Once I Took A Step Backwards And Took Time Out To Really Think Through This Process And Create A Brand Mood Board For My Business Everything I Created Became So Much Easier & Quicker.
In Carrie Green’s book “She Means Business” she tells the story of how she stumbled across a shop in London called Jo Loves which was the venture of Jo Malone.
As she walked through the door she was met with delicious smells of the perfumes and found herself surrounded by gleaming glass shelves exquisitely displaying the ranges of body washes, perfumes, and soaps.
The packaging was beautiful and the staff were super friendly and helpful.
This is why we fell in love with the High Street experience.
And it’s exactly what retail stores need to do more of to get us coming back.
Carrie took this kind of inspiration to create the look and feel of her amazing Female Entrepreneur Association website & membership club that thousands of women now know & love.
It’s a great reminder that just because your store is a virtual one in today’s digital world it pays dividends to carefully craft the look and feel of everything you do online in exactly the same way as you would if you were opening up a shop on the High Street.
It’s probably one of the most overlooked aspects of an online or digital business.
Experience matters.
How your images make people feel matters.
And with the popularity of Instagram and Pinterest looking good matters in today’s business world.
So How Do You Go About Creating A Brand Mood Board For Your Business?
It’s a bit like baking a cake really.
You have to assemble all the ingredients together before you bake the masterpiece.
Some may need a team brainstorm session or some assistance from a graphic designer or if you are flying solo it’s a skill set that you can most definitely acquire along the way.
You will need:-
- Your all important logo.
- Your brand colours / colour palette. (3-5 is ideal)
- Select a texture that compliments your brand colours.
- Find 3 fonts (one might be a script font) that work well for headlines, sub headlines and text.
- Your brand keywords that represent you and your brand, what you are about and how that is conveyed to your customers through your products, services and social media updates.
1. For Inspiration Look No Further Than A Quick Search On Pinterest
Simply head over to Pinterest and search ALL PINS for “brand mood board”.
You’ll find lots of beautifully made mood boards with colour palettes, fonts, textures and logos ready to inspire you.
Refine your search to your primary brand colours and use what you find as the perfect starting point for your own brand mood board.
I promise you now that by doing ALL the steps now, you will save yourself months & months of time later.
Once you have several colours with different tones & shades and one or two contrasting colours it’s time to make sure your logo is up to date and on-brand.
2. Your Logo.
Please do not spend 6 months deliberating over the perfect logo for your social media updates.
Social media is so fast-paced that you are likely to update at least 30-60 images every month.
For printed goods and for brand identity your logo absolutely needs to be right but for social media it’s more to do with creating stand-out content that looks “on brand” to you.
UNIQUENESS really matters.
And given how many billions of updates there are on social media every day that’s a challenge in itself.
Canva.com will do a great job of storing your logo for use on your images.
And a great site for creating a great logo is Placeit.net. It produces vector files for print quality and has a ton of options for fonts, creatives & colours for around $50.
3. Choose a Texture To Uplevel Your Updates
Adding texture in interior design is a well-known technique to create interest in any decor scheme.
The same is true for social media updates.
In addition to your colour palette, choose a texture such as chrome, brass, sparkle, gold, rose gold, blue metallic, silver etc.
A small accent of a metallic texture in your designs can really make it stand out and the one thing you really need to focus on with your social media updates and your websites is standing out from the sea of websites & updates.
And that is best achieved by this process.
The key is to use texture in the right amount.
Think about a textured rug in front of a fireplace in a room. Or scatter cushions on a bed.
Subtle 😊
Resources I Can Highly Recommend For Royalty-Free Images & Design Inspiration:-
For the easiest graphic designing tool for beginners, it has to be Canva.
For a ton of branding, inspiration look no further than Pinterest.
Royalty-Free Images #1 : BigStockPhoto
Royalty-Free Images #2 : Unsplash
Royalty-Free Images #3 : Canva
