Hello, it's Jules. Welcome to the pool party. If you didn't know this, I am a brand designer
and I've been seeing a ton of horrible brand design out there these days. There's a lot
of images generated with AI and I just think to myself, gosh, if we didn't lay off all
the designers and art directors, things would look a lot better because there definitely
are rules to design. It's not just creativity and doing what your heart desires. So I'm
going to help you out because I actually do believe that people should be using the tools
available to support the brand, tell stories and basically share their talents and mission
with people. Whether you're an artist, you want to create a cool logo or you're an author
and you're thinking about making a book cover that matches your website. Branding is important
because it's what makes you recognizable across all platforms. Let's say you're looking for
a job and you're on LinkedIn, you have a website as a writer and you're trying to pick a font.
These are all very simple branding things that you could decide ahead of time in order
to make your work look simple, get to the point, tell a story and be more recognizable.
The key point here is not to overcomplicate it, but there are several facets I want to
mention today, including fonts, colors, images, icons, and creating a mood board that will
be helpful in guiding you with your branding journey. So welcome to this special edition
of the pool party. This is how you can create good branding, stop overcomplicating it and
take back your brand story. If you ever work with a designer too, these are good for you
to plan out in advance. Side note, I see many people work with designers and they fill out
these questionnaires about what their brand represents and they're too wordy. They're
trying to accomplish way too many things all at once. And so we're going to make this really
simple. Again, we're going to talk about fonts, colors, images, icons, and creating a mood
board. This is aimed for the people out there who are not designers. I will talk about some
technical terminology, but let's go ahead and get into what good branding is. Again,
we wanted to talk about keeping branding simple and having it tell a story about who you are,
what you're offering. It's important to have a very clear pitch, at least one to three
sentences of what you do. Go ahead and write this down just as an exercise. It doesn't have to be
perfect, but let's say you're a fitness instructor. If you work online and you film videos, write that
down. If you work in person, write that down. If you have a niche for only doing fitness classes
in nature, write that down. These are all important facets of your brand and they're going to determine
the look and feel of the direction you go. It'll make you unique and help you stand out. But again,
we want to keep this simple. So let's talk about some of these facets of branding. So choosing
fonts. What is a font? A font is a style of type or letters. How would I describe a font to a five
year old? So when you open up a document on your computer, let's say like a word document, or you
see any words on a book, whatever the style is of the words, that's going to be your font. I'm sure
a lot of us are familiar with the font Comic Sans. A lot of times Comic Sans is used in preschools
and with kids or when you're joking and it has that effect of being comical because it's friendly
and it's round. So there's a friendly quality to it. We're going to go a little bit more technical
now. We've graduated kindergarten and we want to talk about two different types of fonts. If you've
ever wanted to know the difference between a serif and a non serif font, this is a super easy way for
you to decide which font to choose. Now let's start with our serifs. Little history lesson.
Serifs are essentially the lines that you see at the end of a line. So let's take the letter I,
for example, capital I. Sometimes I is just a straight up and down line. But when you have
a horizontal line on the bottom and the top that makes it look like a sideways H, that is a serif.
And the whole reason why we had serifs to begin with is because type used to be handmade with blocks.
Type setting used to be carved out and then made into metal blocks that were actually put into a
printing press. And that is how we had our first printed books. One of the first printed works was
the Gutenberg Bible. We're going back way, way back now. And you'll notice a lot of old fonts,
a lot of classic fonts have these serifs because they were physically needed in order to put the
letters into a physical printer. We don't need that these days. And then so we developed non-serif
texts. Non-serif text is everything else that does not include the lines at the end of each letter.
Actually considered a lot more modern. The reason is because serifs are not necessary for typing on
the computer. We decided that it was important to actually make design way more simple. The lines at
the end of letters were considered to be way too much and complicated for the eye. And over the
20th century that anything that was unnecessary or not needed, you would just take that out.
Think about the letter C, for example, you're not just going to put a line at the end of each
point of the C and you don't need it. Let's make this even simpler. Is it a brand modern? Is it in
the technology space? Do you consider yourself something that is relatively new as a service?
Are you trying to innovate? You might want to use a non-serif font. Some non-serif fonts that are out
there are Arial, Helvetica, Poppins, Helvetica Nu. Your serif fonts, again, these are the classic
ones created for type presses. They're going to be the more classic fonts and that's things like
Georgia, Garment, Roboto Mono, Warrior Nu. Notice how these are the ones that remind you of your
typewriters and print books. If you have any work to do that is classical literary, if you have a
very classical brand and you like that older feeling, you want to go for a serif font. It's
that simple. All right. Okay. So we talked a little bit about fonts, the different types, serif,
non-serif, and I made the choice really easy for you. You're going to choose your font based upon
if you're modern. So if you're modern, choose a non-serif. That's the font with no lines at the
end. If you're more classic, you're going to choose a serif font. That's the font with the
lines at the end, like Times New Roman. Think like New York Times. Okay. Next thing, when you're
considering your branding package, you only want to use two types of fonts. And there are a few
things you can change. You can change the spacing between the letters, that's your tracking. You can
change the kerning. This might be getting a little bit too technical, but we're basically talking
about the spacing between your letters. And you can play with this easily on Canva. Write down the
word dog, make it wider, make it more crowded, and just see how that changes the way your font looks.
Some people like more space in between each letter, but consider the story that the spaces between
your letters is telling. If it's more crowded and tight, maybe that's because you want to create a
feeling of coziness. If it's more spaced out, maybe your brand has something to do with airiness and
creating space. Maybe you're a yoga teacher. You definitely want a little bit of space in between
your letters then. And that's another way to change up a font without choosing a million different
fonts. I promise you, you only need one to two. If you have more than that, it's going to look
amateur. And I know that you have decision paralysis, but choose one to two fonts. And if you want to be
a baller, just choose one. Let's say you like a really cool funky font. That's what I'm going to
tell you to choose to. Your funky font is going to be one, and then you're going to choose a very
simple font for your second one. Make it so simple. And the reason is you don't want to write your
paragraphs with funky fonts. It just doesn't work. It looks bad and no one can read it. Okay, great.
All right. We talked about fonts. Let's go on to colors. Again, we want to keep it simple. I'm
going to force you to choose three colors. And we're going to use all of our senses now to think
about what these colors represent. And we're going to use adjectives, words that describe things like
strong, dark, vibrant, maybe subtle. I need you to choose which category your brand or your product
fits in. And we're going to choose colors that match this. Pick three and make sure the colors
look good together. You're going to want at least one color that you use on everything. Be mindful
of how much you use this color. Keep it simple. If you need help, choose black, white, and then an
accent color. Maybe that accent color is pink because you're Barbie. That works if you're Barbie.
But let's say, for example, that you are a hot sauce brand that is made with orange peppers. It
might make more sense for you to use the color orange. So pick your color even based off of if
your product has a certain color. Just make it simple. Again, if you want to be even more elite
with your branding, just choose one color. In the three color palette, I told you to choose white,
black, and an accent. Typically, I would even say just choose one color. And then white and black is
a given. But if you want to play around with more color, just make sure these colors look good
together. But you're generally going to need white and black anyways. And run it by some of your
friends who are visually inclined and play around with even writing the name of the product in white
or black on this color and see how it makes you feel. See if that is something you want to stick
with. And that will develop your color choice. All right. Next up, we're talking about images.
Now images, unless you're a photographer, we don't have to get super detailed into the types
of images, but there are a few things to consider. One thing that I think about a lot as a graphic
designer and a brand designer is if my photos I'm going to include are going to be in color or in
black and white. Sometimes when I work with nonprofits, it's a lot easier to make the colors
of these photos black and white because it gives a sense for people, but it takes out a lot of the
noise. And I'm generally not trying to put a lot of focus on photos, but it does a really great job
of unifying the imagery. If I make the images black and white, you can do this with any filter, but
I would highly suggest not really using filters if you're not good with color grading your photos.
And you can be honest with yourself or ask someone because sometimes images just look way better
without filters on them or just in black and white. So keep it simple again. Have your two options,
color or black and white, and then leave everything else, saturation, brightness,
alone unless you are a professional and you know what you're doing. Okay. So let's talk about high
quality imagery. You don't need to have studio shot photos these days. You can even take your
own photos with just your phone. Make sure that you wipe the lens though, because I will tell you
the amount of times that I get images that people shot on their iPhone. And then once you upload it
onto Squarespace, if there's just like a little bit of oil on your lens, you can see a light halo.
It looks grainy. It doesn't look good. And then in that case, if you don't have your own photography,
use a website like Pexels, that's P-E-X-E-L-S or Unsplash. This is free photography you can use.
That's professional. You can search up images. So you can find images from things like people
working out at the gym or a sauna or water bottles that you could put your logo on, things like that.
And then this will help create the imagery for your brand. Keep it simple though. Make sure to
look at all your photos together and you want to make sure that they look like the lighting is a
little bit the same. So again, that kind of goes back to that whole color or black and white topic.
Sometimes it's easier to make all the photos look better together if it's black and white,
but consider what your brand is. So yeah, just choose a few photos. And if you need to use any
photography, choose some high quality, free to facial photography from Pexels or Unsplash.
And if you have your own photography to include, just make sure that you took some care to wipe
the lens before you shot the photo. Otherwise, I'm going to tell you to shoot again. All right.
This fourth one, icons. Not everyone needs icons, but let's say that you're making a website and
your brand, your company is a burger company. You want to have a cute little burger icon.
You want to have a menu icon and maybe a ketchup bottle. I'm going to recommend the Noun Project.
This is a website where you can go and get icons. I need you to only choose icons with the same line
thickness. Do not choose three different icons that have different line thickness because they
look like they're made by different people. You can tell that they are and they just don't make
sense. Try to get icons that are made by the same person in a pack. And again, if you go to the Noun
Project, these ones are going to be free. You can even find paid ones on sites like Creative Market
where you can download and pay for them. You could search them up on Pinterest, but just make sure
that your icons are uniform. And if you need new icons in the future, you can edit the icons. Take
the icon and put it in Illustrator and change the thickness, but be real. Look at the icons and ask
yourself, do they look like they belong together? Because if they don't, a bullet point is better
at that point than a bunch of icons that look mismatched. All right, last one. We're going to
talk about creating a mood board. Now that we've talked about font, color, images, icons, I want
you to create a mood board. And you can create this mood board using anything. You can open up
slides, PowerPoints, just start collecting images online, take screenshots of logos you like, of
websites you like, and then add them to your mood board. This is what I want you to do though. Be
real with yourself. Make decisions. Don't include fonts that are serif and non-serif. Make a choice.
Make your decisions. I gave you the options for font. It's choose a serif or non-serif. For colors,
it's pick three colors, then one, and then white and black, and then with images, black and white
or not. And then you could even go on sites like Pexels, Unsplash, and the Noun Project to take a
look at the icons and the photos and collect some imagery that you think you would want to use. If
you don't make these decisions, someone else is going to make them for you. And what you're doing
is you're basically paying a designer to make the choice for you because you can't. And that's not a
great place to start with your brand. I know that a lot of times we think that designers, it's easier
to hire a designer because they're making the decision for you, but it's actually better if you
have some insight into what you want and why, because it's going to make it more likely that you stick
to your brand. It is super annoying when people hire a brand designer and get a brand package done
and then they don't stick to it. It defeats the whole purpose of branding and it makes your brand
look messy. It makes you look unprofessional. So create a mood board. And in this mood board,
if there are multiple decisions you like, create multiple mood boards. But at the end of the day,
you're the one who needs to make a decision. And when you make a decision and you choose a route
that's going to make it a lot easier for you to basically, you just created your brand packaging
right there for free and you can evolve on this over time. But branding isn't the most important
thing in whether or not your product or business, your service succeeds. It's just a thing that
helps you feel confident and put yourself out there. It's what makes you recognizable. And that's
what you need to do when you're trying to promote yourself. So don't get caught up on things like
branding and indecision. Just make your decisions and create a mood board. You could even use things
like Pinterest and search it up. There are templates even on Canva for developing branding assets
and you can fill it in right there. I encourage you though, don't try to do way too much with
your branding. The strongest branding is actually really simple. It's very direct and because it is
so simple and resolute, it's easier to expand upon. It's easier to give to a designer. It's easier to
get right. The more you complicate your branding, the harder it's going to be to work with other
people and there's no one else to blame for that but you. Okay? All right. A little bit of tough
love today on the branding sector, but this has been how to create good branding. Stop over
complicating your branding. I beg you. I'm giving you free advice as a designer. And again, there
are a lot of tools out there these days. We didn't even talk about AI art today. I just gave you some
really foundational ways of making your branding look better. And I really hope that you follow
these as you make your resume, you create your LinkedIn, you make your first Squarespace website.
And if you need more help with branding, if you already did this exercise and you're like,
Jules, please help me. I'm lost. You can go ahead and look up my website. It is juliaaspero.me,
J-U-L-I-A-E-S-P-E-R-O dot, that's a period, M-E, and contact me on my website. Take a look at the
branding projects there to get some inspiration and I would love to help you with your brand.
This has been the pool party and if you like this episode, give it five stars. Follow this on Spotify
and we're going to continue with this series because I'm tired of seeing shitty stuff online.
I don't care if you made it for free or if AI made it. Make some decisions. Don't let the computer
make them for you. Have a backbone. And that's been my sub box rant for today. Thank you and goodbye.