How you decide to visually portray your brand will dictate how everything else looks throughout the process of setting up your business. Your website, logo, business cards, emails and even products should all follow consistent guidelines for tone of voice, visuals and colours.
If a potential customer lands on your site after seeing your business on Instagram and it looks completely different, you’re unlikely to have their trust, and ultimately won’t make the sale.
But where do you start and how do you decide what colours and imagery to use?
We’ve got some helpful tips on what you should consider when building your brand image.
Colours
The colours you use on your site, in your logo, on any imagery and social media to promote your brand play an important role in how you’re perceived. You need to consider a few things when choosing your colours.
If you know who your audience is, you can decide how you want your website and any other content to make them feel. Are you going for a more fine-tuned, professional look? Or is there room for some playfulness and bold colours?
You also need to consider readability. Your website needs to be easily digestible, follow the same structure throughout and cater to those with accessibility issues. Switching up fonts on each page, using colours that are hard to distinguish or overcrowding pages with text-heavy sections are never a good idea and are likely to drive customers away. You should aim to make the customer journey as easy as possible, while also showing them who you are, what you do and how they should feel about you.
So on that, let’s take a look at the colour wheel. It might be something you haven’t seen since art class at school, but when planning out your brand palette it can come in handy. There are 3 categories that you can look at to help you decide.
Is your colour scheme:
- Based on analogous colours?
This is any 3 colours that are next to each other on a 12-part colour wheel. Usually, one of these 3 colours will be the main colour you use, with the other two used for accents and text.
- Based on complementary colours?
These are two colours that are opposite each other on the colour wheel, like orange and blue or purple and green. Choosing opposing colours creates the perfect contrast and stability, balancing out your brand image.
- Based on nature?
Looking to nature for colour harmony can give you so much inspiration because colours in nature don’t have to fit into a technical formula. Regardless of whether your business is nature-based or not, you can still find a lot of inspiration from looking at flowers, plants, trees and more.
Of course, you don’t have to use these theories to choose your colours, but it’s a good place to start to see what colours go well.
Something else you need to consider is how certain colours can evoke emotions. What do you want your audience to feel when they look at your site? Here’s a few examples of emotive colours:
- Warm colours (red, orange, yellow) – designed to show passion, happiness, enthusiasm and energy.
- Cool colours (green, blue, purple) – calming, relaxing and more reserved.
- Neutrals (black, white, grey, brown, beige, cream) – often used as a backdrop. These colours are affected by the colours used around them and usually combined with brighter accent colours.
It could be a good idea to use sites like Pinterest to create moodboards with your brand's colours, so you can see how they’ll look side by side. Once you’ve got an idea of what kinds of imagery you want to use, you could add those in too.
Creating your brand book
Once you’ve decided on a consistent brand look that looks and feels how you want it to, you can create a brand book. This is a document consisting of all the guidelines you and anyone who works with you should follow when creating content for your business. This can include fonts, tone of voice, image and graphic styles, colours and even preferences on grammar.
A good place to start would be writing an overview of what your business does and who your audience is. From there, you can go into more detail about the specific guidelines someone should follow if they’re writing or designing for your business. It’ll also make it clearer why you’ve chosen those specific rules if you establish the audience first.
Make sure you’re clear on what colours, specifically what shades, should be used. Include the colour code for each, so that there’s no confusion or room for mistakes to be made. This also applies to fonts.
If you’re using a different font for titles than you are body text, make that clear. This should be the go-to place for someone who wants to know your brand guidelines, so keep things simple, concise, and easy to digest – basically don’t over-complicate it!
Building your website
When it comes to building your website, many website builders have tools to help you keep your branding consistent. There’s options to save a specific colour palette, save images to a gallery or choose a theme that best reflects your brand to start you off.
WordPress, for example, has over 12,000 themes to base your website on, which you can fully customise to suit your tastes and needs. You can then choose your own header and background image, font style, site icon and colours.
Plus, there’s plenty of plugins to help with customisation, like Instant Images for thousands of stock images and videos to choose from.
Choose the host with the most
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If you need any help with your WordPress site, are unsure what package is right for you or just have a quick question, our team of experts are here to help. Give them a call on 0800 0612 153 or message via live chat.
