Brand Guidelines
Create a beautiful brand and logo in 15 minutes or less.
Early stage companies and startups are messy. Your branding doesn’t have to be.
I’ve found that building out a good looking brand from the start not only effects how you are seen by customers and investors, but its also a big moral boost for your team. They should be excited to wear your company t-shirt, show their friends your website, and work for a company that is not only pursing a meaningful mission, but is also visually appealing.
On the flip side, traction, fundraising, and growth are nearly always more important to spend your time on. That’s why I built out this Branding Guidelines Template to take almost no time to fill out. Establish your color pallet, pick your typeface, auto generate a “placeholder” logo, and put your company mission/values down on paper.
Anyone can build a great looking brand in no time. It helps with design consistency, team moral, and makes you look way more “put together” to outside parties.
Instructions
Color Pallet
First off, pick a color pallet for your brand. Really think about what the emotions are that you want others to feel when looking at your brand. Choose a color pallet that helps evoke those emotions.
Coolors.co will help you auto generate a great color pallet: https://coolors.co/
Typeface(s) (Fonts)
The most important thing to keep in mind when choosing a typeface is it needs to be EASILY readable. Put simply; the harder your typeface is to read, the more the people having to read it are going to dislike you…
Google Fonts is one of the best tools to find great typefaces: https://fonts.google.com/
Logos
This is where you can easily waste too much time. When you are building the foundation of your business, a placeholder logo will work until you start to scale into the market.
For this template, you don’t need to create all of your logos (Wordmark and logo(s)), just start with something simple.
To save time, use Adobe’s Logo Generator to create a quick logo: https://www.adobe.com/express/create/logo/random
Images and Icons
Establishing an image and icon “style” for your brand will help make everything look cohesive. If you use bright, colorful images in one place, you should use that same style elsewhere.
Use Unsplash or Pexels to find images and videos.
Use Noun Project or Google Icons to find icons.
Messaging
This is one of the most important parts of building a good brand. Your messaging is about who you are as a company and what you stand for as a team. It’s important to start to outline this early on so you can not only communicate this to your customers, but to your growing team as well.
If you have any questions, comments, or find an error in this template, please email me at hello(at)danstrangfeld.com