When you bring a business online for the first time or start your digital business, it’s common to feel as if you have whiplash from all the branding options available at your fingertips.
Last month it was watercolours, this month it’s gold foil, the next month will be cursive handwritten fonts. There are so many trends and themes across the Internet design world that trying to keep up with them is overwhelming.
Not only that, when you pay attention to trends instead of your own brand, it results in a major disconnect in two places:
- Your confidence in your business’ visual identity
- Your audience’s confidence in your business
And a lack of confidence in these areas is likely affecting your sales.
The solution? Brand focus and consistency. Let’s break it down…
On focus
When you know what you offer, to whom, and why—and you commit to sticking with it—you have focus for your brand.
Your visual identity is created from those elements (along with other signifiers such as your business values, tone, and voice). Staying the course in service to these elements means that you get to ignore all the other design trends that pop up over the months and years to come.
This is why when you change what you offer, to whom, and why, you often need a new visual identity to go with it.
On consistency
It’s better to be consistent on a few visual elements than all over the place with many visual elements. Number of fonts and colours are the two biggest culprits of brand inconsistency.
Ideally, you want to have one primary brand colour and two secondary brand colours that you use across your website, social media platforms, and business documents.
For fonts, the best practice is to stick to maximum three fonts across all platforms. Typically one font is serif and one is sans-serif for good contrast, although that “rule” can be broken if it aligns with your brand. (Don’t you love how rules are sometimes made to be broken?)
You’ve worked hard to get to where you are with your business today. Let’s not detract from the core of your amazing work with missteps in your visual brand focus and consistency.
