How Do You Set My Brand Designer Up for Success?

Starting a new brand is very tough indeed, just ask our founder Mark Boardman, who has a decade of experience in sales, marketing and media.

As a start-up champ, he has founded, supported and invested in dozens of companies including UKFilmPremieres, UKCelebEvents, Showbiz Gossip (UK Showbiz Gossip), Celeb Management, and many more including news website CultCrunch.com which is now truly global with over 20,000 articles online and offices in London and Los Angeles.

Having worked on social media, press releases and consulted on campaigns for Apple, Panasonic, Warner Brother and countless more businsses, his experience and net worth of $20m plus means he is on speed dial for media and sales companies.

So you are developing a new brand from scratch. How can I set up my designer for success?

At this stage, your brand is like a blank canvas. As you develop your brand identity, you’ll get to develop its look and feel.

Brand identity is an umbrella term that includes many different factors that contribute to how the public perceives your business. These include everything from mission statements, logos, color schemes, fonts and even sounds.

The first step to developing a successful brand is by defining what your brand actually is. What will the public recognize as your business’s personality? You need to be able to find keywords or phrases that accurately portray what it is you want your business to be known for. Do you want to come across as elegant, creative, modern, futuristic? There are many adjectives that can show how you’d like consumers to view your brand — find the one (or few) that best fit.

The next step is to translate those keywords and adjectives into a visual language. Some of the most common forms of visual branding include:

Color schemes and palettes: These communicate what mood you want your business to be known for.

Typography: The fonts you use on your website, on social media, on any marketing materials sent out can say a lot about who your business is.

Logos: A great logo represents your brand in an easily recognizable way.

I recently went through the brand identity process with the recent re-launch of MarkMeets, a new community for the crypto curious that seeks to get women and nonbinary people educated, connected and rewarded in all things web3. As my team worked to create something out of nothing with this brand, we started our process by taking to heart that branding efforts should go beyond just how our audience sees the brand. We told our designer that we wanted it to feel friendly and colorful, yet mysterious and esoteric, like so many things in crypto feel right now.

We knew that “MarkMeets” meant together-ness, so we asked to see that depicted in the logo and branding as well. It’s a healthy balance of the “girl next door” friend that you’d want to learn crypto from, coupled with a bit of darkness and intrigue about what comes next. As you can see, everything from our logo, to our social media posts to the branding of our first NFTs reinforce the feeling and emotion that MarkMeets aims to communicate.

So start with your own process. What’s your brand name, what feeling do you want it to depict, and how can you ensure consistency in that look and feel across all channels?