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BBP 048 How to Improve Your Blog’s Brand Consistency with Madison Wetherill

Shownotes:

When readers think about your brand, they think about more than your logo, and so should you. Your visual branding goes way beyond just picking a logo and having a consistent brand message across all of your materials is an important part of telling your readers they are in the right place. In this episode, get some tips to quickly take your brand from DIY to professional!

Guest Info

Madison Wetherill is a food blogger turned web designer, who has worked with hundreds of food bloggers since 2015 through Grace + Vine Studios (link to https://graceandvinestudios.com). She helps her clients connect with their audience through their website design and branding. She is also the host of The Vine Podcast (https://thevinepodcast.com), a podcast focused on strategy and design and growing your food blog without the hustle and burn out.

Learn More: https://graceandvinestudios.com

Navigate the Episode

[00:41] – The Visual Side of Your Brand

[03:49] – Best Tips for a DIY Brand

Related Content

Transcript

[00:00:08].380] – Liz Stapleton

Have you ever heard that your logo is the face of your brand? Well, there’s a lot more to branding than just creating a logo. And keeping your visual branding consistent across your business is an important way for you to connect with and build your audience. Hi, I’m Liz Stapleton, founder of the Blogger Breakthrough Summit and welcome to the Blogger Breakthrough Podcast.

[00:00:25].870] – Liz Stapleton

In today’s episode, you’re going to learn how to improve your visual brand consistency from graphic design superstar, Madison Wetherill. Madison shared these branding tips during the 2021 Blogger Breakthrough Summit. And I can’t wait for you to learn them, too. Let’s jump right in.

[00:00:41].440] – Madison Wetherill

And so now we can start thinking about the visual side of your branding. So the first thing that we’re going to talk about is brand consistency. So I gave a couple of examples of when things start to get a little bit off track with your branding.

[00:00:54].820] – Madison Wetherill

 So typically this is if something doesn’t fit or doesn’t feel right about your branding, and so you go off course and try to create something new. So the very first thing you need to do in order to check to see if your brand is consistent across all platforms is that you first have to review what you have.

[00:01:12].850] – Madison Wetherill

So this can be as simple as taking some screenshots and putting them in a folder on your computer. If you are more tangible and you want to print these out and make a board, that is a great way to do this, too. You could also just open all of these things up on your computer and look at them.

[00:01:27].850] – Madison Wetherill

But you want to look at things like your logo, your website design, any Pinterest graphics that you have, your photography style, and really any other graphics that you’re creating, maybe just open up your Canva account and look through things. Your Freebees might be a good one or even your email marketing campaign template. So you want to look at what all of these pieces look like together.

[00:01:51].160] – Madison Wetherill

Then you’re going to start to evaluate. So you want to first think about everything we’ve laid as the foundation as the strategy for your brand. And you want to start to think about, does your current branding work for your audience, your niche, and your messaging? Does it feel in line?

[00:02:09].340] – Madison Wetherill

And this is really when you have to even if you are not a designer, you can still look at something and know whether it feels off. Maybe you can’t explain what feels off about it yet, but you can look at a couple of pieces of your branding, and then think about your audience member, and think about what this resonate with my audience.

[00:02:27].760] – Madison Wetherill

Would this person be attracted to this Pinterest design? And you can start to just figure out whether these things are starting to build a great puzzle that works. Or if you’re starting to see that there’s some fragments in place.

[00:02:41].680] – Madison Wetherill

Then you can look at the branding and see if it’s visually consistent. So are you using the same colours, the same fonts? Are you using the same overall style, like a minimalist style? Or maybe it’s bright and bold. And you want to just think about, are these things lining up?

[00:02:59].470] – Madison Wetherill

Next, you’re going to document. So I’m going to talk about this a little bit on the next slide. But this is when you really start to create a visual representation of what your branding is. Maybe when you look at everything that you have so far, you realise that your Pinterest graphics are a little bit off. So you’re going to rework those once you have this branding document in place.

[00:03:20].020] – Madison Wetherill

And then last, once you have evaluated everything, you’ve maybe redone a couple of things about your branding and you’ve documented it into a brand board, which, again, we’ll talk about in a second, then you can start to create templates for consistency.

[00:03:35].320] – Madison Wetherill

So I love using Canva for this. I create all of my client graphics for them in Canva so that they can we reuse them in the future. And this is a great way to have consistency within your templates because it’s right there in built in for you.

[00:03:49].210] – Madison Wetherill

So again, when you’re talking about DIY in your branding, whether that’s because you’re not ready to work with a brand designer or you don’t want to, for whatever reason, my best tips for DIY on your branding is, again, to keep it simple.

[00:04:03].910] – Madison Wetherill

So this means you want to use one or two fonts. And I typically recommend if you’re doing a logo and you’re DYI-ing it, just do one font. It’s often hard for people who are not designers to be able to pair up fonts together. And that’s not something that is a natural strength of yours. Generally, I would say keeping it to one font is going to help with consistency.

[00:04:25].480] – Madison Wetherill

If you’re thinking about your website design, you can pick one font for your body font and one font for your headings, and then maybe try to incorporate those fonts into your logo design.

[00:04:35].810] – Madison Wetherill

When it comes to colours, you want to choose two to three colours at most. I typically recommend to do one primary colour and one secondary colour. And those are going to be the two colours that you’re going to use the most in your graphics and your branding. It’s also usually helpful to have some sort of gray colour to be an accent color without really having something that is competing against your other colours.

[00:04:59].500] – Madison Wetherill

So then again, you’re going to create a brand board once you have all of these things decided. And that is going to help you be consistent across your platforms. And whenever you want to create something new, you’ll be able to refer back to that brand. 

[00:05:12].830] – Liz Stapleton

All right, hopefully this episode has helped you to better understand the basics of visual brand consistency and gave you some ideas on how to evaluate and improve your own. If you want to learn more about building your brand from Madison or want to hear more blogging tips and tricks, be sure to jump over to BloggerBreakthrough.com/Podcastdeal to find out how you can access all the 2021 Blogger Breakthrough Summit sessions.

[00:05:36].470] – Liz Stapleton

Be sure to join me next time when we dive into creating freebies that your audience will love. Catch you then.

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