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Lesson 4: Brand toolkit

It’s time to pull everything together.

This is exciting. It’s time to put all that foundational effort you’ve been putting in - mindfully uncovering your core values, identifying your ideal audience, and articulating how you want to make them feel - to work.

We are going to use everything we’ve done so far to inform your choices when it comes to selecting a series of resources that will help you create a beautiful, memorable and consistent brand presence. We started that process in the previous lesson, by looking at your visual style. Now we’re going to continue, by uncovering a colour palette, typography and verbal style that are all you.

 

“Design is the silent ambassador of your brand.”

— Paul Rand

Action station

Now that you’ve read through this lesson, work your way through each of the activities below. Be sure to approach them in order, as one will build upon the next. You have all week to complete these activities so don’t feel the need to rush: sometimes it’s better to let these questions marinate so you can get to the truth of the matter.

Bonus lesson:
Your brand personality

 

To help you work through the activities this week, I’ve created a survey to help you uncover the way your selection of mood-words influence what we call your “brand personality,” and to show how an understanding of your brand personality can influence the choices you make about imagery, colours, typography, and more.

The questions and responses have been strategically developed - from an educated standpoint - to provide you with insights that you might not have thought of on your own. (Sometimes it’s hard, when we are so close to our own brands, to separate our brand personalities from our own personalities).

However, as with all surveys like this, don’t treat it as gospel. There is nuance to your taste, interests, aesthetics and feelings that an automated program just can’t pick up.

So if the results don’t match what you were hoping for, don’t be disheartened. Instead, use this as a jumping-off point for more inquiry. Ask yourself why there is a disparity. Are you favouring your personal aesthetics instead of focusing on your mood words? Are your mood words not fully reflecting what you want to convey (do you need to revise them)? Are you finding it hard to translate your mood-words into an aesthetic?

Bring your challenges into the group during our workshop, and see if the group can help to enlighten you and find a path forward.

WHEN TO TAKE THIS SURVEY

I encourage you to work through each of the activities above before you take this survey. Once you’ve finished the activities, return to this survey and see if the results and suggestions at the end pair nicely with the decisions you’ve made, or not. (If not, this is something we can workshop together).

But if any of the activities above stump you, do feel free to dip into this survey a little earlier. Take a break from the activity, do the survey, and see if it provides you with any insights that help you overcome whatever hurdle is blocking you. Again, you can always bring any struggles to us on the Tuesday workshop, and we can nut through them all together.