Consistency is the key to any successful and recognizable brand. In other words, having a consistent, well-designed brand kit can help elevate and define your identity in your market or niche. 

A brand kit most often consists of the visual elements of a brand, including logo, color palettes and typography, whilst touching on tone of voice, brand values and your brand’s overall creative direction. For digital era businesses, having a brand kit that adapts seamlessly to all your platforms and campaigns as well is naturally going to be crucial for ensuring strong communications with your audience segments, and thus for supporting your commercial success. 

But how exactly do you make a brand kit? Just as the digital era has expanded on the contents of brand kits, it’s also provided the perfect selection of tools for effortlessly bringing your kit to life. Design tools like Canva and Adobe are making brand kit development simpler than ever. Those with limited graphic design experience can easily utilize templates for producing pitchable brand kit mockups, whilst those with a stronger background in design can even use Photoshop online for a more bespoke and polished approach. Regardless, a strong brand kit relies on creativity, clarity and consistency.

To support you through your own brand kit development process, we’ve made a step-by-step guide to creating a strong performing brand kit that covers all platforms, media and traditional marketing tools.

1. Establish Your Brand Identity

Before jumping straight into making your logo and defining all the more visual aspects of your brand, you’ll first want to begin with outlining the meaning behind your brand identity and brand concept. This is the beginning of giving your brand value and purpose. 

A clear brand identity is foundational, in that it also helps to inform all the other aspects of your brand kit, from your logo to the tone of voice you use for your audience communications across different mediums and content formats. Later on, your logo, color palette and tone of voice should aptly convey and be organically reflective of your brand identity. 

At this phase in the brand kit building process, it’s also important to consider your brand’s mission statement, brand vision, and brand values. Ask yourself:

• What are my brand values?
• Who is my brand targeting?
• What message do I want to convey?
• How do I want people to feel when interacting with my brand?

By asking yourself these questions, you can shape a clearer direction for your brand, helping you make bigger decisions down the line. 

2. Highlight Your Color Palette

A strong color palette can often convey more than identity. Colors build association, evoke emotions, and appeal to audience sentiments and desires through the use of color psychology – all alongside drawing attention to a brand.

Based on optimal color ratios used in creative industries, a well-balanced and cohesive color palette should include:

• A dominant primary color
• A small selection (2-4) secondary colors
• Neutral color (1-2) for backgrounds and text

Your secondary and neutral colors should compliment your brands primary color, giving the brand personality and elegance. Tip: Save your color codes within your brand kit for easy access.

3. Create Your Brand Logo

Your logo should act as the face of your brand, being the most recognisable aspect to return customers to the brand. A strong logo also inspires positive and relevant associations, by presenting your brand as playful through design and by utilizing color psychology.

It’s also important to keep in mind that your logo is designed to be used across virtually all mediums and in a variety of different sizes. So in the creation of your logo image file/s, you should ensure it is adaptable to all formats, and thus usable across all media types. 

Use this guide to create the perfect high-resolution logo:

• Use various colors on the background and logo to ensure it stands out.
• Use a transparent PNG file to drop the background.
• Design in vector format (SVG, EPS) for high resolution.

Designing your logo in a high-resolution vector format ensures the logo is clear across all media types. SVG or EPS files can be easily resized and edited when using tools like Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop. 

4. Create A Bold Typography

Your brand fonts are used across all channels, from your websites to your social media and even posters and other traditional print designs. This means that a bad selection in typography can affect the efficacy of your brand at every level.

Your typography should build on what you have already established, conveying your brand story and complementing your visuals. You should establish:

• A heading font
• Subheading font
• Body text font

Your heading fonts should be bold and easy to read, where your body font must remain clean and complimentary to your header. Avoid using too many typefaces, 2-3 contrasting typefaces will aid in strengthening your brand identity and brand recall. 

5. Find Your Tone of Voice

Your brand voice should be clear, consistent and reflective of your brand’s personality. It would be helpful to include a quick guideline on your tone of voice within your brand kit, highlighting how your brand comes across to your audience: fun, friendly, professional or bold. 

It can also be helpful to include a tagline, phrase or keywords in your TOV (tone of voice) guidelines, just to keep your tone of voice relevant to your values and creative direction. You might want to adapt your tone of voice to each platform, adopting a more casual tone on instagram in comparison to more professional on linkedin. 

6.  Map Your Creative Direction

Now that your brand kit is established, it’s time to put together your brand assets – using icons, graphic templates, image presets and examples to create a strict guideline. You might want to create a business card, brand strategy template or other assets relevant to your brand function. Templates can make content creation quicker, ensuring consistency and long-term success. 

The result is a consistent brand identity, with high-quality social media and marketing visuals. 

Final Steps

Congratulations! By now you should have a high-quality, well-designed brand kit, elevating your digital and physical presence. There is however, just one more step you might want to consider: storage. After you have your logo, color palette, visual direction and templates complete, you’ll want to look at compiling your assets into one design. Remember to include:

• Logo
• Color palette
• Typography guide
• Tone of voice
• Creative Direction or Visual Guide

Using a file format like a PDF is easy to update, store and share. Remember to test your assets before diving in head first! Trial your logo, typography and color scheme across your social platforms, newsletter or billboard format to ensure they are readable, clean and consistent.

A strong brand kit isn’t only visually satisfying, it makes customers’ heads turn!