The Ultimate Guide to DIY-ing a Brand for Your Online Business
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As a brand and graphic designer, I would love for everyone to be able to access custom brand design right from the beginning of their online business journey. But I also understand that for a lot of brand new businesses, custom work just isn’t in the budget. If I hadn’t been a graphic designer, custom branding would have been out of reach for me at the beginning of my business, so I fully understand (and support!) people who choose to go down the DIY route.
While I love doing custom work for business owners a little further along in their journeys, I also love sharing my design knowledge with people who don’t have that background and need to DIY it for a bit.
Enter, The Ultimate Guide to DIY Branding!
In this post I’m going to walk you through the step-by-step process of creating a brand identity for your online business in the most efficient and effective way possible, so you can actually start making sales + growing your business. And when you’re ready, I hope you’ll remember me + come back for a custom job 😅
Here are a couple of really important things to note before you jump into the guide:
Try Not to Overcomplicate It: You’re going to find yourself wanting to add more, do more, change more as you move through the brand design process. And I want to encourage you to do less. Many people without a design background tend to add too many elements to their designs because they feel that simple designs aren't enough. They fear being caught out as an amateur or DIY-er if their designs look too basic. But I find the opposite is almost always true. The more elements you try to work with, the more room there is for error. If you keep everything dead simple, you’ll find it much harder to go wrong.
Don’t Spend Too Long On It: While building a brand identity is important (for a number of reasons we’ll touch on that throughout this guide), it’s not as important as nailing down your audience, getting your offers + funnels ready, or executing on your marketing strategies. If you’re not making sales, you’re not really growing a business. So the aim of this guide is to set you up with the essentials fast, so you can start working in those other areas more effectively.
Now that we’ve established that – let’s move on to the guide! We’re going to walk through 5 essential steps, and I recommend going through them in order. I’ve designed this process for each step to build on the last, so skipping around will only make it more difficult!
Step #1 - Start with Brand Strategy
We just talked about how it's important not to spend too much time on your brand identity initially, and that's true. However, if you're going to spend any amount of time working out the details of your brand, it should be during this first step. Your brand identity, as well as all of those other important business growth tasks, like making sales and setting up funnels, build off this strategy.
So, what do I mean when I talk about brand strategy? The strategy is formed by four key parts:
1. Understanding Your Audience
The first step in my brand strategy process is a deep dive into your audience – you might have heard this referred to as your target market, niche, or ideal customer/client. I like to use audience for my online business folks, as most of us are doing some sort of regular content creation that attracts an audience – who we eventually want to turn into customers. So in this stage of the strategy, we want to do a deep dive into their demographics, interests, pain points, wants, motivations, and values as they relate to your business.
For me, it’s important to start with your audience. If you run a search on brand strategy on Pinterest you’ll probably find loads of resources on your vision, your mission, your values. But I find that focusing so heavily on the internals of the business first tends to create a disconnect with the audience. You might come up with a plan you’re super excited about, but then struggle to find an audience that fits. Instead, it's more effective to have a general idea of what you want to do, and then conduct that target market research. From there, you can tailor everything about your offerings, marketing, and sales to that audience.
2. Understanding Your Business
Next, we can move on to your business. Now we can really go wild with your vision and plans for your business. We want to answer the question of what value you provide – specifically, how you solve your ideal customer or client's biggest problem. Additionally, we’ll define your vision for the business and what the day-to-day looks like for you.
Based on these insights, we'll start thinking about how you can best deliver your product or service. This process ensures that your business is not only aligned with your goals but also effectively meets the needs of your audience.
3. Understanding Your Competition
It's important not to get too caught up in what your competition is doing, but completely ignoring them is a missed opportunity. Take a look at what your competitors are doing well, and where they might be falling short. How can you fill some of the gaps? Consider what’s going on more generally in the online business space. When you know what’s going on out there, you can make decisions about what to include or avoid in your own business.
4. Bridging the Gap
And finally, we have step four: Bridging the Gap. This step involves taking everything we've learned in the first three parts of the strategy and using that information to form a plan to bridge the gap between you and your audience. This is where we dig into some of the specifics of your offer lineup and delivery.
We also look at the type of marketing needed to move your audience from not knowing who you are to making a purchase. This sets up the foundation for more specific marketing and launch plans down the road, ensuring a cohesive and targeted approach to reaching and engaging your ideal customers.
If you want a breakdown on the specifics of each step in the strategy + what questions you should be asking as you move through, click here to download my free Brand Clarity Checklist! Once you’ve got that done, we can move forward to the brand design stage.
Note: Your brand strategy will change as you move through the early stages of your business, and once you’re established, it’ll still be an ever evolving project. So don’t get stuck on this step. It doesn’t have to be a completed document or a work of art - just make sure you have a grasp on each step as it stands now.
BONUS: As a final step in this process before moving on to designing your brand identity, based on everything you’ve learned about your audience and your brand strategy, it can be incredibly helpful to establish 3-5 brand words. Think of brand words as key descriptors of the personality or vibe of your brand. These words should speak to your audience and what they’re looking for, rather than just your interests or preferences. Brand words act as a quick reference for the vibe and message you want to convey, helping to keep your branding efforts focused and consistent.
Step #2 - Design Your Starter Logo
Before we get into how to design your logo, I want to make one thing clear: your logo is just one piece of the puzzle.
Your logo isn’t going to help you create reels or graphics or slides for your webinar. Your colors, fonts, and imagery will do that for you. But you should still create a logo, and you should still do it first. When I create brands for clients, the logo design process is critical to the development of the brand identity - as the logo comes together, it sets the tone and informs the decision making for the rest of the visual elements.
And the same goes for you if you’re trying to DIY a brand identity.
But how do you do it?
Here’s the secret when it comes to designing your own logo – your business name in a well-designed font will almost always be enough to get you started. You get the benefit of a professional designer’s expertise through the choice of an expertly designed typeface, and you can closely match the aesthetics of the font you choose with your brand words. Plus, it’s simple, meaning you’ll have less of a struggle trying to match other elements like fonts, colors and photos. In my opinion, it’s the best method for fast and easy logo design.
But if you’re thinking, “Emily, it is NOT easy to just pick a font and make a logo” - it is with my Starter Logo Font Guide! I’ve done the hard work for you, curating 50 of my favorite logo fonts PLUS 5 simple video tutorials to show you exactly how to do it.
The Starter Logo Font Guide is designed to save you time and streamline your efforts, allowing you to quickly craft a logo that aligns with your brand’s style, whether it’s modern and sleek, classic and timeless, or playful and creative. And it’s been made with online business owners in mind, so whether you’re a course or membership creator, coach, content creator, social media manager, VA or other online service provider, the fonts and tutorials will be perfect for your needs.
Don’t waste hours searching for the perfect font - register below and I’ll send the guide your way for free 🎉
Once you’re done with your logo, you can move on to the next steps. And if you’re wondering how you’re going to choose colors for your logo when that’s still to come in Step #4 – for right now, we’ll be keeping everything in black and white. Get the design right first – you can add color later. Best not to work with too many elements at once!
Step #3 - Choose Your Brand Fonts
Did you know that the fonts you choose can have a surprising impact on your brand’s success? It might be easy to write them off as a minor detail, but they actually play a crucial role in how effectively your brand communicates and connects with your audience. Here’s how:
First Impressions Matter – and fonts can help! The style and shape of your font is often one of the first things your audience will notice about your content, long before they ever start reading. A well-chosen font can captivate and engage someone instantly, making them more likely to stick around and absorb your message.
Brand Recognition. Consistently using a particular font helps build brand recognition. Over time, your audience can start to identify your content just by the fonts, even before they read a single word. In a world where half the battle is stopping someone’s scrolling, being easily recognizable in the feed is critical.
Legibility + Accessibility. The right font not only looks good but is also easy on the eyes. A poor choice can lead to legibility issues, which might deter your audience from engaging with your content. If people can’t read your sales emails, they’re not going to be buying your product or signing up for your service!
So how do you choose (and use) the right fonts for your brand?
Use Reputable Font Websites.
For free fonts, you can’t go past Google Fonts, and for paid fonts, my favorites are Creative Market and Fontspring. If you have an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, you can also access the Adobe Fonts library - but keep in mind that you can’t actually download a copy of the font if you use these, so if you were planning to upload your font to Canva, you’ll have to buy it separately.Use Your Brand Words.
Remember the brand words we came up with at the end of the strategy part of this guide? We're going to use them again here to help us select fonts. Different fonts have different characteristics and can portray a different vibe or personality. For instance, many serif fonts have a classic, high end feel, and many sans serif fonts have a modern, minimal vibe. If you don’t know where to start, you can try searching “YOUR BRAND WORD fonts” or “YOUR BRAND WORD font pairing” on Pinterest or Instagram. Sites like Creative Market and Fontspring can often be filtered by descriptive words. TypeWolf is also a great resource for discovering fonts, and they also have alternatives for many popular fonts – so if you find an Adobe font you love but don‘t have a subscription, you can match it to the nearest Google Font. I also have another blog post with 6 done-for-you Google font pairings - check that out here!Keep it Simple.
I know I’ve been banging this drum through this whole guide, but you’re going to have a really hard time if you try and create a complex font system here. Unless you’re really confident that you know what you’re doing, I recommend sticking to one or two fonts. Typically, we at least want to have some sort of contrast between elements like headings and buttons versus the rest of your body copy. But this can be easier than you think! Try using the same font in different weights or cases - for an explainer on what that means, catch the video tutorials in the Starter Logo Font Guide!Keep it Legible.
I know it can be tempting to use all of those elaborate, stylized fonts from Creative Market or the Canva font list, but they are often difficult to read – especially in longer sentences or paragraphs. A decorative font that works for a 1-2 word logo might not be legible enough for a heading font. Handwritten script fonts should be used sparingly for the same reason. As I mentioned earlier, poor legibility can have serious consequences for getting people to actually read your content, so when evaluating choices, make sure you can easily read it, especially at small sizes.
Step #4 - Create Your Color Palette
Color is an incredibly important element in any brand identity. If fonts are one of the first things people notice about your content, color will almost always be the first. Certain colors evoke different emotions and reactions, so it’s important to make sure that the colors you choose align with those brand words.
When choosing colors, here are a couple of key things to keep in mind:
Your Audience > Your Preferences: When choosing brand colors, your audience’s preferences are more important than your own. Similarly, the experience you want your audience to have with your brand choosing colors that will contribute successfully to this are more important than using your favorite colors. For instance, if your favorite color is flaming hot pink but your audience prefers a calming and chill experience, those two things probably won't work well together.
You Know it’s Coming… Keep it Simple: You don’t have to go crazy with colors. The more colors you choose, the harder it is to make them all work together. If you’re not confident in your design skills, don’t make it harder for yourself! You can have a really successful color palette with only 2-3 colors… and if you really want to make it easy, 2/3 colors can be black and white, with the third color being your signature brand color. Many huge brands do this incredibly successfully.
Consider Contrast + Legibility: When choosing colors, we want to make sure that they’re not negatively impacting a user’s ability to read the fonts we just chose! And this isn’t just a preference - it’s an accessibility issue. Pastel colors over light backgrounds are incredibly hard to read. Similarly, colors that are too similar in level (or brightness) can also cause problems for legibility.
Here are some resources I love for creating color palettes:
Coolors - will show you a new color combination each time you hit the spacebar. You can add or remove colors, lock in colors you like, and use their Visualizer tool to see the palette in action.
Adobe Color: You can experiment with their color wheel and different types of color palettes using this tool, but they also include the option to extract colors from a photo, and accessibility checkers.
Canva: Canva also has a color palette generator that will pull from images as well as a library of pre-made color palettes that is searchable.
Pinterest / Instagram: Many designers have put together color palettes that you can search for on these platforms - try searching “YOUR BRAND WORD color palette”
Step #5 - Take or Choose Brand Photos
Photography is an incredibly important piece of the branding puzzle. Photos play a vital role in catching the attention of your audience, and supporting your written content with necessary visual context clues. They help your audience visualize outcomes or see themselves in the story you’re sharing. Additionally, they help break up long sections of written content.
But not all photos are made equal. Poor quality images can reflect negatively on your brand or on the perceived value of your offers, so it’s important to get them right.
For the highest quality imagery, I recommend that all online business owners, particularly those with personal brands, invest in a brand photoshoot. Showing your face on your website or social channels goes a long way in building a connection with your audience, and a professional shoot adds a level of legitimacy to your brand that selfies or stock photos just can’t match. On top of this, having styled images of yourself makes a lot of other design tasks so much easier, as all of your imagery already coordinates and matches your brand theme.
If you can’t have a professional shoot done, try having a friend or family member take some pictures of you and learn how to edit them in Lightroom. That’s actually what I did for all the photos you see of me on this website - my sister (not a photographer) took them, and I followed some YouTube tutorials to edit them to my liking.
If a photoshoot isn’t accessible to you at all, you can still curate your own set of stock photos from free online stock sites! In fact, you’ll probably need stock photos from time to time even if you have a brand shoot done, so having a collection on hand is super useful for all your design tasks going forward. I have a separate blog post that will show you exactly how to do this - check that out here.
A final note before we wrap things up – why do all of this upfront?
It might seem like a lot of work to establish all of this at once, but having all of your brand identity elements on hand, ready to go, can help you:
Streamline your creation process + save time.
Imagine how it would feel to be able to just add your copy in and go, rather than having to make decisions about what font to use, which color this graphic should be, or where you’re going to find the right stock photo? With your logo, fonts, and colors established, all of that additional decision making over small tasks disappears. This means you have time to create more if you want to, or use that time in other areas of your business.Build brand recognition.
When your brand identity is consistent across all platforms, your audience learns to recognize your work before they even read a single word. Stopping the scroll is half the battle, and in a world where the sales journey is not necessarily linear, ideally we want to make sure that our audience can identify our work within a couple of seconds. If you’re in an industry where someone typically has to spend some time following + consuming content from you before they make a purchase, this is even more important.Delegate tasks.
One of the biggest challenges for growing businesses is delegation. “But I’m not planning to have a big team!” I hear you say – but this one is for you even if you only plan to hire a contractor or two. By having set guidelines around your brand identity and established branded templates, you can be confident that team members or contractors are able to do their jobs and maintain your brand effectively without you having to micromanage their every move. Your social media manager or web designer will thank you!
Plus, it’ll only take a fraction of the time you’re wasting on starting from scratch on every new design!
That’s a wrap on The Ultimate Guide to DIY Branding!
I hope you found it helpful! If you have any questions about the guide or about branding in general, feel free to shoot me a DM on Instagram - I’d love to chat more with you there.
See you in the next one!
Emily Banks
