybe they bring up something that you hadn't thought of before. One of the best questions you can ask over and over again in your 15-minute calls with your real humans is, why? If they tell you, when you ask them, what do you believe in? Oh, I believe in love. You can ask them why or you can ask them what does that mean? Or you can ask them why is that important to you? Just digging deep just like how you did for yourself. You'll want to get to know your real humans, your target market, the people that you want to serve to the same level. Because I promised that's where you're going to find interesting places for your business to play with them. The next step is creating your muses. There's a worksheet here at the top, it says creating your muses. Essentially, this is the culmination of all of the information that you've gathered. Stuff that you made up about your dream customer in your target market worksheet, and then the conversatiosns that you had with real humans to learn more about your target market. All of that comes into play here to create what I call muses. Your muses are essentially made up people that are a combination of all those things. They're exactly who you want to target, but I suggest giving them a name, giving them a hair color, just to make them as real as possible, even though they might be based on three conversations that you had plus your worksheet on target market. You might not know this exact news right now, but that's why you're making them up. You're giving them as much story as you're able to. They will serve as like the starting points for the tone and voice and how to reach out and how to connect with the people that you want to serve in your creative business. Now that you have your muses, look over the profiles that you've created and ask yourself, what do they love about your business? What do they hate is a strong word. What are they like about your business? Like they're just like whatever. What would make them fall in love even more with your business. That is really golden for us to develop new ideas or new ways to reach out to them, or unexpected things that maybe you didn't think about before, and it's coming from real information. Super-useful. Also remember that the more you understand what your muses love or don't love about your business, the better you can talk to them about those specific things. Again, part of branding is to build that trust and that legitimacy in order for people to feel comfortable purchasing from you. If there's something that you find that like cannot be changed about your business. But you know that your amuses not really convinced about it, you can speak to that, you can write about it. You can say, hey, you might not feel like blah, blah, blah makes sense, but here's why, and maybe you even be able to change their mind about it, or at least they'll understand, why you made that decision and they'll feel understood and heard and that's super powerful for your business. Another thing that's really helpful is to create your anti muses. Basically, these are people who would be a really bad fit for your business. Then, you know, like, oh, but that'll help you make decisions like I've been invited to speak at this event or I have a commission coming up. But actually you realize if on the other side, it's not your people, you can just quietly turned that down and move on find your real people. All of this to say, free yourself from being all things to all people, it's just not worth it. What you really want to do is become the go-to choice, like that choice that some special type of person feels like, oh my gosh, this is the obvious choice for me is to hire you. That is why we've worked so in depth for our target market and creating our Muses. Let's go over the key takeaways for this lesson. Taking the time to really get to know your target market, to get to know the people that you serve is essential for building your brand. You can't have a conversation without involving both sides. The more you understand them, the better off you are in your business, and the better the stronger your business is going to become. Now, what you want to do, the second takeaway is start broad, Start with that target market exercise, then as you work through it, get more specific. This specificity, of being able to talk to real humans is going to change everything for you. That's where the real conversations come in so that's a second takeaway, pleased to those. The third takeaway is create your Muses. These are profiles that you are creating that you'll use to guide you in the rest of the creation of your brand. In how you write, in how you speak, and how you show up in social media, all this other stuff, they're based on your muses. Your muses are your dream clients. 11. Your Tone and Voice: We've gone over your brand pillars. We've talked about your target market. Next step is to get clear on your tone and your voice for your business and your brand. Your tone and voice is essentially how you say what you say. It's your brand's way of communicating through words to connect with your target market, to your potential clients, to your potential customers in a way that they will actually want to listen to you. You could be shouting from the rooftops, but if what you're saying doesn't matter to them, then there's no point in saying anything. It's not what you say, it's how you say it. As someone who's doing their own branding, it's really, really important for you to be clear on your specific tone because honestly, even if you are a visual creative, like a photographer, an artist, painter, designer, you're going to end up doing a lot of writing for your business. This can be on your website, social media, telling stories, giving talks about what you do and stuff, you're going to have to write that at first, it is never ending. A lot of people don't think about it, but running a creative business, you do have to educate and explain what you do to a whole lot of people for them to understand what you're about and what you're doing. Here's the thing, people actually want to connect with people, it's mind-blowing. This is where you have a direct advantage over any major corporation. A corporation can never be a person, but you creative business owner, you are a person. You can actually connect person to person, real human to real human, people to people, it's a gift that you have in your creative business, let's use it. On this first worksheet called your tone and voice, there's like a word bank, and here we're going to do a little bit of that brainstorming process again. What I want you to do is look over the word bank and circle any words that have to do with how you naturally talk. Some words are words like approachable, simple, complex, mystical, sarcastic, funny, open, transparent, trustworthy, and there's so many more. You want to just look it over and see which ones line up with how you normally talk. If you're having trouble filling this out on your own, call up a friend and go over it with them because they'll have opinions on how you talk. Now the next step is bringing up this next worksheet that says your brand pillars and your tone and voice. What you want to do is after you've looked over your word bank words and you get clear or certainly you like feel out which ones work for you, I want you to get into this worksheet and first write out your brand pillars. Write them down, and then look over the words that you circled and write them down if they align with your brand pillars. Remembering what they mean to you, what each one of those brand pillars means to you, why it's important to you, why it's important to the world at large and then finding the tone and voice words that match with those. It does not have to be like one for one like, freedom and approachable match, no. It can just be like two columns that have a relationship. It doesn't have to be A to B, it can be like a little bit more abstract than that but he idea is to start getting clear on what types of words do line up with the foundation of your brand. When you look over the two columns, there might be a possibility for you to get a spark. Start writing down any ideas of things like content or social media posts or whatever that might come up as you see your brand pillars and like one of your words. For example, maybe one of my words, actually let me pull up my word bank. Maybe one of my brand pillars is freedom. Let's go back to our freedom example. One of my words is quirky, meaning a little weird, but in a fun way, and I look at those two words and I'm looking at my two columns and I'm like freedom and quirky, that's really cool. I wish people knew all these weird things that I do in order, like I don't do the normal things to feel freedom. I might do something that seems a little bit different. I might crochet freedom. I might go around in like knit things on trees for freedom. That could be a blog post, that could turn into social media, that can turn into a video for YouTube, talking about your approach to freedom and how it's different than the rest and that's something that's really, really true to your brand, and if you say it in a way that matches how your target market, how your muses interact with you, super golden. Now that we're clear on our tone and voice words, let's create our brand glossary. The brand glossary looks like this, you've got a little worksheet says your brand glossary up at the top. What you want to do here is go back to your two columns, and you want to see if there are any words that come to mind that align with those things. Maybe you end up, our example was like freedom and quirky. Maybe one of your brand words is a little something different. Everything you want to talk about it in the context of it being a little something different, so it's fun, it's a little quirky, but it's basically how you specifically talk about your brand pillar of freedom. I want you to write words that you do use in your brand, that's essentially what your glossary is. Words that make a lot, a lot of sense for your brand. A little some different, maybe you even change how you write something to be some, it's up to you, be creative. What's great about this is that the more words you add here into your brand glossary, the easier it becomes to do things like writing for your website or writing content for social media, because whenever you're stuck, you just come back here and you check out what words you wrote down and you use them, it's that simple. On the bottom of that worksheet, there's what's called your brand blacklist glossary. What this means is, these are words that make no sense for your brand. Words that you are absolutely going to avoid. Going back to our example of having the brand pillar of freedom with the tone and voice of quirky, like being quirky, chances are you'll probably never want to use the word trapped unless if you're really trying to do a very strong message. That might be an example of a word that you would never use. Trap, trapping, even if you're talking about something more abstract like trapping paints, like you're going to find another way to say it. That is the power of your blacklist glossary. Again, those are words that you know your muse is not going to get into, it doesn't match with your business, just doesn't make any sense. You've got your brand glossary, which is what words work for your tone and voice and your anti glossary essentially, words that don't work for your brand. Now, we'll go over some examples. I have a couple of examples here for you up on the screen. One of them is an author named Danielle LaPorte. Danielle LaPorte is the quintessential creative business. She has developed a really, really strong personal brand. She has multiple books published all around, personal growth and self-help type books from a very cool creative modern-day perspective. Her brand tone is definitely wise, irreverent, spiritual, but then also modern and provocative. She'll curse, for example, when she's not trying to be spiritual from a church standpoint, but just city girl spiritual and in your face about it. When she's writing things that exist in her brand glossary are things like cry, crusade, repeat, like that's a sentence that she's used in the past. She'll come up with a hashtag that says truth bombs. Hashtag truth bombs, which is not what you would normally think of, bomb is usually a bit more violent, but her brand is provocative and irreverent, so it is a little bit out of the ordinary for spiritual stuff. Then her programs are called things like Fire Starter Sessions or The Desire Map or White Hot Truth. She talks about how, she says sentences like, I'm championing the light or she talks about naive vulnerability versus awake vulnerability. All of this going really, really well in line with her brand tone and voice, which is wise, irreverent, spiritual, modern, and provocative. On the other end of the spectrum still up on your screen is another example. This company is called Onnit. Onnit is, they call themselves a total human Optimization Company. They basically do workouts, fitness related stuff. Their products having to do with fitness, they sell supplements, they sell kettlebells and workout weights and stuff. That's there and they do trainings for people who want to get certified in their way of doing things like it's a whole world, it's called Onnit. What's cool about them is, their brand, tone and voice is sharp, inspirational, hard, adrenaline, superhuman. Everything about what they're doing is. Even how they call their company, Total Human Optimization Company. What's more adrenaline and sharp and superhuman than that? How that shows up in their writing is they'll say things like lift free or die, that's intense. They'll write things like inspiring peak performance. They'll talk about, in their articles that they are researching bleeding edge science. Not just like avant garde science or science that's really new science, no. Bleeding edge, not just even edge science, it's the bleeding kind. Even their products, they're called Alpha Brain, Defense Soap, Basic to Beast, Hack your mood and then they'll say things like we're all fighters. You can totally see how that lines up, how it shows up from your tone into your writing. Their tone again with that intense writing is sharp, inspirational, hard, adrenaline, superhuman. All of this reminds me of one of my favorite quotes, which is from a woman who is a multi passionate creative, named Maya Angelou, writer, dancer, speaker, incredible person, incredible creative, and she says, "People don't always remember what you say or even what you do, but they always remember how you made them feel." That is what we're trying to get to with these exercises of tone and voice. Let's go over our key takeaways. Key takeaway number 1, it's not what you say, it's how you say it. When you say something that makes your muse, your potential clients ears perk up and want to listen in, that's when you know you're doing something right for your brand. That's when you know you're building real, authentic, true connection in your brand, and that is so important for your brand. Key takeaway number 2, choose tone and voice words to describe how you feel or how you speak through your brand. Because we are building creative businesses and so much of what we do as creatives is coming from within, the more that your tone and voice words can align with how you naturally talk, the better. Basically, that's key takeaway. Key takeaway number 3 is, make a brand glossary and your anti glossary. This will make it so much easier for you to keep track of words that you always use and words that you never use in your business and in your read. 12. Getting Yourself Out There: The last step of this portion of getting clear on your brand pillars and your tonal voice, all these other things that we've gone into; before we go into the design part, is 'Getting out there'. There's a worksheet that at the top says Getting out there, and we're going to work on our brand statement and how to basically introduce yourself to other people when you're running your own creative business. Because that's always the scariest part, isn't it? It's like introducing yourself to new people; but the truth is, introducing yourself to new people is a way to grow your business that has been working since the beginning of business. I don't know how else to say that. But the more people that know about you, the more likelihood you'll run into your target market, they'll love what you do, feel aligned, and purchase from you. Let's go into it. A brand statement is essentially just a way to distinguish what you do, who you do it for, and how you're different; like how you are special, all in one sentence. When you look at your worksheet, you'll see that there's a fill in the blank sort of formula that you can follow. It says, I am, and you put in your name, like I am Nadia, for example. I am, put in your name; and I am a, put your job; and I love doing, blank, like your skill; and, blank, your passion; for, blank, your dream client; and they love how I, blank, and this is where you put in your approach. Let me go into that a little bit more. When you fill that out, it's going to sound like a robot. That's okay. We're just getting this started because it is like a weird formula thing and it's not actually what you're going to use to introduce yourself to people. It's going to feel a little awkward, and it is an awkward sentence, but it is just a way for you to get used to seeing all the different things that you're bringing to the table, so then that way when you do meet someone, it's not weird. The last thing you want is to sound like a salesperson that just wants to hear themselves talk. Instead, now that you have your formula one setup, let's work on using or creating a shorter version that you can use for your brand, and this, you'll be able to use for actual real people and real humans. Trust me on this one. What you want to think about is what is called your foundation sentence. Keeping it really simple, one of the baseline formulas is, I help my clients get results. But you want to break it down to I teach, for me, for example, right now, I'm teaching creatives how to do their own branding in a soulful and authentic way. Boom. If I go into a networking event and I use that foundation sentence, I'm not saying like, "I am Nadia and I am a graphic designer with art direction background and I love teaching in a way that is soulful," no one wants to hear that. So much simpler if you just use that as your base and then create this shorter foundation sentence. Again, for me in this case, it would be, "Hey, I'm Nadia and I teach creatives how to do branding that really feels authentic to who they are." Here's a thing. In general, when you're going out and talking to people, the shorter the intro, the better, because it makes it so much easier for them to just, take in the information and strike up a conversation. Then you can start talking about other things. What you have in common, what you have in your business, what they're about, what they're up to and all of them create real connection. Short, clear intros work because they sound confident, right? Totally got it. They're easy to remember and they're simple to repeat. The best thing that can happen for you is if I go into a networking event and I introduce myself and I say, "Hey, I'm Nadia and I create or I teach creatives how to have an authentic brand or how to create their own authentic brand." That's really simple, really clear. I get to come off as confident and then the best part is that the person who's listening to me could then go on and be like, when they meet up with their creative friend who has a fledgling creative business, they're, "I met this girl, Nadia. She teaches creatives how to build their own brands that feel like them or something like that." They might not remember exactly what you said, but because it was simple, and short, and clear, they'll remember most of it, and that's all you need is for someone to remember you and then strike up the conversation and go from there. The key takeaways for this lesson is do right out that full brand statement with the fill in the blank stuff and just become aware of all the different types of things that you can say when you're introducing yourself to someone new and in a way that lets them understand what you do in your business. Way beyond something like, "I'm a graphic designer." It just allows for more to open up in a conversation. The second takeaway is, use the introduction foundation, that short sentence to make a simple sentence that you can like say with confidence, connect with someone in a real way and best of all, it will be easy for them to remember and say it to somebody else when they find someone that makes sense for you to work with or sell to. That's getting out there. 13. What Is A Visual Identity?: Now that we have figured out all of our branding foundations and strategy, the brand pillars and our tone and voice and all that good stuff, we're going to go into building out the foundations for your visual identity. First off, what is your visual identity anyway? Basically, a visual identity is what people consume with their eyes. That can include colors, which is a simple color palette that you would use for your brand and build around. It can also include fonts, and these are fonts that you're choosing to use consistently throughout the different ways the content that you're communicating through your brand. When it comes to fonts, and we'll go more in-depth in another lesson, but you can go from simple free fonts all the way down to really custom-made fonts for your brand, and we're going to cover all of that, how to choose them. Another thing that helps build your visual identity is graphic elements. Graphic elements are things like textures, patterns, icons, and other types of graphic elements we'll go into it, that basically just when you use them consistently helps build cohesion in your brand. Then we will also go over logos and I'll explain the basic how tools on building your own logo for your brand. This is actually a really important part of your visual identity, because a lot of times logos are like the first thing that people interact with when they're interacting with your business. The last thing we're going to go over is photography. Again, all of this is anything that someone is consuming with their eyes when they're interacting with your business. You don't always need to have custom photos, but it definitely helps. We'll go all through like how to approach finding photos that will work for your brand. I'm going to give you a hint, it has to do with your seasonal archetype, but more on that later. Key takeaways for visual identity are that basically your visual identity for your brand is made up of all the things that people consume with their eyeballs. This includes color, fonts, logos, graphic elements, and photography. We'll go over all of that more in depth in the next lessons. 14. Color Psychology: The first thing that we're going to go into is colors, color psychology. I'm going to go really deep into colors because, honestly, the way that we approach colors, you'll be able to use that framework to approach everything else. We're going to talk about some really key things, I can't wait. First step, color psychology is the framework upon which you build your visual identity. It's literally in everything that you do. So it's really important. The reason why is because colors actually evoke an emotional response. Other times it's like the thing that you can't really skim across. Even if you're skimming, you're going to take in that information. Hopefully you get what I mean by that. We all actually feel color in a subconscious level and that's the thing. When you know about color psychology and how it can work in telling your brand story better, you can really create deeper levels of impact within the target market that you want to serve, your people, your community. It's a really powerful tool. Because color psychology allows you to communicate in a nonverbal way to your target market, it creates really big ripples of impact in your business, in the decisions that you're making within your business. Ultimately, it provides a framework for you to make all the other decisions. That's why I start with color psychology and why it goes super deep. Once you're clear on how to approach color, then you understand also how to pull together fonts, textures, patterns, photography, illustrative styles, all of that, in order to tell your story in the best way possible, or in the most real to you way possible. Now we're going to get into an approach to be able to pick out the colors for your brand. Like I've been saying over and over again, picking up the colors for your brand is the framework on which your visual identity is built and you're going to need two things to be able to get into the next worksheet. You're going to need your brand pillars, and you're going to need your tone and voice words, and using those two tools, we'll get into choosing your brand colors. So you should have this worksheet called Choosing Your Colors and there's a word bank on it. That's what I want you to bring up and start working with. What you're going to be doing is, there is words that are feeling words and they're paired, and it's a feeling. Just go with your gut, start circling the ones that when you're looking at your brand pillars and your tone and voice words, that you're like, "Yeah, this totally matches." For example, we've been using the example of having freedom as one of our brand pillars and maybe for you, when you have freedom, you might look at this list and be like, "Yeah, okay. For sure I'm going to circle abundant. For sure, when I think about my brand pillar of freedom, I think of cutting edge. I think of intense, or natural, or visionary, or pragmatic." It's just like a gut feeling that you're going with in terms of these are feeling words. So use your gut and go through them, and circle whichever ones pop out at you. Don't worry if they make sense for color. That's another key component. Doesn't have to totally make sense right away, it'll make sense on the next worksheet, I promise. Once you're done with with going through that word bank and seeing what feels right for you, then go ahead and go to your next worksheet page which says, "Does it align?" and here you're going to have three columns. One is your brand pillars, then your tone and voice words, and then your color keywords. What I'd like for you to do now is write out all your brand pillars, write out all the tone and voice words that you wrote down on your other worksheets so then that way you just see them in one place. Let's find it. Here we go. Look back at this worksheet, this word bank worksheet, and see which keywords line up with that feeling. It doesn't have to be like one plus one equals yes like the freedom, brand pillar plus the word, I don't know, friendly for your tone and voice keyword equals abundance, for a color keyword. It's not like that. It's more like just for you to see whether or not they tell one cohesive story. When you feel that's key too, it comes from inside. So it's not what other people are feeling or what you've been told that word means, it's when you feel like you have one big idea on this little worksheet of yours, where the brand pillars, the tone and voice words, and your color keywords feel like one family, then trust that. It doesn't have to make logical sense because what we're looking for is a way to approach creating your color palette and creating the foundation of all of your visual identity in a way that feels completely and uniquely like you. So if it's not making logical sense, it's okay, that's all I want to say. Then at the bottom, once you're done with that top part, the bottom of that worksheet says, "What colors immediately come to mind?" Don't worry, don't stress yourself out over this part. Just start writing down colors. Be as specific as you can. Actually, there's this one time I was teaching this color psychology foundation and there was an artist in the audience and she said something really helpful, "Use adjectives to describe the word, like the color that you are choosing." For example, instead of saying just green or like, "Yeah, I'm looking at my stuff and green comes up." Instead of saying, "Green," you could say, vibrant green, forest green, muted green, even gray green, or the green. If you're not an adjective fast thinker, you could even say something like the green that you see in the morning when the sun hits a 05:00 a.m. and the leaf is pointing towards the clouds or something and you know what that green looks like. It's just a cue for you. But it's just to get your brain thinking in colors. Now we're going to go into what I call your seasonal archetype. When it comes to colors, one of the easiest ways that any type of person can understand it, whether you're an artist, or a designer, not a designer, a writer, whatever, is using the four seasons to be able to understand the different nuances of color. There are four seasons, spring, summer, fall, and winter. Very simple. We're all familiar with the different feelings that those seasons bring up and they can totally influence the colors that you choose for your brand. So let's talk about it. I'm going to go through the different seasons first and talk a little bit about how they translate, how the different feelings of each season translates into color, and I'll also be showing you examples on the screen. Let's go into the spring archetype first. The spring archetype aligns with the feelings of spring. So you're talking about optimism, energy, it's delicate, it's a little quirky. The spring archetype tends to be really good for folks who are very bubbly and almost like a fairy, or a little bouncy ball. A lot of folks who align with the spring archetype tend to be businesses that are around joyfully bringing people together or bringing ideas together in that way. Some key spring qualities are things like, I'm just going to blurt out some words, especially pay attention if you see some of these words in your keywords for color. So it's words like simplicity, sparkling, forward-thinking, open, clarity, bubbly, optimistic, quick thinking, communicative. When that starts translating into design, look and feel, usually spring has a lot of fuss free, like light and bright and soft color tones. If they have a pattern, it tends to be pretty casual and informal, and it's just your brand voice tends to be simple and clear and fun and light and bright. One of the things that I think about a lot is, if you were a cupcake store, you probably are going to be a spring store. We'll look at an example now so you can see. Here's a color palette that I developed for clients that totally fits the spring archetype mold. You can see on the left that it's light, it's bright, and it's really, really clear. The colors are a bit on the boulder side. This specific client, her brand pillars were connection, courage, choice, and curiosity, and then her tone and voice was playful, teen, because she's actually like a teen psychologist, and casual. Then her color keywords, this is just what you can see, how it all comes together and get ideas from your worksheet. Her color keywords would be fiery, quick, bright, and rebel. Then next up on the slide, you can see actually her whole mood board. You'll see it will go more into mood boards in another lesson but you can start seeing all of those types of qualities showing up on this mood board. Let's go into the summer archetype. The summer archetype aligns with the feelings of summer. It's not quite what you think though. Summer is the only one that you've got to like wrap your brain around a little bit more because a lot of times people think of summer and they're like, pool party, turquoise colors, and actually summers not that. Summer is chill, muted and romantic. Think about what happens to your clothes if you leave it outside on a hot summer day, it gets faded. Or think about that feeling that you see or when you're outside on a hot summer day and you can see the heat coming up off the concrete. That is the feeling of summer for the summer archetype for this lesson. Summer types tend to be like a lot more romantic, artistic, organized and focused on details. They live for like structure and quality. A business that I see a lot for summer archetypes are wedding planners or anything that has to do with the wedding industry where it's very soft and muted and elegant, and also you better believe that they have everything figured out and organized and structured. Let's go into the summer qualities. The qualities of a summer archetype is elegance for you to feel luxurious, much more formal, refined, misty, dreamy, aspirational, calm, dependable and balanced. When it comes to the look and feel, you're going to see everything feels a bit muted, sophisticated with touches of gray. Again, like that feeling of when something stays out in the sun for a really long time and the colors get faded. For summer design, elegant lines, traditional fonts, we'll go into that but serif fonts for those of you who already know, those work really, really well for some archetypes. Then anything that feels quality works really, really well for summer archetypes too. Here on the screen you're seeing an example of a summer archetype color palette. Let's walk through this again. This was one of my clients. I think she's a life coach. All about living life's simply. Remember, the summer archetype is romantic, soft, and cool. Her brand pillars were simplicity, connection, self-care, expansion, and integrity. Her tone and voice is sisterly, a friend, familiar, and her color keywords are natural, comforting, gentle, soft, and soothing. You can see we have a lot of gray tones. I would say even for summer, she is even a little bold for summer. It could even be muted even more. But she's still fits the bill, so there's that. It does have like a lot of natural colors graze part of a color palette and this cream as well, that's super summer. But I think something that would make, just to talk about it, that would make her even more summer as if this deep green and this charcoal color were even more faded feeling for whatever that's worth. Here's the mood board that matches this color palette, which is the summer archetype. You can start seeing how it just feels very chill. Let's go into the fall archetype, the autumn archetype. For record, that's me. Autumn archetypes align with the feelings of autumn are four. Earthy, cozy, comfortable, a little rustic. A lot of times, if you fall under the fall archetype, you probably tend to enjoy warm relationships with your clients or with your customers. You want to make it feel a little bit more like family. You probably working on longer-term projects because it lets you go deep. You just want to go deeper with people who create real community and connection. Not that the other ones don't have that before it's extreme. Some key qualities that the autumn archetype, the fall archetype we'll have are feeling words like warm, earthy, ethical, passionate, like history, like maybe something that feels more rustic, substantial. Then also big energy and willing to break some rules all for the sake of creating that connection. For the fall, look and feel in terms of design, a lot of times you'll see warm, intense, or muted colors like but highly saturated colors that do feel earthy or actually even this thing that I'm wearing now would be a perfect fall color. Overall, the look feels welcoming and the patterns that you'll see in terms of like graphic elements for for fall will be either picking up from like natural stuff like wood texture or like leaves or plants, so that thing, or stuff that feels vintage or historic. Like even almost feeling like old Western world, old time type faces and fonts, that sort of thing. Now let's go into looking at this Fall archetype color palette. This is actually a client where he is a woodworker. And he makes all these beautiful custom furniture from reclaimed wood and stuff that would like one man's trash is another man's treasure. He works with like big restaurants and stuff like that in Miami. It's really cool. Anyway, his color palette is warm, intense and muted. You'll see like these mustered yellow's a lot in fall, you'll see deep greens a lot and fall. Kind of this creamy tone that you see up here, and of course, I didn't even try to hide it because of his job.One of the colors I put in there was straight up a wood texture because it's going to be all over his photography with his work. Let's go into what his brand pillars are and how it all breaks down. His brand pillars were or still are, quality, creativity, responsible, and timelessness. His tone and voice is professional and friendly so he wanted to be taken seriously because he's an expert at what he does. But for him being a dad is like really important and he wanted it to feel friendly and like family. That's the relationship he tries to build with his clients. Another thing that I just realized is since he's the fall archetype, he likes to work on projects that are longer-term with his clients. He'll work with the restaurant from concepting before they start even having an idea for what they want inside the restaurant, all the way to creating all of the wood paneling and whatever they end up hiring him for. I feel like that's really fall this like long-term relationship, really partnering with with your clients or with your customers. You can build that feeling even if you're doing products, just throwing it out there. Because if you're wondering, sometimes people are like, "Oh, I get how it works for like a client, but then if I'm selling prints, how does that feel?" That might show up in your packaging or ways to make people feel more connected to you, more like have a deeper relationship with you. You can just play around with that, just throwing those ideas out there with his color palette. His color keywords, we looked over his brand pillars, you can see his tone and voice. His color keywords are words like warm, earthy, vintage and long-lasting. So much of what he's about is really high-quality furniture and paneling and design. That's also why he likes using reclaimed wood because it's like he says, it's like a really high-quality wood. You can see all of that fits really well with autumn archetype and you can see how it starts showing up for his color palette. Let's go into the winter archetype. The winter archetype, of course, aligns with the feelings of winter. It's clear, it's practical and self-assured. Winter types tend to be really no fussed, very minimal and super laser focused. Some winter qualities are dramatic, strong, luxurious, decisive, practical, grounded, and very bare bones, very minimalist. The look and feel will be very clear and intense. Think ice blue and metallic, and neons. Actually winter is the only archetype that uses neons and also the only archetype that should be using pure, pure black because black is a really striking bold color. All the other archetypes probably can use like a softer black or gray. If you are thinking about perhaps your winter, chances are you want to be seen as an expert in your field, and you gravitate towards designs that are minimalist with strong and clean patterns and lines. So basically, no frills. Let's keep going so you can see the example. Let's get into the example. Here, this client is actually a really awesome example of winter, it's a law firm run by a woman who wanted her law firm to still feel more feminine than her competitors because that's one of her being a woman led law firm, and actually I believe the whole team is women. That for her she knows it's a differentiator in her market and people are interested in hiring an all-female team within the legal industry. But she also wanted to come off as an expert in her field, and you can see that in the color palette. It's cool, it's strong, it's clear, it's intense. You've got this light blue, deeper navy blue, and a pure black, a pure white, and a silver metallic, and that's it. Other color palettes that we've been looking at. I think may have had more colors, but this one, it's just like, how simple can we get it. That was just something that came up over and over again during our branding process together. Let's go through her brand pillars, tone and voice and color keywords together. Her brand pillars are freedom, opportunity, family, and reliability, she's an immigration attorney. Her tone and voice are professional, expert, and clear, end of story. She was very clear about it. Those two things together translate to color keywords such as cutting edge, visionary, expert, high-end, and pragmatic. You can see that coming back to her color palette where the primary two colors that we used in her brand were the deep navy blue and white. Then we also used black to really make an impact. We barely used the silver. Silver was being used for their business cards and stuff to show their high-end factor and then the light-blue color that's more icy was actually used as a color background in their web design, but very rarely. It was just very clean, very clear, super simple. Here's the mood board that matches, so you can see what the whole feel is like when you start bringing it all together. A lot of businesses, like traditional businesses that will go for winter archetype are things like lawyers, accountants, I want to show you a sneak pic of another mood board. Actually, I have this client who is a hair stylist and this is a good example of what winter looks like when it has a little tinge of fall. That's the cool thing about these archetypes, is that you can blend them together if you're in between seasons. For her, she's an expert, she's relational, but she also has a lot of feelings of wanting to bring people together. You can see that in her neons and 90 Hip hop tendencies in this mood board. I'm not going to spend too much time on there, but I just wanted to show it to you. So that you can see that winter archetype can have some life to it too. Now, that you have more insight on each of the season archetypes, pull out this lovely little worksheet here, and you'll see that you have the ability to decide which archetype you think you embody. I included keywords for each one so then you can look at your color keywords and see if they are here or which ones match you. From there, you'll know your brand archetype. Let's go through the process of how you'll be picking out your colors for your brand. Now that you have the reference of the season archetype, do use that. There is a worksheet right over here called, your color palette. It's really just for your own use, it has the three columns. Your brand pillars, your tone and voice, your color keywords, and at the top it says, my brand season archetype is, and you put if you think you're winter, fall, spring, or summer. What I want you to do is just start working through, what are the different colors you think will work for your brand. I actually have a worksheet that you can download and it has all the different meanings for different types of colors, but trust your intuition more than anything. You can refer back to it, but it's really just a reference. Like I said, we're really trying to find ways to create something that is uniquely yours. The definitions are what other people say but if you have a different definition, that is a okay. The main thing that I want you to do is pay attention to whether or not the tones or the hues of the colors that you're picking do align with your brand archetype. The softer or brighter, quirkier colors for spring, those muted, faded, gentles, elegant, sophisticated colors for summer, those earthy, rich, deep jewel tones for fall, and that clear, crisp, ultramodern, expert level color, black, white, neon, metallics for winter. Just make sure that when you're creating your family, it all feels within the same seasonal archetype. That is going to be what creates cohesion with your color palette. If you are not following that and you're like, "Oh, here's two colors that are super bright and quirky from spring," and then a neon from winter plus a faded green gray from summer, it's just going to feel very wrong. It's just going be total discord, something about it is not going to feel right, so trust your gut when you are putting it together. One of the things that I like to do is find colors that you like online and start printing them out. It's not going to be a true representation because every printer is different and colors are, whatever. There's a lot of technical reasons why that might not always work, but it'll at least get you in the right place. Do that and as always you know how I roll, pick a lot of colors all at once and then start bringing it down. Everything that we've been doing, the system has been the same, start big and start wittering your way down until you get a color palette of 3-6 colors that you really love, that feel like you, that aligns with your brand pillars, and aligns with your tone and voice. That's magic, my friends. The last part about picking your brand colors is understanding what a hex code is. Hex codes are what we use to denote a color value when it comes to the web. For a lot of us that are probably in this class together, we're not brick and mortar businesses, but maybe some of you are, but all of us need a web presence. I like to go over what a hex code is and how to find them, how to find a color palette within what you've printed out and put together that you can put on the screen. It's, I think to me, the most important piece of building your color palette because it's what's going to allow you to go and build consistent colors on the web. You define your colors hex code, it's a hashtag with six letters or numbers, a combination of six letters and numbers after the hashtag. That's what you're going to use as how to define your hex code. For the record, it's on this color palette worksheet underneath those three columns, it says, my brand colors in their hex codes are, so you'll be able to write them out there as you explore. One of the things that I wanted to share with you all is how to find hex codes online as you create your color palette. I'll show you. There are a few different places that you can look online for inspiration for color, and building out your color palette, especially now that you are aware of where you're trying to go with your season archetype. One place that I really like is a website called design-seeds.com, you can see it up on your screen. It does have a lot of different color combinations, you can find one that lines up with what you wrote down on your worksheet. What's great about it is, they do include the hex codes for the different colors as part of showing the color palettes. I find that incredibly helpful. Another website is this one that's up on the screen now called coolors.co, look at that, they have a friendship with Skillshare. I don't think I realized that. Even better for us. Here, it generates color palettes and when you find the colors that you like that match your brand, then you can see what the hex codes are. You might need to mix and match them, you might take a blue from one color pallet and a green from another color palette and that's totally okay. The idea is to be able to find the hex codes. Here is up on the screen now an example of what it'll look like to look at one color palette that Coolors generated, and at the bottom of all the colors, you can see that they have the hex codes, that's what a hex code looks like. Then the last reference place that I'm going to point you to, and there are a lot more than just these three, but I just find these three to be very useful, is color.adobe.com. For those of you who know, Adobe is the godfather of all things, creative endeavors for any type of designer, they're intense. I really trust their ability to point you into the direction of finding any color that matches with your brand. It's pretty neat, you can go in and create a custom color palette. That way you could even use a color wheel and when you find the color that works for your brand or that matches what you wrote down on your worksheet, then you'll be able to see everything actually, like the hex code, the RGB codes, but focus on the hex codes, that's what's going to help you the most. Now that you have the hex codes for all of the brand colors that you created, then keep that somewhere safe, keep that in handy. We're actually on the last module, when everything comes together, we're going to create a brand board and you'll be writing it out there. Keep tabs on your hex codes, so then that way it's easy for you to reference to use in the future throughout everything that you make for your brand. 15. Creating Your Moodboard: Now we're going to go into how to create a moodboard for your brand. This is actually a super fun and important step to getting clear on what things are going to look like for your visual identity without having to actually get into the really tiny details of everything else. It'll make sense. Moodboards are basically a way of building a clear intention around your visual brand, your visual identity. When you create a mood board, it's going to be like a mix of photos, colors, textures, graphics, icons that you find. It's just a way for you to start putting those ideas together without having to actually make them. Then that way you can see what works for your brand and what doesn't work. Of course, please create your moodboard using your brand pillars, your tone and voice words, and your color keywords and have your color palette out in front of you too. When we get into the tutorial in the next video, I'll be showing you step-by-step how to make it digitally. But for now, we'll go over the different types of moodboards and how to approach it. If you want to make one digitally, it'll be easier, but if you are doing a physical moodboard, then have your color palette near you so you can reference it while you're making stuff. My friends, moodboarding takes time. It takes patience. It takes commitment because you are literally going through, and it's basically like a scavenger hunt on the Internet, through magazines to start piecing together the idea of your brand in a visual way. Be kind to yourself, be patient for yourself, and definitely carve out some time to be able to create your moodboards. Then that way, it's really truly something that you're proud of and that makes sense for you and your brand. Let's go into moodboards. Moodboards, there's two different types. It's pretty straight forward. Moodboards can be digital and they can be physical. Here's an example up on the screen of a few digital moodboards. These are the ones that we looked at for the color psychology lesson, and you can see the spring one and the summer one are here. This was completely made on the computer and it's actually a template that I use for my clients. There's also another type of moodboard, which is physical moodboards. These are great for people who learn kinetically. Meaning they learn through movement, through doing, through making. Just know what type of person you are and go for whichever type of moodboard makes more sense for you. Physical moodboards are great if you're the type of person that learns better when you're walking around or you are learning better if you just, like move, or maybe you learn through dance. Physical moodboards are the way to go for you. This is exactly what it sounds like. It's taking printouts, magazine cuttings, fabrics, textures, and physically putting them together in a way that starts giving you ideas of what your brand visual should look and feel like. One is not better than the other, they're the same. So just do whichever one. If one of those two slides made you feel like, that sounds like fun, trust your gut, and go with that either digital or physical. I like both. Let's talk about some awesome places to find image references for your moodboard. One of my favorites is pinterest.com. If you haven't heard of Pinterest, you've been living under a rock, but no, jokes aside, it's really great. It's basically like Google for all things visual. There's a lot of designers that upload their work there. A lot of photographers as well, and you can even Google moodboard and you'll be able to see examples on Pinterest as well. By Google, I mean search. Another place that you can look for references is magazines. I like to go to the bookstore and find magazines or order them online and spend a little more to get magazines where they're a bit more on the artsy side. Because I think that the quality of the photography and the layout and the design choices are just better. Also, there's fewer ads, so you won't get stuck with a bunch of purse ads if you're looking at magazines for women. You'll be able to actually find what you're looking for, which is the name of the game. Art magazines are great for this too. Then if you're building a physical moodboard, but even a digital one, look out for fabrics and textures and other printed materials. They can totally help add dimension to your moodboard and start giving you ideas around photography styles, which we'll get into at another lesson but these are really helpful. If you're building a physical moodboard then you might actually want to get a piece of the fabric and put it onto your moodboard. In one of the sessions where I taught this class, I had a client or a student who is a therapist that works with horses. That's how she helps people heal is with I think it's called equine therapy. Her moodboard was amazing. She bought a huge canvas and put pictures, photographs of the horses on her ranch that she works with, and had like feathers and it was really original artwork that she made. It was very inspiring. When you're building a physical moodboard, if you're that tactile person, just find the stuff and put it on there. Even if it doesn't totally hold together, you can always take a picture of your physical moodboard and take it along with you. Let's go over real quick on the screen what the different moodboards look like for the different archetypes. Once again, here's the spring archetype. You can see that the moodboard is light, it's bright, clear, optimistic. In her case, there are references for typography and fonts that are a little bit more hand-drawn and her vibe had a little bit more of rebelliousness. The summer archetype moodboard is more romantic, soft, and cool. You can see in for her, there's a lot of nature, water references, and very sophisticated fonts. The fall archetype or autumn archetype is warm, intense, and muted. Again, this is the woodworker. He's actually appearing in the corner working. He's in his own moodboard. You can see that for him it was a lot of vintage sort of cafe racer type references with these rich mustard yellows and deep chocolaty colors and creams. Letting the fonts do a lot of the talking too using this historical retro vibe. Then finally, the winter archetype is cool, strong, clear, and intense. This was the lawyer that I was telling you all about. You can see how straight-laced it is. It's very elegant, expert. You can tell that it's simple, it's minimal, not a lot of fuss. On the next video, I'll be going into tutorial I made for those of you who are not designers. If you're a designer, you're welcome to join me too. But I made a couple, actually two Google drawing templates. I recorded myself just going through the template and explaining step-by-step how to use it. The link is available for you and have fun with it. 16. Moodboard Tutorial: Hey, everyone. This is a tutorial on making your moodboard using Google Drawing, the tool Google Drawing, Google Drawing is amazing. If you are not super to design something, and you're not super well versed in Photoshop, Google has Google Drawing. What you want to do is open it up. In the resources, we have this template that I made you guys. You should have that as a downloadable PNG file. You want to open up a new one that is yours, and call it. I'm going to do an example of moodboards. Here's my example, moodboard that I'm creating now. What you're going to do is, go to Page Setup, and this pop-up will come up, and you're going to choose widescreen 16 by 10. That's the style that I have and the exact dimensions that I used for the template. Once we have this setup, you want to go into insert image, and that's loading. You can either upload the image or I have it actually up here ready. This is the image that you should have downloaded, it's a PNG file. You can just drag it here once you have it downloaded onto your computer, and boom, it's here. What I do is, I like to make it bigger so that it fits pretty much exactly, there we go, so it fits exactly in my image. This is what we're going to use to make our moodboard. You see it's now perfect, there we go. All right, close enough. As you can see, there's a whole mix of things going on. What you're going to do is, you're going to use this image as your base and use it as your guide, as you put other images on top of it. What I like to do is, so here I have my folder called moodboard tutorial. That's how I organize things on my end. I like to have my images in a folder, the images that I've found for my made-up business. You can see those are the images we're going to use. Then you guys have your worksheet, but I just quickly put in a text edit file, a quick file, my color codes. I just put into, just that a thing that you guys can see. We'll just start with picking one of our images. You're able to drag the image immediately into, just drag it from your Finder into the Google Drawing, or you can again do Insert Image and drag it here, upload it this way, so it doesn't actually matter. Here it is, and what's neat about a Google Drawing is you can actually position your image. It's not like a sophisticated as Photoshop. They don't have layer masks in there if you're familiar with that, but if you double-click on your image, it actually has a crop tool that pops up, so you can mess with it a little bit and it's pretty neat. Because if you click on the image itself on the outside of your crop, you can move the image around. You can also make it smaller. Then mostly what you're going to do is use these crop lines, let me see, to follow. See how I can see through the image a little bit and I can see my rectangle goes all the way here. I just want to follow that, and there we go. Maybe what I decided is, you know what, I want to see more of these business cards, I double-click again on the image and it pops up like this, and I go to the blue lines and that's the image itself. I make that smaller. I can move that around until I have exactly what I like. Awesome, I love that. Then we keep on doing this. Let's say I found this interior image that I just fell in love with. I thought it would look really neat right here. Again I just place it, double-click, use the crop lines to find where I'm supposed to put it in my layout. There we go. Then I realized, I didn't get all the way down, I lost my whole room, there we are. I'll just double-click again, no big deal, and make my little shifts, click on the image, in the background. I can make it smaller, so that it'll actually fits. There we go. Maybe, it's not going to be the most perfect fit ever, but again, it's just to get the vibe right. It's just to get the feel for what it is that I'm creating with my brand. That's totally close enough. I get it, It's giving me the same mood that it gave me. When I found the image, I just fell in love with it, and there we go. Let's put this woman in here. Again, using the crop marks, maybe she can go right here. Just a quick Control Z or Command Z, will let you undo, if you don't like what you did. Let's see how to. This is not totally lining up. Actually, I think she'd be better here, another long section. You can just move things around, feel it out, see what you like. There we go. I like that she's not completely showing. Cool. I like that she's peeking out. It's not exactly perfectly right, but it's close enough. Definitely, it starts putting together the feeling that I want to create for this made-up business of mine, that is artsy. I would say probably a bit of an soft summer archetype, if I had to choose. My ladies, I think actually they would go really great here. There we go. Double-click. You can start using the Crop feature, finding that spot in the mood board, and then click on the image itself and start messing with the corner so then that way these ladies actually fit in the area I'm trying to make them fit in. See how it doesn't totally line up. I can just double-click again and play with it until it's exactly how I want it. Awesome. Actually, I want to bring them down a little bit. I want to see their faces, even if I don't get to see their feet. There we go. Those are some of the images that I chose. Now you want to also be starting to put colors in. The colors are going to be the last thing that you add to the mix. The way that works is, this is why I was so adamant about knowing your hex codes, there's no simple way to color pick or pick out colors the way you might be able to in Photoshop. I just made these little circles. You just go to this icon, you go to Shapes, you click the circle, you make a little circle. Right there. I want it to be a little bit bigger. You can start putting in the actual color that you want. I go to my TextEdit file and I pick up my, actually I think I want to put my cream color and I just named them green and cream. The rest of them are just placeholders. This is my cream color hex code. I highlight it and here, I select my shape, I go to this fill color icon, and I go to Custom. See how here we've got a nice little spot for the hex code. I highlight that, I paste in my hex code, and I click "OK". For me just for aesthetics, I don't like having a black line around the circles. You can click on your shape, go to Border color, and I prefer having a white border and I like go to Border weight, it's right next to it. I like for it to be three pixels, that way it just sits on top. This is what we were talking about with not using super stark white. That cream color's almost a white. I can barely see the difference on my screen, but when it prints and when you start using it a lot more than just a little circle, it'll start popping up more. That is pretty cool. Actually you know what? For the sake of this tutorial, I'm going to move this over here because want to get a vibe of what the whole thing could look like for you guys, so we don't need to see. There we go. We can make her tiny. This is what's so neat. You can really have fun with it, make decisions, change your mind. That's the whole point of a mood board. I really liked how she was before. I'm actually going to make her bigger and fill her up like this. There we go. Very cool. I'm starting to get a feeling for my brand already. I forgot my packaging inspiration. I'm going to bring that over here. Double-click, start playing with my crops, so grabbing the black crop marks, putting them where I want to actually place it, on the mood board. Seeing if I got it. I got it right. Double-click because I want to see way more of that packaging, describing the blue line and readjusting the size of my image so it fits in there. The best I can. We don't need to have it perfect. The idea is to get the vibe of your brand. Actually I want to bring this up a little bit because I can see some of the gray. There we go. Cool. Now I'm going to make another shape. I can actually copy paste this, see how it just made a second one and move it over. If I really want to be a Cycler or all my circles the exact same size, I can totally do that. I just put that in another section where I had a circle. You just click on it and just go bright back up, Fill Color, Custom, we have this little box again, and I go back to my TextEdit file and I can get my green hex code. Copy, highlight this thing, Paste. Now I've got my green and there we have it. You just keep on going until the whole thing is filled up. If you end up, say for example, I move this and actually I ended up having my circles behind the image but I really like having my circles in front, I just click on the circle, I cut and I paste and it automatically brings it all the way up to the front. When I'm good and done, I actually highlight my template, delete it and all that's left is going to be the mood board that I've created for my brand. Once you're done with that, let's just say the rest of it is filled in, you can totally go to File, Download As, you can download as a PDF, as a JPEG or a PNG. I recommend doing PDF or JPEG. Then you can print it out and put it up somewhere and look at it for inspiration whenever you're feeling like blah about your brand. That, my friends, is how to create a mood board using Google Drive. 17. Choosing Your Fonts: Let's get into choosing our fonts for our brand. So fonts, I'm going to geek out in this section because they're one of my favorite things ever. I really love typography. It's a really cool way. Remember, I don't remember in which less than I said this, but I did talk about one of the unexpected things of having a business, even a creative business, is how much we have to write. Writing content for the website, writing content for social media, just writing all the time. What I love about being able to work with fonts is you can start conveying your brand even through your written content by the fonts that you choose. Which is, I think like the coolest thing in the world to combining this visual piece with the writing piece. Fonts are a really cool way of adding those layers to telling your brand story. As you research and learn about fonts, you're going to want to essentially narrow down your fonts to like three to four different traces. You're going to use your font choices for your logo, which can be one or two fonts. Your headlines for your, like when you're writing like an article or something that headline is like what goes up at the top, like imagine the newspaper, it's like the big words at the top. "Things happened." That's your headline. So you'd want to find a font for that, and then another fourth font or a third font for your body copy, which is all the meat of any content that you're creating. So body copy might be on your website when you're talking about your bio, like the whole bio, that's your body copy. So one of the temptations that happens when you start getting into the world of finance is you go down deep into the Internet rabbit hole and you get tempted to, like, you start seeing all this cool stuff and you'd get tempted to mix it all up. Resist temptation. A small set of fonts will help you so much and keeping your brand clear and consistent. We're going to go into the archetypes, the season archetypes and how you can pick fonts based on the architect that you have. But just simple is good, you can tel-co with like 10 fonts and start thinking that every other posts you're going to like mix it up and stuff like, "Don't do that." Let's get into it. You're going to need two worksheets for this next part. The first one is the one that you've already filled out, actually both of them you've already filled out. It's the your color palette one. It's the worksheet that has your season archetype, your brand pillars, your tone and voice, and your color keywords along with all your color palette in hex codes. Then the other one that I think, you may or may not need this, but it's better to have it than not have it; is your glossary. Your brand glossary and your anti glossary. These really help you add another dimension when you're looking for fonts. So trust me on this one. Get both of these out and your mood board. So with these three different worksheets and your mood board as your sort of guiding Northstar, that's where you start looking for fonts. Let's go over the different types of fonts. We're going to follow along on the screen, and we'll get into every single one, you'll be able to see examples. So there are four different types of fonts: Serif, Sans Serif, Script, and display. So serif fonts are the ones that have like little tiny feet at the bottom or top or of all the different letter forms. PS, one of the things that happens when you start looking at fonts is you're never going to see a lot of the same way again, you almost have to look at the letters as if they're shapes and not actually things that make sounds like abaka. So yes, serif fonts have the little feet and that they tend to look more classic, more traditional, more strong and serious, and they work really well with Spring archetypes, Summer archetypes, and Autumn archetypes. Then you can actually, I've seen this a lot too. You can still work with Serif fonts and create like a really crisp clean ultramodern look, which allow winter archetypes, that is their jam. Let's look at some Serif font examples. So you can see that, well, the four examples that I have up here on the screen are Times New Roman, Baskerville, Spectral, and Big Caslon. You see how like there's like the little feet against the bottom of the letters. That's how you know it's a Serif font. A Sans Serif font actually doesn't have those little feet. Since they're actually literally means without the Serif. They tend to look more modern, more streamlined, and usually more like forward thinking and progressive. Also Sans Serif fonts are usually used for web because they're easier to read on screens. This is not a hard and fast rule, but it is one that you can totally follow and feel comfortable with. Let's look at some examples of San Serif fonts. So we have up here: Helvetica, Arial, Open Sans, and Muli. You can totally tell that none of them have the little feet that we were talking about, even if they have like tiny little variations, but they're all very modern looking and very simple. Script fonts are a whole other family. They have connected letter forms and they generally set resemble some like traditional handwriting or calligraphy. They can vary from like very retro cool, which can come off as super playful, which works really well for Spring archetypes to that super elegant calligraphy that you might see on a wedding invite, which has Summer archetype written all over it. Any business can find like a script font that would suit them. It can cover a lot of different emotions. Because of the fact that they tend to be more layered or more of have display type qualities. Use them a bit more sparingly, especially ones with like lots of flourishes. If you're Summer archetype and you're choosing something that looks more like calligraphy. Please do not make that your body copy. Just know that they stand out and choose wisely. So up on the screen you can see Script font examples. These are the names also, I forgot to mention that before, but all the words that you see up here are the names of the fonts themselves. You can already tell they have different feelings. So selfie feels more cool and retro sought of sign painter. But then like snail round hand feels a lot more like summer where it's more calligraphy based, and Northwell and Emily Lime are Script fonts, but they actually feel more like handwriting. Let's talk about display fonts. Display fonts are the name tells you everything you need to know. They're a bit more decorative, they usually are like they're used to attract attention and they tend to exist within trends. So you'll see on the next slide when we look at the examples. But one easy example is, at some point I feel like on the web, everyone was using a font that looked like they went on a chalkboard and wrote stuff out on the chalkboard and had this sort of texture to it. That is an example of a display font. I would say, to be very careful choosing a display font, make sure it really makes a lot of sense for your brand. Because they tend to go in line with trends, they also tend to drop out of trends rather quickly especially when you're working on finding something that works for your logo, you want something that lasts. So yeah, there's a little quick tip for you there. Let's look at the display font examples. Here we have on the screen American typewriter, another font called Vanity and other font called Chalkduster, which is kind of like that texture that I was telling you guys about, and Monoton and Frederiku the Great. All of these are the names of the fonts. You can see they're wildly different. That's what it is when you're talking about display fonts, it's really just to stand out. So you would never use, please don't ever use these together. But it is a way for you to see just how large that group is. It's more about how different they look. Some key takeaways for our learning about fonts lesson here that I just want to review with you all is, there are four different types of fonts. We've got Serif fonts, San Serif fonts, Script fonts, and Display fonts. The Serif fonts have the tiny little feet at the bottom of the letters or at the top of the letters, and they're more traditional looking. Sans Serif fonts are the ones that look ultramodern. There's no little feet, the letter forms are a bit more clean and minimal. The script fonts are the ones that look more like handwriting or calligraphy. Display fonts are the ones that just are wildly different and meant to standout and attract attention. So because we're looking for 3-4 fonts for our brand, it's really important for us to look at font selection as choosing a family of fonts. They need to work well together and they need to play well together in order to actually be useful for your brand. Again, if there's one thing I can say, you got to take away from this whole time that we have together is we're looking for a way to create cohesion in creating a brand that looks and feels like you. Some of the things that we're looking for is to create contrast or fine fonts that work well, that are complimentary. This is how you're going to be able to like put together designs using these fonts in a way that is really easy for your target market, your community, the people that you serve to identify your vibe and what you're into. One of the easiest ways to do this is by looking at our season archetype. Telling you this season archetype is everything. Using the season archetype, we're going to go through some examples of font combinations up on the screen, and that way you can start seeing how the different fonts play well together and how they work together based on the season that you identify with. Spring archetypes are really fun and they're light and they're quirky. Usually a combination of San Serif fonts and a Script and fun script font work really well for spring, just because it's like a more upbeat, playful vibe. Let's look on the screen. Here are two examples for spring: the Quirky Fun Display font up at the top with a Modern San Serif underneath, and then again, you can see like a quirky fun script font paired with a modern Sans Serif. So just two different ways of approaching Spring, yours might look totally different, but the idea is there. Summer archetypes are more traditional, romantic, elegant, and usually pairing them with a Serif font and a San Serif font works really nicely to keep that level of elegance. Usually, the Serif font tends to be more traditional looking. The other thing that works really well for Summer are these sort of more romantic script fonts. We'll check it out on the other side on the next slide. Here are two examples for Summer. You can see I called it flowy script with a simple Sans-serif, and then another type of flowy script with a simple Sans-serif. This combination does line up really well with Summer because it feels more traditional than the other combinations. Hopefully, you're getting that feeling looking at these and getting some ideas. Autumn archetypes and fonts. Autumn archetypes, as you know, are warm, inviting, friendly, cozy, and kind of earthy. Font combinations that work really, really well for autumn archetypes are usually like a strong Serif fonts, and then also a sort of handwriting-style-script font. Let's check it out. The thing with fonts is that sometimes it's just way easier to see it than it is to explain it. Here we have two examples of a strong script that looks a little bit more like handwriting paired with a strong Serif. Yeah, that's just kind of grounded tone that works really well for Autumn or Fall Archetypes. Now let's talk about Winter Archetypes. As we said, our winter folks are the ones that are high-end expert level. The thing that I find works absolutely best with Winter Archetypes, you can make other fonts work, but I highly, highly recommend finding one font family that is a Sans-Serif font family with lots of options, so check it out. We'll look at some examples. Here on this slide we can see two examples, each one is actually only one font. We've got one headline. You can kind of make it bold, change the spacing between the letters to really make it stand out. Those are the lines that say understated San-Serif. Underneath the sub-headline or the body copy, it's actually the same font both times. But because the family is a large one, the font-family is a large one, we have lots of options, so it gives it an entirely different feel, so one family to bring them all together, one font to rule them all. That's really, really great for Winter Archetypes. Let's talk about the key takeaways for finding fonts that work well for your archetype. One, obviously, it's really important to find fonts that work well with your season archetype. I'm just going to be like a broken record on this. Your season archetype is going to inform so much information for your brand. Spring archetypes worked really well with fun, quirky Script fonts paired with a Sans-Serif font to kind of bring it like a more modern feel. Summer Archetypes work really well with flowy, more calligraphy type Script fonts, and that feels like a bit more romantic, and they pair really well with simple Sans-Serif fonts. Autumn archetypes work really well with strong Script fonts that feel more like handwriting and a strong Serif font that just lets them continue to get grounded because that's what autumn or fall architects are all about, that earthiness. Finally, winter archetypes, one font to rule them all, go with San-Serif. It's awesome. You just find a font family that has a lot of different options: thin, light, regular, semi bold, bold, extra bold black. When you start digging dip, all of those words will make way more sense, and the more the better. Just focus on using that one font and have at it, make sure it looks really, really modern and minimal. That's your winter archetype. Okay. Let's get into actually researching for our fonts. Font research can be, if you're a nerd like me, really fun and exciting. One of the things that I will say, and I'm going to share some of the resources that I really love on the internet with you, is trust your gut. You know your season archetype, you know what you're into. You have so much information in all of your worksheets about where your brand is headed. Use that information as you're looking at all these fonts. Let that plus your heart and your little inside space guide you. Research is not meant to be so structured. You're really going out there and looking for ideas and getting a feel for what's out there. Here's some of my favorite places to find inspiration on the internet for fonts. One of my favorite places is called Fontpair.co. What I think is really great about this website is that it strictly pairs Google fonts together. Just pro tip, Google fonts are all hosted by Google and completely free. If you are a new business or just a business on a budget, creating your creative business, this is a really great place to see combinations that work for you, and this is even better. I forgot about this. They're paired by San-serif/Serif, Serif with Serif, Serif with San-Serif. You can actually see examples from that align up with your archetype directly on that website and download those fonts and get to it, which is really, really cool. The next site that I wanted to show you all is a website called typewolf.com. I am low-key obsessed with this website. It is not a place where you might end up buying your fonts, but it is fantastic. The person who runs this website is a designer who is even more obsessed with fonts than I am and it shows. He has amazing resources, font pairings. If you find a font that you like, but you're not sure where to go, he makes other recommendations. It's fantastic. You can just spend all of your time in this website to get ideas and research done for your fonts for your brand. Like I said, it's not a place where you buy fonts or download fonts, but he does link out to those websites. If you find a font on his website that you really like for your brand, chances are you will be able to click and be taken to another website where you can actually purchase it or downloaded it or purchase and download it. Next up is a website that is actually an e-commerce website for fonts. It's called myfonts.com and it's enormous. Most fonts are on here and you can buy them and just keep going. What I think is really cool about my fonts.com is even though what they're whole businesses is selling the font to you, they actually do have categories, as you can see on the screenshot, where it does say San-Serif, Script, handwritten Serif, Slab Serif. I mean, they get detailed because a lot of designers use this website, but you can just start clicking there and clicking on tags and stuff. If you look at the screen and just look really carefully under San-Serif, it even says the word modern. You could click on the word modern and it'll take you to a bunch of fonts that are tagged as modern and then you can just continue down the internet rabbit hole of the font world and explore. The last website that I want to show you all is fonts.google. com. This website is Google Fonts website and it's also organizing categories. There Library is insane. Google has compiled the rights to, I don't even know how many fonts they are now, on this screenshot, which I took a while ago, it says 841 font families. People underestimate the power of Google Fonts. They're all free to download, free to use. You can download it onto your computer and even use it for your print stuff. Yeah. If you're using a templated website platform like Squarespace or Wix or Weebly, I know I am a Squarespace fan, I love Squarespace, so I highly recommend them, but anyway, that's neither here nor there. Squarespace uses Google fonts. Basically, any font that you'd find here, you will be able to find it to be able to use for your website. It's amazing. When you're creating business on a budget or just starting out, or you just want to be savvy and you haven't really fallen and you want to experiment with your fonts, I really recommend downloading fonts that are part of the Google fonts library. Yeah, that's my two cents on Google fonts. We're going to talk about the same thing that I say over and over again. When you are researching fonts, start wide. What I like to do is actually create a folder and I'll start taking screenshots or downloading fonts. Usually, screenshots are really good. I'll take a screenshot of a font that I like, I'll rename that screenshot. Do not be me and make the mistake of not renaming the filename. Rename the screenshot with the name of the font, and then put it in your folder of your fonts folder. Then, put anything that you like in there that makes sense for your brand pillars and that makes sense for your season archetype, and then start looking through them and whittling them down. I'll explain how you can do that in a way that's going to save you some time because, yeah, if you end up liking 50 fonts, no. We don't want you to spend like ten hours figuring that out. My pro tip when you are starting to put fonts together. Now you've got your folder fonts, right? Open up a Word document or a Google Drawing or PowerPoint or whatever it is that you're using, Keynote. If you're a designer, open up Photoshop brand designer; illustrator. I recommend illustrator. What you want to do is start putting words that represent your brand together and see how the fonts look. This is why for me I was saying that it's really nice to take screenshots of the fonts because like on my fonts.com, you can actually put words and preview them. Here's how I would do it. I would actually put my brand pillar words in there, take a screenshot, rename that file like, "Oh, this is the name of the font." One of my favorite fonts right now was Haptic, Gt Haptic. It's beautiful. I would rename that font or that screenshot Gt Haptic and then put that in my folder. When I'm trying to decide what I want to do, I would take that screenshot and put it next to another font to see how they play well together. I feel I say this in every lesson, trust your gut. What you're going to start seeing is you're going to be gravitating more towards some font combinations than others. "Kill your darlings" is a term that I've heard a lot in design. Be free with it and then start bringing focus to it, and that's going to be your best friend in terms of any type of design process but especially here when you're building your brand. 18. Choosing Your Graphic Elements: Now that you have your color palette and your fonts, and your tone and voice, and You're ready to get into checking out what graphic elements are that you can use for your brand for your visual identity. First, let's go over the different types of graphic elements. I'm going to show you different examples for each one. One type of graphic element is illustrations. The names you'll see here are pretty straightforward. Illustrations is exactly what it sounds like. It's using little illustrations that might be woven into your brand for different reasons, so, you just want to keep it consistent. Here are some examples of illustrations. The next type of graphic element that we're looking at is icons. A lot of people think about icons almost straight away. Icons are like little symbols, this little, they're symbols that you use for your brand or business. I'm going to give you a little tip in a moment about my thoughts on icons. I have very specific feelings about them, but a lot of businesses use them and you can totally take advantage of that and use them in your creative business. Here's some examples of maybe some icons that you could find online and use for your business, or just what different icons and what they look like. A third type of graphic element is shapes. Shapes can do different things in different purposes within your visual identity. They're really, really flexible, I actually use them a lot in my own designs to be able to create base things. You'll see they can be used for patterns, that can be used for textures, there's a lot of possibility with them. Here are some examples of shapes being used in a brand. Another type of graphic element that's really, really helpful for brands, is borders. So this might be, if you're making a social media graphic, or physical invitation, or just a thank you note when someone purchases a product, you might have specific types of borders that you use in your brand, and all of these in the name of creating a cohesive visual identity, so, boarders help with that too. Here's some examples of borders. A final type of graphic element that a lot of people overlook but they're really important is buttons, and just general web styles. You would think that something so small wouldn't really matter, but there's actually a lot of different ways that you can design a button and have it feel like your brand. Sometimes you can do with texture, you can do it with the shape of the button itself, and make sure that it lines up with your brand. It's like one of those details that goes along way. Here's some examples of buttons and web styles. All right. Let's talk about the different uses of graphic elements. One really, really, really helpful use of a graphic element is for your graphic element to become a content divider. The content divider is exactly what it sounds like, it is created to divide your content. For example, especially on a website, or a newsletter, or a place where you have like a long form of copy, content dividers really help break all of that information up, so, then that way it's easier on the eye as someone goes through your information. Usually a content divider is some horizontal line or some shape, but always in a horizontal nature because a lot of our screens are horizontal. You want it to be there to make it easy to have a little moment of a break when you're reading, but not so there that it interrupts the entire experience. Content dividers, they're like subtle, but even they are a really good opportunity, you're going to use them anyway, if they're a great opportunity to build cohesion in your visual identity for your brand. All right. Another really great use of graphic element is through illustration or what I call an identifying object. So you know how sometimes you land on a website, I'm going to talk about websites a lot in this lesson, but you land on a website and it's really, really clear, there's a consistent shape that repeats in different places in the website, that is an identifying object. That's where you can use a type of graphic element to be able to build that repetition and cohesion to feel like no matter what page they land on, there might be a little triangle at the bottom or some type of flower, if you are like a summer archetype for example. All of these different elements can count as different things for every single type of archetype. That's why I'm only focusing on the types. Now let's talk about borders and background styles. This is pretty simple. You know, when you land on a website and you can see that there's a texture or a color behind the content that's on the website, that's a background style. When you're consistent about the type of backgrounds, or the type of borders that you're placing on your visual items, that can also create a story that aligns with your brand. So that's just another piece of the story that you're telling. Then the last use of a graphic element that I want to talk to you about is the icon set. Again, an icon set is created if you have a lot of services, or blog categories, or just a lot of something, and you want to be able to break it down for your community, your target market, the people that you serve, that's when icon set become super, super handy. You can usually break them down and have a different icon representing each service, or product category, or content category. I want to talk to you now about some pro tips in terms of when you get into the wide world of graphic elements. As you're researching, the best thing that I can tell you to do is just like everything else, there's a lot of stuff out there. We're going to go over some resources where you can like buy graphic elements and all that stuff. You can get into it really, really deep. The best thing that you can do is really always go back to what is it that I need for my business. If your creative business has a lot of services, or a lot of products, or a lot of content creation, then what do you need in terms of your graphic elements to be able to best organize that? Then that way your target market, or your community, or the people that you serve, can understand that easily. It's meant to help you not confuse other, it's meant to help people understand what you're offering them, not make them more confused. So the question that you should be asking yourself over and over again is, do I want these graphic elements because I think they're cool or cute, or whatever? Or do I actually need them? If it's just one, don't do it. Trust me, on this one, you'll end up with a bunch of graphic elements that you'll never use, and that's not the point of what we're trying to do here. If you do need it, actually, I'll give you a good example. Going back to the icon set and what I was saying before. Say, for example, you have one thing that you do, and you do it really, really well. You might not need an icon set to describe your one thing. You might not need to buy a whole 20 pack of icons, or make them from scratch, or whatever, just to describe the one thing that you do awesome. Meanwhile, if you are a store front, or a designer, or something with lots of different types of services where you need to like categorized things, that's where you'll say, 'Okay, you know what, I'm going to invest in an icon set that matches my brand, that looks good with my season archetype." That's where it'll make more sense. What you're really trying to do, is make sure that it's easier on people to understand what you do instead of more complicated. You want that across the board. One of the things that this means is you have to plan out what it is that you're going to be creating for your brand. Some of the easy ones that you might gravitate towards are things like a website, a business card. Maybe you have a PDF that you want to be able to send out for potential clients, or customers, or proposals. If you have an E-commerce store and you're selling prints and things, then you may want to understand how to best categorize all of the types of products that you have. From there, once that's how you figure out what you need and then you can start looking for the correct graphic elements for that. Takes a little bit of planning, takes a whole lot of discipline. But it's so worth it. Now let's look at some examples. For this first example, I want to show you one of my clients. Her name is Sheila Marie, and actually, I call her like the gateway drug to wellness for women of color. For her brand one of the things that I just want to point out to you is the dividers and the patterns that you can see throughout her entire website. Here we have patterns built into even the photography that she has on her site. Then you can see here that for her newsletter, she has a texture that has a repeat pattern behind it, but it's really subtle. That's a way to be able to use dividers and patterns and textures in your brand. For her, because she works with women of color and primarily women of African descent we totally went in and took the patterns and textures with that in mind. Again, looking to see how you can use them to make it more cohesive experience for the brand that you're creating. Let's check out the next example. The next example is Julie Smith. You might recognize some of those elements for her brand on her website. She's actually our Spring Archetype representative. One of the things that you can see on Julie Smith's blog is all the categories and illustrations that were created by me for her blog. Because she works with a lot of different categories, you can see there's one for communication, relationships, education, love, sex, and gender, substance use. She works with teenagers and their parents to be able to build bridges between the two of them. There's a lot of different topics that she can talk about. That's a great example of when you know you need an icon set and in this case, we used an illustration style for the icon set that we developed for her. There are a few different things that you can do around creating graphic elements. One, you can hire a designer, we'll get into that a little bit later. If you want something super custom, that example is just like what we just looked at for Julie Smith. I was the designer that got hired and we created an entire icon set and brand. Actually, we did everything from beginning to finish together. But what I would recommend is especially, if you're starting out or just at the experimenting stage with your brand, just to see what works and what doesn't, is to check out these websites as resources to buy graphic elements and be able to use them. The first resource I want to show you as my absolute favorite, it's called Creative Market. Creative Market is basically a store of graphic elements. It's really powerful. You can find everything in there. You can find fonts, you can find patterns, textures, photography, templates for social media, icon sets, all things that would work for your brand. Definitely check it out. The only caveat I will say is, again, always go through the process of doing a whole lot of research first. Maybe use the same process that we use for fonts and make a folder and call it, "Graphic Elements That I'm Thinking About Using". Take screenshots and make a note, maybe rename the screenshot the name of that graphic elements of the pack that you're looking at. Then just keep them all in there before making the purchases, because you can really end up racking up a bunch of graphic elements that when you really think about it, you only need like one or two. Creative Market, I think is amazing. I also wanted to give some free resources. Another resource is a website called Web Designer Depot. They have an entire category called freebies. Actually, another thing to know about Creative Market real quick is if you sign up to have a profile on their website, then every single week they do have freebies, but you don't control which ones are free. It'll change every single week. Sometimes you get lucky and you hit the little graphic element lottery. You went some graphic elements for free. You can do that on Creative Market. It's just more of a roulette. Web Designer Depot has an entire category of freebies that are always free. Then the last website that I wanted to share with you is one called Graphic Burger. Graphic Burger is a combination. Some of them are free and some of them are paid. Just keep an eye out, but it's a great resource for all bunch of different types of graphic elements. What's great about this is that all those elements are ready to go and ready for you to use. Another resource that I wanted to share with you all, if you are in need of an icon set, are a few different websites. One of them is called the Noun Project. If you look at it, you can see that there's a lot of, that's all they do is icons. Some of them are black and white, some of them are color. I really like it because you can easily find a family of like-minded icons. Icons that look from the same design, the same source. That will really help you out as you build out your eye concept for your brand. Another tool or website that I think is helpful, but you need to have the caveat is you need to sign up for our profile with them is canva.com. Canva.com is really neat because they let you do, Photoshop light on the web.You can go in and you can make some basic designs for social media, for Facebook graphics, presentations, whatever. You name it, they have a template for it. What's neat about it is built into their platform our basic icons and basic shapes that you can use for your brand and build on it like that. They have a free version, which is great, and they also have a paid version, which I think opens up more options for you. But either one, you're probably pretty good. The last place that I want to recommend is Dribbble with three bs. This is actually a repository for a lot of really cool design that's coming out from some of the world's best designers. There's so much good design on that website. If you just do a search for the word free, it's little pro tip for you, what will come up in the search results are designers, and designs that are willing to give away one of their designs or some of their designs. If you just search through that search results on Dribbble, you might uncover some really great designs that you can just download and use for your business, which is really cool. The third part that I want to share it with you in terms of resources is patterns and textures. There's two places that I really recommend for looking for patterns. One is subtlepatterns.com. What's cool about subtlepatterns.com is that you can download a lot of different patterns and lay them on top of your color palette. That will make a really nice textured background as a graphic element that you could use on your website or behind fliers, whatever. It's really helpful. Then the second place that I really recommend is again, you can't go wrong, Creative Market. We already talked about it and we'll go back into it. But Creative Market definitely also has a lot of patterns and dividers and staff for sale. 19. Designing A Logo: A logo is what creates a first impression for your brand. It's so, so, so important. A lot of times it's the point of first contact between you and your target market. It should be ideally the single most identifiable piece of your branding. You might have textures from one place and elements and icons from another place and someone else might have the same ones and it won't matter, but your logo really ideally needs to feel like you as much as possible. Let's get into what you want to do when you are looking for making this logo. Some tips: One, you really want your logo design to be flexible because especially as a creative business, chances are you're going to go through different stages of evolution as a creative business owner. The closer I find that your business is to who you are, you really need to create a logo that can evolve with you. It's not what you think. Instinctual you might be thinking, all right, so I need to find a logo with the most specific font and like that it looks so different than everybody else's and actually, I would say the opposite. The logos that can stand the test of time are ones that are simple, clean, and just very, very straight forward. You might want to explore that instead of going into the far eccentric, like I said when we were talking about fonts, lot of fonts will become your logo. The display fonts which someone when they hear unique, they might go and gravitates towards that. They fall out of trends really, really fast and they just have like a cycle, like a life cycle. Whereas some of the more traditional or timeless fonts that are serif or sans-serif fonts. They do stand the test of time. We're using fonts that existed way back when in a printing press. So that's when you know something can grow and evolve with you. The key is to make sure that you're picking one out that works best with your brand story and your brand archetype. So let's talk about the perks of a well-designed logo. A well-designed logo, it's such a great tool. So it basically creates the opportunity for someone to really distinguish themselves from their competitors. It immediately creates confidence, it stands out and most of all, when you have a well-designed logo, it feels less amateur and more professional which means again going back to one of our first lessons, it's creating that consistency, that legitimacy in that trust, which ultimately leads to someone purchasing your services, your product, your art, whatever. Before we go into the different types of logos, I just want to say one more thing. Trust me on this one, when it comes to design, less is more. All right, let's go into the different types of logos. There are different classifications of logos and we'll be covering some of them in this lesson. You can go pretty far deep in the design world with this, but I'm going to leave it to the basic ones. So the first one is the Type-only logo. It can also be called logo type or wordmark. They all mean the same thing. Essentially this type of logo includes a brand name that uses typography only. Here's some examples: Disney is a really strong one, West Elm, which is like a furniture company, also has a Type-only logo. Those are some examples that we know in our day-to-day of Type-only logos. To me, I'm just going to say this out loud right now. This is the way that you want to go for your creative business. It is the simplest way. You can't get it wrong. As long as you pick a font that matches your brand archetype and your season archetype and it will give you room to grow and evolve and shift which is in our nature as creative business owners. So the next type of logo classification is the Type and Symbol or Icon logo. So it's also known as a combination mark. This type of logo includes the brand name plus a symbol that goes with it. Some examples could be like the Adidas logo. You have the word Adidas and then you've got those three stripes, or like the American Airlines logo or they have their little insignia that's on the back of all their planes. There are both great examples of combination marks, otherwise known as the type plus symbol or icon logo and then finally, the third classification is the Symbol/ icon only logo. You can also call these symbolic or iconic logos. This type of logo includes a symbol only, and it's typically only used by established brands. Think of your Nike or Apple. I really don't recommend that you do this for your creative business because chances are, if you're watching this video, you're probably not at the point where someone just sees a swoosh and knows it's you. Let's just leave it there. So next up I'm going walk you through a process to start developing your own primary logo. Step one that I recommend is look for logo inspiration, pinterest.com is a great place, dribble.com is also a great place. We've talked a little bit about both of those websites in the past, but essentially there are websites that have a lot of design examples on there and maybe when you're first starting out and you're deciding I'm going to research right now. Only type, only logos or only combination marks the symbol plus the type logo. You're trying to figure out, just to get a sense of it, you're trying to figure out what might work best for your brand. So I would just start researching there. Step two, once you have like a folder filled with pictures that you've downloaded and inspirations, resources that you've gotten on Pinterest and on Dribble of different logos that you like. Start breaking it down for yourself. Is your folder filled with the combination logos? Then that might be a hint that you are totally gravitating towards that and that's the way to go for your business. Are you finding that you have only type only logos in your folder and they're like all super modern-looking? That's a hint. That's the way you should go. When it comes to building your visual identity, even down to logos. There's a lot of rules that you can get stuck in. But ultimately, we're building something that's supposed to feel like you and look like you. The more that you use your gut and your intuition and figure out what you like and reverse engineer it the better. So let's look at some examples of the Type-only logos and the combination logos. We'll begin with the Type-only logos. So here up on the screen you can see a logo that I designed for a company called Imalac. Imalac is definitely going under the category of a summer archetype. They are modern, feminine and straightforward. Their company does a super high-tech breastfeeding pump for women who are on the go. What's interesting about their logo, as you can see that this Type only logo, it's very, very clean and the font is super minimal. It matches with who they are. Let's look at a second example because I really want to show how wide the spectrum is and how much you can play with just a Type-only logo and yes, for the record, I'm focusing on this because I'm really, really nudging hard that this is the direction that you go in Type-only, it can grow and evolve with you, promise. So with Julie Smith, you might recognize her from other lessons. She has a brand again that is a spring archetype, fun, irreverent, gritty, and also professional because what she's doing is in the industry of mental health, people need to know that she's a certified in a bazillion things to talk about teenage psychology. So you can see that for her logo, what we did was combine a handwritten brush lettered word for Julie. It was not a fun I actually drew it by hand. Sorry, sorry, not sorry. But you can find fonts that are similar to it, promise, and then we made her last name in a more grounded, bold, modern fonts. So then that way you've got a little bit of both, you told the whole story right there. So those are two examples of Type-only logos, and I hope that it shows that there's everything from the most minimal Chanel type logo to the most hand lettered brush stroke type logo within that world. Please stay in that world. Okay, so next up is the combination mark logos. So this is your type plus your symbol or your icon logos. So here are some examples, well two examples that we'll go through so you can check it out. Ideally, if you're going to go this route, you want your symbol to do a couple things, right? So either they are filling in the story, like your symbol in your logo will fill in the story of what your business is about or it adds to the story. So either filling up the missing holes, I'm going to have an example of that or it adds to the story that's already present in the font itself. Let's do that adding to the story first. Check out this logo that I created for a company called goddess retreats. Goddess retreats, as the name implies, is a retreat service for women in Bali, Indonesia. And with them they wanted it to feel, they are very much a spring archetype. They wanted it to feel fun and light and effervescent and free. A lot of women that go there like, finding themselves. So they wanted to convey that in their logo. It's dynamic and it's modern. But, when they started going into the different types of retreats that they were doing and they were starting to think about expanding. We actually created these sub logos. Don't worry about that. Just for this example, we'll go into it. I wanted to show you one of them. So they were thinking about going into another country and doing a goddess retreats snow, were the retreat center would not be in Bali anymore, but it would be all around snow related activities. So here you can see that we have the words goddess retreat, the master logo with the word snow underneath it. But what I did in order to create more of the story, so if someone's just skimming, they're getting a lot of the same information repeatedly is I added a little snowflake on top with some tiny element. You probably can't even see it here of like a flower in the middle. It lines up with all of their other retreats, but it gives more information about what they're trying to achieve. So that is telling more of the story through your symbol or through your icon in this combination logo type. Another example that I want to show you that for little caveat, I did not design this, I just am a fan of this logo is for a combination logo. Is for a restaurant called Yolk. Yolk is a restaurant that seems to be super focused on breakfast foods. I think that the name yolk, it's the center of the egg. It implies eggs are kind of seen as a breakfast food most of the time, but I feel like it's missing some information. Here, whoever designed this, did a really good job of using an icon to fill in the blanks. So as you can see, they have the word yolk. They have a little icon of a sun coming up as if it were dawn above the word. All this is doing is totally implying like you want to come here for breakfast or brunch. This is what we mean. Me being a designer, I can't help it also think to myself that the little yellow center of the sun also looks like a yolk. So there's a lot of layers to that design that I personally really love. Keep in mind too, that a symbol could actually differentiate your business from other competitors. An example of a business that does this really, really well is the business Evernote, which is like a tech app company to take your notes. What's cool about it is their symbol ended up being a little bit unexpected, but makes total sense for what their services. So their symbol is this little green elephant. We all know that an elephant never forgets. So even though it's not really filling in the blanks or telling more of the story. But just in a more abstract, less direct way, it does stand out like whenever you see a little green elephant, you're like, "oh yeah, Evernote." So you don't need your symbol to be that clever. But just think about like the story that is telling people about your brand for your creative business. That's really ultimately what you are trying to do if you're going for the combination work. All right, so now the next step, step three, C, is choosing the type of logo that you want. We've been knee deep, you've done research. You have a folder filled with different references. Now it's go time. You got to make the decision and choose which path are you going? Again, I'm going to say it probably for the third or fourth or fifth or tenth time, I do recommend type only logos for creative businesses because ultimately when we are in creator mode, we don't always know where things are going to go. That's the magic of what we do, right? That's the magic that we bring to the table. I do believe that even more than the combination mark, the type only logo is the most flexible logo classification that exists, then it can grow and evolve with you. So that's my recommendation, but definitely step three is making that decision and then starting to explore. So actually starting to explore step four. So start playing around with different fonts. Look at your references. What I recommend is opening up a document and start writing out the name of your creative business or your name, if that is the name of your creative business and you're just going as yourself, that's how my business is. But it's more than just writing it out on one line. Play with different combinations. Remember the Julie Smith example, we had two different type fonts or treatments that we combine together and start seeing if you can mix and match in a way that makes sense that's clean and concise for your brand. In the beginning, stick to black and white. When you're starting to play with your fonts to create your logo. The reason for this is, color is distracting, I said before, and our color lesson, it speaks to the subconscious inside of us, like in us all, color is emotion. We're trying to do the best decision for our business as possible. So black and white, or even just like black font on white background is the way to go at this stage as you're experimenting. You want your logo to always make sense in black and white because if you rely on color, you're not always going to have that option. So say for example, you have your creative business, you've launched it and now someone wants to come like, you're going to go speak at an event. The event person is like,"oh great, can you send me your logos so that I can put it on the pamphlet that people are going to get with the logo and the names of all the speakers." You send them a color logo and they write back to you, "I'm so sorry. We're printing black and white only for budget purposes." You want your logo to be strong at its most base level and then the color adding onto it is only going to be like icing on the cake. All right, so once you have figured out a font combination, or just even one font or one type or one combination that works for your brand, the next step is refine. This is probably the hardest part of being a designer. The process of refining, refining, refining. See what's working, see what is not, see if you can change it. Really whittle it down. The simpler the better, less is more. All of those idioms that we hear day in and day out, they are so true when it comes to design. Just sit back. I like to do personally a combination of things. Sometimes if I know that I want to do direct like for sure a logo that I am making is going to be based on a font, I go directly to the computer, and I just start playing with the font, the different weights of the font like bold, italic, whatever is available to you. I will just play if your business name is two words, I'll stack them differently. I will move them around, really have fun with them. Meanwhile, if you are seeing that part of your brand is a bit more like hand done or illustrative, then I would go straight to the sketchbook and start sketching things out. Use a pencil, use a pen, and just don't make it a perfect sketch. You are not trying to sketch the most beautiful logo at the first time, just like start sketching ideas. A little quirk that I personally have is, I actually start writing things down. I'll sketch with words first. It sounds weird, but I 'm just sharing with you in case. There's no right or wrong way to do it. When I start thinking of ideas, I might just start saying, "A going into C", and it won't make sense to anyone other than me, but it's like an idea that I have in my head. If I write it out, I will remember it but it will take me a really long time to sketch it. I will skip the sketching part and I will just go back to it later. But sketchbook is really good for that if you are a little bit more of a tactile person. Then, keep experimenting until you find a logo that you actually like. The last step, step Z, is to get feedback. This step is optional. I always tell folks to be very, very careful about who you are asking for feedback, especially around design for your creative business. We have been digging deep and really, really having a foundation that your friends or your family will not have done, right? They won't. I am just going to say that again. They haven't done this yet. It's important for you to go to people that you really trust. You trust and know two things. Know who you are and know the thing that you are building, what your vision is, and that they believe in you, three things. Because you want to get feedback from people who are supportive instead of getting feedback like, "I don't think you should start a creative business anyway. Let us talk about that instead." No, that is not what we are trying to do. That's why I say this last step is optional. If you feel strongly that you have found your jam and your logo, do not ask anyone, just go with it. Okay, I want to share a resource with you. If you are finding yourself getting stuck in the sketches, the folder, and fonts and you are like, "I hate Nadia right now." I am going to give you a little hint that you are going to thank me for. That website platform called "Square space", they totally have something called the logo maker. It's an interactive website with a bunch of different elements that you can already use. You can make an icon, logo or a combination logo that has a symbol or an icon in it, or a type only logo. They have like examples and stuff. It is like drag and drop and mix and match, super-simple. You might want to start there if you are not a designer. Just to get used to thinking that way and if you are feeling stuck with your fonts and with your sketches. It's logo.squarespace.com. It's fantastic. All right, now that you have a logo, add your colors to it, step x. Once you know the basic construction of your logo, you can add the colors to it, and then you might still need to tweak. I'm just going to say that out loud. Maybe you had your brand colors to it and you are like, "Oh actually, I think maybe I want to make my first name in italics because I think it will work better with this color combination." Have at it. It's not a scientific process. Fill it out and see. At the end of every step, definitely you look over it and ask yourself, is this really me? Then make changes accordingly. Once you have your primary logo locked down, then the next step is to try it out in different settings. Try and get on Canva.com or something, put it on a background and see what it looks like for a social media. Get on Canva.com and try it out. They have templates for business cards. Feel it out and make some fake things using that platform or Photoshop or Google Draw. Just see how it comes out. You might get more information once you see your logo in the wild than when it is just floating there on your screen or in your sketch book. Okay. [inaudible] the last step of your logo, is to love it and put that logo on everything. I just wanted to go over some extra tips. Just organize in one spot in terms of your logo design. One, be really cautious with trends. Try to go for something that really actually feels like you, instead of what you are seeing on Instagram. Two, don't over-complicate it. Keep it simple so in that way, it actually can grow and evolve with you. Three, please, please, please keep your maximum number of fonts in your logo to two. One, two, no three, no four, no five. Even better if it is one. That way you can keep the attention really focused from other people. Also, a little tip that I like to share is be aware of when you are going to make your logo alive. It' totally something to be celebrated. A lot of times, a logo reveal. You can do a little teaser. You can tell people that you are working on it. When you unveil it, it is a big deal because it is one of the most important graphic elements that you are creating for your business. Celebrate it. 20. Choosing Your Photography: Okay, now let's talk about photography. Photography is to me the glue for your visual identity, for your brand. It totally reinforces your tone and voice but in like a visual way. The tone and voice words that we were using. We were using it to guide our content creation and what kinds of words that we use. But photography is basically taking that and shelling it out in a visual format, right? The words that you eat with your eyes. We're going to go back to our brand archetype or season archetypes to be able to start guiding us in being able to create a photo library for our brand. For example, if you are a fall or autumn archetype, then maybe you're going to be looking for photos that have deeper tones. That are maybe a bit more dark or rich or saturated, that feel really cozy and warm, like you would be having tea with a friend. If you're a spring archetype, then probably your photos are light and bright. Maybe a lot of white light and bright colors that are pastel and fun and quirky. When you really take the time to use your season archetype to research for photos and start creating your photo library. For the record when I say photo library, this can mean a few things, but essentially what I mean is creating a folder on your computer with photos in it. It's really not that complicated. Those are photos that you can use over and over again to be able to tell the story of your brand. When we're talking about photography, we're showing it across the board. It can be used for your website, it can be used on printed material, it can be used for social media. There's kind of two ways that you can go about creating a photo library. I'm going to mention the first way and then I'll walk you through the second way. The first way is to actually go out there and hire a photographer and have a photoshoot for you and your creative business. If you have a budget, you have the ability to do that, you're super clear. You can totally do this it's worth every penny, quite honestly. I'll talk a little bit more in a mini session, a mini lesson about hiring other creatives for your creative business. But I'll just leave it at that for now. The second way that we're gonna talk about is going out there and finding stock photography. Some free and some paid. I'll give you some resources for that as well. The payoff that you get when you take the time to really find photos that tell your story and align with your season archetype, is the same payoff that you get when you do anything with intention. People believe you, they have confidence in your ability to follow through on whatever it is that you're doing. They trust you and ultimately they buy from you. Now I want to go into some tips that I want to share with you all about choosing photos. There are I think two or three, I can't count. One is consistency. Consistency is so key when it comes to choosing photos that are building out the story of your brand. This means that you want the photos that you put on your website to have the same feel as the photos that you have on your social media, that have the same feel as the photos that you use for your email newsletter, that have the same feel as the videos that you're making as everything that's coming, that's being created by you for your creative business. Consistency in the look and feel of your photography. You can use your season archetype to be able to make that happen. That is going to be so clutch for you and your brand. The other thing I'll say is, when you're creating your photo library consider two things. One, consider the style and also consider the subject matter. A lot of times I might see folks using a consistent feel, but the style of the photos are really different and kind of don't match or the stuff that's in the photos don't match. So let me give you a clear example. Let's go back to our fall archetype. A fall archetype person might have in the photos that they're using, whether it's coming from a photoshoot or stock photography. More nature themes and even with the nature themes even going more like mountains and plants and earth. Because that's our earthy art archetype. Whereas a spring archetype might have more like the beach and light bright colors and turquoise waters. If they're going with nature or they might not even have nature at all. A spring archetype might have balloons and bubbles and cupcakes and that sort of thing, in pastel tones and very bubbly. The photos need to look like they're coming from the same place or the same story but pay attention to what's in the photos themselves. A lot of times we might just get stuck on what it looks like and my color palette looks aligned here, but then the subject doesn't make sense for you. Let's go over some examples for what it looks like to have that consistency in the look and feel and in the subject matter. All right, because I've been using fall and spring, I wanted to show those two types of examples. Check it out. The first one that we're going to look over is a social media blogger and entrepreneur. Like a creative business owner. She's highly successful. Her name is LC Larson. When you look at her feed, this is her Instagram feed. You can totally tell that she's a fall archetype. Everything is very warm and inviting and all of the photos, she has taken them through filters that have a bit of a chocolaty tone to them. You can see those browns and like there's no real pure white in her feed like even the whites are just like a cream instead of a white. You can definitely see a lot about her personality and her brand just from that alone. Another example is Caroline Kelso Zook. She is our spring archetype example. She's an artist, an author and an entrepreneur who I think definitely embodies the spring archetype. Her feed is actually largely her artwork, which is bright and happy, full of positive affirmations. But then when she does post photos of herself or what's happening in her life or other types of photos, she makes sure that it's also consistent with having high contrast. Those colors are really bright and feeling really happy because it totally aligns with who she is. Let's go into finding great stock photos. This is if you are not going to be hiring a photographer and doing a photoshoot for your brand. If you're not ready for that, then there are a lot of great places to find high-quality stock photography that you can use or adapt for your business. One site that I want to show you all is a website called Unsplash. Unsplash is a really good site for free stock photography. A lot of times all they're asking is for you to give some credit to the photographer, but even that's not required. A lot of different really talented photographers are uploading amazing work to Unsplash. The way that I like to go about it is I just type in, the themes that I'm looking for. Again, go back to your tone words, put in words like inspirational, put in words like gritty. Whatever works for you and your creative business and see what comes up. Don't stop at just one word. Just try a few different things and start downloading and see if you can create your photo library from that. The next website that I'd like to share with you all is a website called Stocksy. Stocksy is my favorite stock photography website ever. The level of talent on Stocksy is insane. Stocksy, however, is different than Unsplash because all of those photos you do have to pay per photo. You can choose like the size of your image and then I think they start at $15 per photo and then they just go up from there. One of the combinations that I'm just going to suggest here, especially if you are in the beginning stages of your business. One of the cons of using Unsplash is that a lot of people use that website, which means if you are choosing a photo from Unsplash, chances are a lot of other people are also using it and it lessens the impact. Not that it's not going to be impactful. It just lessens the impact of that photo if someone has also seen it on like 10 other brands, right? What I think is really smart and that I've done quite a bit for my clients is doing a combination of Stocksy, where you pay for the photo, which means way fewer people are bothering to do that. Which means way fewer people have that photo. Use Stocksy for like the big things like the first photo that you see on your website or all the main images at the top of your website. Then use Unsplash, the free stock photography, for things that are like less important. Maybe a little bit further down if you're designing a website or use that for social media. But definitely like if you're not able to invest in having a photoshoot, do invest in a few key photos coming from Stocksy. It is awesome. The last resource that I wanted to share with you all is the Death to Stock photo. I don't use them very much, but it's a cool concept, especially if you're someone who in your creative business, you're going to be coming out with a lot of content. I will say that this is like the Netflix of stock photography. You pay a subscription every single month and you have access to stock photography. A lot of their stuff looks really similar. If you get on that website and you see that it really matches your season archetype. I say go for it. You're going to be creating a lot of content to promote your business. I just find that the quality of the photography on Death to Stock photo is really high. Those are my resources for stock photography and I hope that you start building your photo library. 21. Creating Your Brand Board: All right. So we have finally reached the last step, the final stage of building your Visual Identity Foundations. Next up, we're going to be talking about building a brand board, putting it altogether. What is a brand board? It's really simple, it's a way to put on one document all of the information that you've created for your visual identity. It has all of your brand's components, the fonts, your logo, your colors, and your patterns and your textures. Why is a brand board helpful? Well, there's a lot of reasons why it's helpful, but I'll go over a few top ones. One, it's really useful to have everything in one place. If you've made it this far in this class, you completely understand that there's a lot of work that goes into creating your brand. A lot of different components, especially the more that you want it to feel and look like you. A brand board is the compilation of all of those things in one place so that you can quickly access it. Which brings me to my next point. A brand board saves you time. Say for example, you want to bang out some graphics for your creative business. Well, if you've got your brand board right there and you're able to quickly see what your photography style is, what your mood board looks like, what your colors are, what your fonts are. You almost don't have to think. You can just focus at the task at hand, which is making these graphics that you need to make for social media or whatever and the brand board just works as your guide. A brand board also helps you when it comes to contractors and outsourced helpers. If for example, you are going to do your first photo shoot. Definitely, definitely, share your Mood Board and your brand board with the photographer, and they're going to be able to get a sense of what you're about and what look and feel to go forward with for you. Pro tip also send those brand pillars their way also, like it adds so much depth and dimension to whatever it is that you're trying to create. But even if you're not hiring a creative freelancer to help you in your creative business, send the brand board over to even like a virtual assistant that's just helping you out, creating your next email, newsletter or whatever, following up with potential clients, whatever that might be, it's important for them to also have the brand boards, so they're using the right fonts, the right language, that thing. Okay, so I wanted to touch base on brand board versus brand guidelines. In this class, we're only going to be focusing on the brand board. The brand board is, like I said, a very simple, straightforward documents that goes through your visual identity elements. The fonts, photos, patterns, textures, that thing, a brand guideline is a much more in-depth document in your brand. We will not be doing brand guidelines in this class, we're just sticking to the brand board to make it easy for you to get your branding out there. 22. Brand Board Tutorial: All right. Let's get into your final project, which is your brand board. We talked about brand boards versus brand guidelines. This last lesson of the visionary branding course is a tutorial on creating your own brand board. Let's get to it. You have a template that I created for you that's just basic. You can switch things up, you can change the order, it's all in Google slides. The first thing that you're going to do is go over to, "File," to get you started, hit, "Make a copy." Then what you'll want to do is save it somewhere in your own Google Drive or for me, I'm just going to call it Nadia Payan Brand Board and I'm actually going to use my personal brand. When you hit, "OK," it's going to open up a new document. The template is now your version and you can start making changes. The basics of the brand border all here, your logo, your color palette, patterns, textures, icons, whatever it is that you are adding into your visual identity, your fonts, and your mood board. Actually, I would like to show you all, I actually created a folder for myself where before even getting into this template, I organized everything. Then that way I can just drag and drop what I needed as my reference for this. Let's get started with Google Draw. You can actually just do a few different things to get your image into the template. You can drag it over. There we go, drag it over and it'll just plop it in there. So there we go, we can add my logo here, and I actually put a placeholder rectangle. I can just select it and delete it. Then that way it's nicer for me. I actually want to move this up a little bit because we can move everything up. There we go, just to evenly distribute things. Here now I have my logo in here. The other thing that you could do if you wanted to is press, "Insert Image." Then, "Upload from computer." Then you can go to the file directly and upload it that way. There's more than one way to get the image in there. Another thing that I did, now that I have my logo up here, we can get into color palette. I actually created a small color palette like a mini version of my color palette in a Google Spreadsheet for myself and for the sake of this tutorial and what we can do then is these are all little rectangles and we can change the fill color. I'm going to show you how. When I go over here, I have my hex code, I'll copy that. Come back here, my rectangle is selected, I press this fill color and I click "Custom." Here, I have the opportunity to put my hex code in and press, "OK." Just like that, the little rectangle changes color, I also get to put my hex code at the bottom there. For me, I'm going to go ahead and make this a size ten and bold. There we go. Actually, I'm going to make this bigger. I think it's bigger and nice. Then we do that for every single one. I'll just go ahead and copy this hex code. Highlight the rectangle that I want to change the color for, go over here to, "Fill color, custom and paste." Then also upload it here. Next color, this dark blue and you'll see when I plop in my mood board, how many more colors I have going on. It's just because of my design background and my love of colors. I definitely went a little nuts with the color palette for my personal brand. But obviously, you all know, it's not what I would recommend for someone who is just starting out and wanting to get their brand together. I can select the rectangle here, "Custom," again and actually I just noticed something really cool. Here's five of my colors from my personal color palette for my brand. But I actually just noticed something neat. If I click on this rectangle and I go to, "Fill color." Now I have all these colors here because I've been adding them in. Which means that if you decide to use Google Draw to like make your social media graphics and stuff like that. You could easily have your entire color pallet ready to go for your brand, which is really cool. I actually hadn't noticed that before. Let's keep moving on. Here's a section for patterns, textures, icons. For me, I actually don't have icons. I do have patterns and textures. I just went in double-clicked and deleted the word icons and I go back to my folder where I made my brand board assets. I actually have three different examples of textures. One, like a photo treatment thing that I have for creative retreat that I run called Majic Jungle that I use on my website. I'm going to go ahead and drag and drop that. It's huge obviously. Let's make it smaller, you just grab the side here and resize. It doesn't have to be perfect. It's just for us to be able to see what's going on. Then maybe I'll just delete these two guys, these two placeholders because I'm not going to need them. Go ahead and also bring in my web backgrounds. Here, I'm actually going to drag and drop two at a time. I know, so fancy and start resizing as well. These are just like web backdrops that I use for my own brand and I added like a dusty texture to them just because I like. For my personal brand, I wanted to feel more organic and imperfect because that's who I am. I'm organic and imperfect, that's what I'm about. It's not a perfect process. It's a creative one. I'm just going to resize these and there we go. I would have to zoom in to be able to see like my dusty texture. But it's good there. I can see that I like these paintbrush strokes and I liked the dusty textures and it's in my colors and those are my patterns and textures for my brand. That's good for me. Now, let's talk about the fonts. What I did for my fonts is I actually went and took screenshots of them with their name. Sofia pro and Minerva modern, are the two fonts that I primarily use for my personal brand. Again, I can grab both and drag and drop them over here. One ends up right on top of the other. You've got to move one. I'll just go ahead and resize them for this font section, actually I'm going to delete this. Because I don't need it there. Because I'm replacing it with the actual font name. Then Minerva modern and let's put it over here. That's going to be really long. There we go. It's all right and taking out this fonts there and making sure. I think I'm going to just make Sofia pro smaller, so it aligns in terms of the sizing, mix the brand board look a little better. These are my two fonts. This now feels a little bit high up there. I'm going to select them both. The little rectangle and the word fonts and bring it down. There's just a little bit more space. Then finally the mood board, you've got a couple options with a mood board. I went ahead and made it a little mini mood board. You can go ahead and do the exact same process for the mood board tutorial and implement it here and insert images and mask them and all that if you feel inclined to. The other thing that you can do is you could have saved your mood board as a JPEG or as an image. Then you could come and save yours and save it as an image. What I'm doing is I'm actually going to drag it over here, and I've got my whole mood board ready to go, saved as a JPEG, and I'm just going to bring it into the document. If that's the route that you want to take, just select all and delete this baby and then bring in your own mood board. Your own JPEG and there we go, there we have it. Now I have a quick reference document for all of my brand visual identity assets. I've got my logo, if you have a secondary logo, you can also put it there. I personally don't, I've gotten my color palette, which as you can see from my mood board is actually way bigger. I could have taken all of this and made a second row if I had wanted to, you feel free to do that. But again, like I mentioned before, I really don't recommend having that many colors when you're just getting started out. When you're just getting started and then I've got my patterns and textures. If you have icons put them there too. If you want right now there's a transparent background. But if you wanted you could make another rectangle. Let's just do a copy-paste. This is going to be a little strange. I'm actually going to cover the whole thing and this brown. I'll change the color to white. Then I will under order. I did a right-click and I'll choose, "Right-click, order, sent it back." There we have it. This is your brand board and you can change it up, you can do whatever you need to do to make it great for your brand. One little thing that you could do is maybe instead of having these black rectangles, you actually say, "You know what, I'm going to go ahead and take advantage and change them all to this cream color or one of my brand colors." There we go. All of them have that color or you want to change the font directly here. Do what you need to do to make it yours. That is your tutorial for your brand board for your final project. I just want to say, "You did it." This is the end. This is the end of the visionary branding course and you made it. Congratulations, you have worked really hard. There's a lot to think through and when you want to do branding with intention, it's a lot of inner work. You decided to take the more interesting path of going from the inside out and for that, I commend you. "Now, give yourself a huge hug. Take a moment to celebrate your commitment to the long-term vision of your brand." This is not for the faint of heart. Building a brand means that you're interested in being around for the long run. You have done that for yourself, for your vision, for your creative business. Your conscious business with so much love and care and it's going to show, people will feel that. Now, I wish you the best. "Go out there and share your vision to the world." Keep in touch and congratulations again. Great job.