How To Successfully DIY Your Pet Brand Part 1: Colors & Fonts
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Are you struggling to piece together your own brand or brand guidelines for your pet business? Maybe you’re not reaching the right people or you aren’t converting customers at a level you’d like. Regardless, the effectiveness of your branding can be a direct representation of the success of your business.
But, first things first, how do you actually brand your business?
We’re diving headfirst into the first post of many to follow in our series on how to successfully DIY your pet brand!
Ready!?
We’re chatting today ALL about colors and fonts. Because it’s a lot more than just compiling a list of your favorite colors and fonts and calling it a day.
Step 1: Finalize your brand’s mission and keywords
Before you just dive into picking these colors and fonts, take a step back to reflect on your brand’s mission and keywords. What are you trying to get across with your audience? What do you want your clients or customers to feel when they come across your brand or your website?
Write all of this down as it will become very useful as you gather inspiration and decide on visuals.
Step 2: Gather visual inspiration
The number one place that we recommend to actually gather this inspiration is...wait for it… PINTEREST!
If you haven’t yet used Pinterest, you’re in for a real treat. And, side note, if you really haven’t used Pinterest, how in the world!?!? It’s AH-mazing!
Back to the point: Pinterest is the perfect place to begin to gather inspiration for your brand.
Create a secret board (if you want to keep it for your eyes only) and begin pinning away with images that represent your brand vision.
Our best piece of advice here: Try not to default to your personal preferences. Yes, sometimes these can align and that’s awesome if it does, but you want to focus on the feelings, emotions, and characteristics of your business.
When you’re pinning images to Pinterest, take note of how each image actually represents your brand.
After a while, you may begin to notice similarities in colors and textures that you pin, which can give you some handy insight into your colors and fonts as we head to the next step.
[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row _builder_version="3.25"][et_pb_column type="4_4" _builder_version="3.25" custom_padding="|||" custom_padding__hover="|||"][et_pb_image src="https://dox.design/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Screen-Shot-2019-05-01-at-5.58.04-PM.png" align_tablet="center" align_phone="" align_last_edited="on|desktop" _builder_version="4.9.4" hover_enabled="0" alt="dog illustrations pinterest page" sticky_enabled="0"][/et_pb_image][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row _builder_version="3.25" custom_margin="0px||" custom_padding="32px|0px|0|0px|false|false"][et_pb_column type="4_4" _builder_version="3.25" custom_padding="|||" custom_padding__hover="|||"][et_pb_text _builder_version="3.27.4"]
3. Begin working on your colors
We’ve talked about the science of color and color psychology before. It’s powerful stuff, guys.
In fact, it’s worth mentioning again, as we did in one of our #droolworthy brands’ blog posts that up to 90% of snap judgments people make about products are solely based on color alone.
Um, that’s a huge deal. Color choices evoke very specific emotions, feelings, and emotions in people that come across our brands. These perceptions evolve into purchase decisions.
In order to begin choosing the right colors that will attract your target clients/customers, you first need to understand a little more about color psychology. We’ve included some resources below on color psychology and how to pick your brand colors. In essence, you are probably already aware of a lot of the color psychology associations based off of the brands you already interact with. Think...the McDonald’s arches or Starbucks logo or Target. The feelings you associate with these brands stems directly from the colors they utilize.
Color Resources:
Action step: Come up with a color palette for your brand. Dox Design typically recommends at least 5 colors (2 primary colors and 3 secondary colors).
Use the following charts to help guide you in building your color palette from the colors you see popping out from your Pinterest inspiration board:
[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row _builder_version="3.25" custom_margin="||-40px" custom_padding="24px|0px||0px|false|false"][et_pb_column type="4_4" _builder_version="3.25" custom_padding="|||" custom_padding__hover="|||"][et_pb_image src="https://dox.design/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Screen-Shot-2019-04-30-at-1.17.56-PM.png" force_fullwidth="on" align_tablet="center" align_phone="" align_last_edited="on|desktop" _builder_version="4.9.4" hover_enabled="0" alt="four color theory charts" sticky_enabled="0"][/et_pb_image][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row _builder_version="3.25" custom_margin="0px||" custom_padding="32px|0px|0|0px|false|false"][et_pb_column type="4_4" _builder_version="3.25" custom_padding="|||" custom_padding__hover="|||"][et_pb_text _builder_version="3.27.4"]
Some last minute tips to walk away with when it comes to colors:
• Include both light and dark tones in your color palette (contrast is goooood).
• Again, we cannot emphasize enough, don’t default to picking your favorite colors, because it may not be the best choice for your audience.
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Step 4: Develop your typeface.
This step can be one of the hardest for inexperienced or non-designers because it’s not something you normally consciously pick up on.
We don’t typically recommend picking a super common font like Helvetica or Times New Roman. How do you make your business stand out while also creating an easy-to-read and clear brand presence?
To help, we put together a list of 10 things you can do to instantly upgrade your brand visuals, and of those things was, yes, your typeface. We listed all the resources there, but some of our favorites include Google Fonts for free fonts and FontShop for awesome sauce fonts for a fee. You can view our other recommendations here.
When it comes to pairing and choosing your fonts, you first need to understand how to combine your fonts together. For clarity’s sake for those DIY’ing their brand, we’re going to focus on the difference between serif and sans serif.
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Serif fonts are typically easier to read when you have long-term text and is more traditional, while san serif is more simply used as headlines and on screens. It also gives a modern modern feel to your brand.
As with colors, the best advice we can give you (although this is not 100% fool-proof) is to go for contrast, which would mean pairing the serif and sans serif together.
You can also provide contrast with your typeface by bolding and increasing/decreasing font sizes across your brand platforms.
As always, you want to keep your font choices consistent across all platforms. You don’t want to confuse your audience or make your content seem too isolated from the rest, so choose 2-3 fonts and stick with those.
This is a lot of work to get started on, so stay tuned for part 2 on how to Successfully DIY Your Brand!
Want to stay updated on all our blog posts, so you know when part 2 is released? Bookmark this page and check back in next month to see part 2!
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