Branding is stressful, but Basic Branding can literally save your life

Tuesday 23 July 2024

By Laura Whitehouse | Mighty Fine Design

The stress of starting a business or working for yourself is as real as it gets. It’s like one day you’re at school, surrounded by nice adults who are literally paid to ensure you do not perish (and learn stuff, I guess). Then, the next day you’re suddenly the adult and oh god suddenly you’re the person in charge, except the one who’s paying you is also supposed to be you. So, yeah — it’s stressful.

What’s worse is that “being good at what you do” isn’t even enough any more: now you also have to look the part and present well. So, naturally, you google ‘Branding’ and you’re hit with two options: either you pay someone to take care of this nightmare for you, or you go full DIY and graduate from MS Paint to full-blown Photoshop (with a minor in web design and Illustrator).

Basic Branding tips to help establish your business
Obviously, these two options are equally stressful. You’ve just started a business, so “paying people” feels like going to the market to trade your meager food supply for fancy pictures of slightly better food. And unless you’ve already dabbled in such things, trying to create your own branding by opening something like Canva can induce fiddly tech sweat dense enough to hide tears.

However, as I’ve said before, there are ways that designers can help you build a brand without breaking the bank. The idea behind Basic Branding is that you get exactly what you need to start the ball rolling and have your business/bankable self looking consistent in the eyes of partners, clients, and customers.

With the Basic Branding Tips below, you can finally take steps to reduce your everyday stress levels — which, not to be dramatic or anything, can definitely kill you. So, in case you thought that headline was overdramatic, just remember I’m out here saving lives with my hot branding advice.

Logos fix everything
The beauty of getting a professional set of logos done is just how versatile they are when it comes to establishing your brand. You might not have the money to get a big, expensive website done up just yet, but chances are you do have a social media, a business card, or just an email address for people to reach you. With all of these, there’s one surefire way to elevate your business in the mind of everyone who sees it, and that’s with some bespoke logos.

Your standard professional logo set should not only supply you with your own designed logo, but also a handy folder containing your logo in various styles, sizes, and formats. This can then be used in whatever context your business requires and your now-regularly beating heart desires. It just saves you having to scramble around for the right thing to put in your email signature.

Fonts and Palettes set you up for success
It can’t be overstated just how much consistency matters in the invisible checklist of people’s expectations of businesses. The tricky thing about consistency, however, is how it really comes down to the details more than the louder stuff like website design or recurring social media presence. The way your email signature looks, the style of the details on your business card — should things seem too inconsistent, it’ll send a micro-signal of doubt to the reader.

You can, of course, hire a professional to handle all of this stuff, but should you feel confident in handling the bare necessities (🎶I’m not doing this twice in two blog posts 🎶), then you should still consider paying someone to select the fonts and palette choices for your business. From there, you can stitch together your own signatures and templates knowing that so long as you stick to those standards, the consistency of your business can never go too far off course.

Social media templates can make it all easy
I’m not sure if you’ve been on the internet lately, but it is an absolute warzone on the social media front. As if it wasn’t hard enough to stand out — now there are, like, five or six major platforms to consider? So, more than ever, you’ll need cute graphics and visuals to grab people’s attention, and I’m not sure if you remember, but seven paragraphs ago we agreed that using Canva can induce sweat of a technologically fiddly nature. So yeah, no thanks.

That said, professional designers can take the sting out of such programs on your behalf with tailor-made social media templates, meaning all you have to do is open it up, type your message in, and ship it out to the widest web. Even if you do know your way around Canva or Adobe Express, having professionals set up your templates helps take all the thought out of these posts, freeing up time in your schedule every month.

And, if you don’t have the time (or energy, honestly) to actively run a social media account, a designer can set you up quickly and easily with a beautiful 9-grid on Instagram. These handy little graphic layouts have the dual purpose of saving you from having to buy a full-blown website in the early days, so they’re quite the value get.

Basic Branding — it literally saves lives
The hidden beauty of basic branding is that it also helps offset the work you need to do for your business later down the line.

Imagine flying by the seat of your pants for two-three years, heart-rate high, constantly having to decide which font you’ll use today or which logo you’ll run with. Then imagine your business starts to take off, and you now suddenly have the money and the inclination to get your brand’s visual identity sorted once and for all.

At this point, however, any shift in branding will come across as noticeable and a sign of inconsistency. You’ll need to make twice the effort to get all your other assets to line up with your new branding standard, costing you more time and money than you ever planned to spend in the first place. That’s a stressful future that’s completely avoidable — you just need to get all the basic branding down early first.

Now all you need to do is actually reach out to a professional designer — perhaps via the large prompt near the bottom of her website, to give a completely random example. Remember: it’s not scary to talk to designers, they are usually quite cool and funny and wise — though it always helps to take a look at the absolute and very real rules for briefing a graphic designer.

Consider your life saved — Thanks, Basic Branding!

Tuesday 23 July 2024