These past couple weeks I’ve been working with one of my first official freelance design clients, making small updates to the original brand and website I created for her 5 years ago.

As I’ve revisited fonts and tweaked colors, I’ve found myself subconsciously using designer tricks that I’ve learned both in design school and by experience.

I haven’t been shy in sharing these design secrets. In fact, you’ll find many of them scattered throughout past Elle & Company blog posts.

But I’ve never compiled them all in one place.

Whether you’ve designed your own brand, hired a designer to create the elements of your brand for you, or you’re a self-taught designer trying to improve your design skills, implementing these insider tricks will help you create a more cohesive, professional brand.

We just wrapped up the 2019 Brand Challenge last week, and over 1,300 business owners took part to create a one-of-a-kind brand from start to finish!

Fonts, colors, logos, photos, icons - we left no stone unturned.

But creating a brand is really just the beginning. From here on out, your days will be spent implementing it.

Whether you took part in the challenge or not, every business owner who can’t delegate their design work is faced with the important task of choosing an app to help them create their graphics.

The two most popular options at the moment? Canva and Adobe Illustrator.

Both apps are helpful, but they aren’t created equal. So in today’s post, I’m highlighting the biggest differences between the two so you can figure out which program is the best fit for your design needs.

Did you miss out on the Brand Challenge? It’s never too late to jump in and take part! Visit this page to sign up and get started.

Congratulations! You’ve officially made it through Elle & Company’s Brand Challenge.

But before you start implementing your new brand on your website and collateral items, take some time to compile all of your hard work and create a beautiful reference for your brand by creating a brand style guide.

This post is part of Elle & Company’s 4-week Brand Challenge. Click here to see more details, sign up, and access the free workbook.

You can do a killer job on all of the steps we’ve covered over the past 3 weeks.

But if your photos are amateur or inconsistent with the rest of your brand, your brand will fall short. Every. Single. Time.

This post is part of Elle & Company’s 4-week Brand Challenge. Click here to see more details, sign up, and access the free workbook.

Just like icons, patterns are another fun way to add interest to your brand and make it more memorable.

When you create a custom pattern that’s unique to your brand alone, you have the opportunity to stand out from competitors, communicate the message of your brand, and add some flair to your stationery, packaging, designs, and website.

This post is part of Elle & Company’s 4-week Brand Challenge. Click here to see more details, sign up, and access the free workbook.

Differentiation is all in the details.

While borders and backgrounds may seem insignificant and small compared to logos and color palettes, they can have a large impact on the consistency and professionalism of your brand.

You already determined your graphic style last week, so considering your borders and backgrounds should be a fairly easy task.

This post is part of Elle & Company’s 4-week Brand Challenge. Click here to see more details, sign up, and access the free workbook.

Your logo is taken care of, your fonts and colors are good to go.

Next up: graphics.

Something as simple as an icon or a border can make your brand distinct and memorable. Much of branding is considering and accounting for the small details.

But before you create fun brand assets like icons, patterns, and borders, you need to consider the overall style of your graphics.

This post is part of Elle & Company’s 4-week Brand Challenge. Click here to see more details, sign up, and access the free workbook.

Your colors are all set! Now it’s time to dive into fonts.

But finding, choosing, and pairing fonts for your brand isn’t as simple as grabbing Comic Sans and Baskerville from the list of included fonts on your computer and calling it a day.

Actually, please don’t use Comic Sans as a brand font. Ever.

Today’s action step and blog post will walk you through what to consider and how to go about choosing fonts for your one-of-a-kind brand.

This post is part of Elle & Company’s 4-week Brand Challenge. Click here to see more details, sign up, and access the free workbook.

Remember those black and white primary logo and alternative logos you refined/created last week?

It’s finally time to add some color to them.

(And now that you’ve already outlined your color system, this step should be easy!)

This post is part of Elle & Company’s 4-week Brand Challenge. Click here to see more details, sign up, and access the free workbook.

Now that you’ve determined your color palette, it’s time to create your color system.

I know what you’re thinking, “What in the world is a color system?”

Let me explain.

Your whole brand should be viewed as a system.

It’s sort of like an equation; you plug in the values to the framework and you get the right answer.

This post is part of Elle & Company’s 4-week Brand Challenge. Click here to see more details, sign up, and access the free workbook.

Color is a great way to distinguish your brand and create recognition.

In fact, color increases brand recognition by up to 80%.

Think about Home Depot, Target, and T-Mobile. Did their brand colors (orange, red, and pink) automatically pop into your mind? Of course they did!

The same should be true for your brand.

This post is part of Elle & Company’s 4-week Brand Challenge. Click here to see more details, sign up, and access the free workbook.

Whenever I’m designing a logo, I’m constantly thinking about how each element (like fonts, colors, and illustrations) can be pulled apart and used elsewhere in the brand to create consistency.

Especially for logo variations.

Chances are, the logo you just created/refined in Day 9 either fits well in a horizontal format or a perfect circle; but not both.

And that’s where today’s action step comes in.

This post is part of Elle & Company’s 4-week Brand Challenge. Click here to see more details, sign up, and access the free workbook.

Now that you’ve rounded up some visual inspiration, it’s time to clean it up a bit and compile your images onto an inspiration board.

An inspiration board is simply a graphic compiled of photos, colors, and patterns that provide visual direction for a design project (in this case, your brand).

You’ll come back to this board in the coming weeks for visual reference.

As you build out your brand, you’ll be able to weigh all of the visuals (like your logo, color palette, patterns, fonts, icons, etc.) against this board to ensure that every component stays consistent.

This post is part of Elle & Company’s 4-week Brand Challenge. Click here to see more details, sign up, and access the free workbook.

Now that you’ve considered some non-visual aspects of your brand, it’s time to take all of the work you’ve done up to this point and create some visuals.

But here’s the thing: It can be difficult to create visuals for a brand solely off keywords and a mission statement.

What does “vibrant, authentic, refreshing, and bold” actually look like?

Well, it can look like a lot of things. And that’s why it’s helpful to have a visual starting point.

This post is part of Elle & Company’s 4-week Brand Challenge. Click here to see more details, sign up, and access the free workbook.

I know, I know. I promised to help you come up with a visual direction for your brand this week.

But before we get into inspiration boards and logo designs, remember that your brand isn’t simply a logo and a color palette; it’s an experience.

There are two key components to a brand: tangibles and intangibles.

We often think about the tangible components, like logos, color palettes, and fonts.

But intangible components, like the words you use in your social media captions and the names of your products, can have a big impact on how your brand is perceived.

This post is part of Elle & Company’s 4-week Brand Challenge. Click here to see more details, sign up, and access the free workbook.

So much of branding has to do with communication.

In fact, while I often tell people that I majored in graphic design in college, my real degree was in “Visual Communication Design.”

Because the visuals in every design are always communicating something to people.

That’s why it’s important to make sure that the design of your brand is saying the right things to potential clients and customers.

And that’s why we’ve been spending so much time on this “groundwork” stage of the branding process. Through your future goals, mission statement, client profile, and the 5 adjectives you’ll come up with to summarize your brand in today’s action step, you’re determining what needs to be communicated.

This post is part of Elle & Company’s 4-week Brand Challenge. Click here to see more details, sign up, and access the free workbook.

We’re on Day 4 of the Brand Challenge, and you might be surprised that we still haven’t jumped into any of the major visuals like fonts, colors, and logos.

I promise we’ll get to those soon!

But branding (and design, in general) is about much more than making things look good.

The purpose of branding is to catch the attention of potential clients and customers and build trust with them so that they’ll purchase your products and book your services.

In order to do that, you have to know:

1. Whether your current brand is effective

2. Where your business is headed

3. The mission of your business

4. And what type of clients you want to be working with

You’ve conducted a brand evaluation, set business goals, and written your mission statement in Days 1-3 of this challenge.

And today, you’re going to zero in on the type of clients and customers you want to be working with.

This post is part of Elle & Company’s 4-week Brand Challenge. Click here to see more details, sign up, and access the free workbook.

You wouldn’t drive across the country from California to New York without a map. And you shouldn’t operate your business without a mission statement.

A mission statement gives you a framework for evaluating opportunities and deciding whether they fit your core business model and strategy.

It can help you define your business and establish your brand, and it can help you (and your employees, contractors, etc.) focus their efforts and suggest ideas that fit with what you’re trying to do.

But what does your mission statement have to do with your branding?

This post is part of Elle & Company’s 4-week Brand Challenge. Click here to see more details, sign up, and access the free workbook.