Considerations for Developing New Brands Online
When you start creating a brand on the internet, things can be confusing. You’re not sure what search terms you’ll be able to rank for on search engines and there is a lot of traffic to compete against online. It’s important that once you’ve established your brand’s identity, you continue to design the brand through style and campaign optimization.
Since working in a web & app design agency, I’ve picked up a few things about website design and stylistic elements. I’ve been involved in implementing branding colors and selection of fonts to identify who brands are online, before implementing with CSS. Not everything about design for Marketing is complicated and this introductory blog post will provide you with some background on how to design your brand for success.
This is written mostly for people that have newer brands, rather than large established brands that have more concrete guidelines on their collateral. For your brand, you might consider the font selection, colors and overall user experience of your website. These concepts can also be useful for designing your professional portfolio site.
Fonts define us
You’ll want to choose distinctive fonts to showcase your brand’s personality and mood. If it is more casual, I would recommend a sans serif. Usually, it’s advisable to have more than one font with variety between seriffs and sans seriffs to show distinction between headers and copy. The website doesn’t need too many fonts and many brands start with 3 - 5 fonts for simplicity.
What’s in an Image?
Not everything has to be original content. Many small businesses and even multinationals are seen utilizing stock photos for basic imagery in their content. You can utilize your own imagery or start with a royalty free stock site to save on initial investment.
Color Psychology
Brands should always have a core of 3 base colors. These 3 colors make up a majority of the branding, the logo and website. An additional 2 colors will be secondary colors that are used on CTAs and links. CTAs should be the most eye-catching, so they are often orange, red or light green. Color psychology should be considered for the main brand colors because colors have an emotional and cultural influence on site visitors.
Buttons
The users of your website need to understand how to get from point A to point B. You’ll need to make sure that there are clear buttons to show them where to go. These should be in a bright color that makes them stand out on the page, above the fold in the content. It’s important that the number of buttons is kept to a minimum outside of the main page navigation, so that users are not confused about where to go next. Often buttons are after the first paragraph of body text or an additional floating button is added to the right of the navigation menu.
For many businesses, it is important to consider how to get site visitors to the sale page in the most efficient manner possible. For a personal brand, you may want to link to a contact page, or utilize an HTML email link.
In the long term, you can consider developing your own style guide with details about the best branding components to include in your designs. You can’t stipulate everything, but you can make an overall guide to the thematic concepts utilized to represent branding. By understanding these general stylistic elements, you can create a brand that looks more seamless from the get go.