Your graphic identity consists of all the things that help your brand or business differentiate itself visually in its graphic forms. It’s your brand’s sense of style, from its choice of typeface to its logos, wordmarks, colour palettes, design layouts, and even the environment and interior design of your studio or office.

Colour Palette

One of the first things you’re going to want to consider is your brand’s colour palette. Colour has a very profound impact on people and sends a very clear message about your brand in an instant. You’ll need to understand what feelings, emotions, and thoughts certain colours portray to help define your colour palette.

For example, blue denotes trustworthiness, green could reference freshness, the environment, or money, and yellow is associated with youthfulness and affordability. Colour theory is a vast, complex topic, so check out this article for more information.

You’ll also want to determine if your color palette is going to be complimentary, analogous, split complementary, or monotone. This is something you can decide later on, but it's something you will probably want to settle on before hiring a designer, or starting to design your marketing materials. Also, sticking with a minimalist black-and-white scheme while working on any designs will allow you to drop spot colors into your designs if you just choose one colour.

My friend Karen Byker is a wonderful maternity, newborn, and family photographer, and her brand design for her business Reflections of Life Photography is fantastic. She’s all about softness. Her brand’s colour palette is strictly muted earth tones. She even provides gowns for her clients to wear, so they stay consistent with photographic style. I can spot a Reflections of Life photograph from a mile away. I’ll link to Karen’s website in the show notes, so you can take a look.

It helps to do a bit of research with your printer to understand what they can do for you, as well. If you’re a luxury brand, consider asking about gold or silver foil and embossing or debossing.

Logos and Wordmarks

A logo is a symbolic representation of your brand and a wordmark is the textual representation of the brand. The brand’s name. For example, for McDonald’s the golden arches would be its logo and the word McDonald’s in the McDonald's brand typeface is its wordmark. For Chanel, the wordmark is the name Chanel itself but the logo is the two interlocking letter Cs.

Your business definitely needs a wordmark, but it doesn’t necessarily need a logo. In order to create a wordmark, you’re going to have to pick a typeface. Once again, you have to go back to your brand’s market position and core values for indicators. At any market position, your wordmark’s typeface can be either serif or sans-serif, so feel it out while you’re doing your search. There are a lot of great tools to help you select a font.

If you’re doing it yourself, and not hiring a designer, I would stick to Google Fonts. Google’s fonts appear all over the web and are often embedded right into graphic design programs, website and content management systems like Squarespace and WordPress, and even into the brand identifiers in studio management systems like Sprout Studio (affiliate link). It makes it easier to make sure your brand identity is consistent across all your brand assets. However, there are also other font repositories you can look at, such as Adobe Fonts, Font Squirrel, and Fonts.com to name a few.

For Blackwood Studios, I lucked out with a ligature in the typeface, Cinzel Decorative, on the double OOs. The capital letter O in the Typeface Cinzel Decorative is almost perfectly round like a wedding band, and when you put two of them side by side, as in the name Blackwood, the typeface has a ligature of the two Capital O’s overlapping, and it looks like two wedding bands overlapping. For that brand, I have adapted the capital letter B on its own as a brand mark and the two interlocking Os as an additional, more subtle brandmark.

If you are going to create a logo, the one piece of advice I would give you is to avoid photography-related clichés and iconography, such as cameras, tripods, viewfinder brackets, lights, light stands, flashes, or even smiles. Stay away from clichés. Clichés are not differentiators. Just imagine if every clothing store or clothing brand had a shirt or pants for a logo. If you are insistent upon an icon, go back to your core values. Make it something that has to do with the genesis of your brand, or the clientele you serve.

Tools

So, now that you’re ready to start developing your graphic identity, you’re going to need brand assets for a tone of stuff. Your website, Social Media profiles, Facebook Page headers Instagram stories, watermarks if you use watermarks, and a tone of other stuff. 

If you’re doing things yourself, I highly recommend using Canva. I’ll include a link in the show notes. Now, I am an affiliate, so if you sign up for a pro account, you’ll be supporting this show, but as with all things I recommend, I don’t recommend anything I don’t or wouldn’t use. And I use Canva every single day. Every day. 

I have a background in design. I started out designing newspaper layouts in university and was a member of the Society for News Design, and I’ve been designing websites since 1994. I was using Adobe InDesign when it was Aldus PageMaker and Adobe Illustrator when it was, well, it’s always just been Illustrator. But I was using CorelDRAW before that. I’m old! Leave me alone! 

But nowadays I prefer speed over endless tinkering and Canva is fast, amazing, and has everything you need. A pro account will even let you save your brand’s color palette so you can use it over and over again. There’s even a mobile app. Anyway, enough about Canva. Just use it. It’s awesome.

If you are a hardcore Illustrator and InDesign user, then by all means, use those. Whatever works for you and gets the job done.

If you have an existing brand but don’t have a brand guide or colour palette, consider making one. When you want to differentiate your brand from the rest of your competition, and you definitely do, remember that your graphic identity is going to be the primary way in which your clients connect with and think about your brand.

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