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Creating a Brand Board on Canva: A Casual Guide
Hello Internet friends! Today, we're diving into the world of brand boards and how you can whip one up using Canva's free version. Whether you're a budding entrepreneur or just someone who loves a good DIY project, this guide is for you.
Why a Brand Board?
First things first, let's talk about why you need a brand board. Imagine you're working with a designer or a print shop, and you want to make sure they get your brand's vibe just right. A brand board is your visual cheat sheet. It includes your logos, fonts, and colors—all in one neat package. It's like handing over the keys to your brand's kingdom.
Getting Started with Canva
Now, let's get our hands dirty. Fire up Canva and type "brand board" in the search bar. You'll find a bunch of templates to choose from. Pick one that tickles your fancy and hit "customize this template." Don't worry if you're using the free version; it's more than enough for our needs.
Logos, Fonts, and Colors—Oh My!
Upload your logos to Canva. If you're like me and have a fictional brand (shoutout to Mindful Brew!), this is where you get to play around. Mindful Brew is a green coffee house with a community space, and its logo reflects that vibe. Remember, your logo is the face of your brand, so make sure it’s front and center.
Next up, fonts. Canva has a plethora of options, but for Mindful Brew, we’re going with Bristol for the header and Monstrat for the body. These fonts are easy on the eyes and keep things looking professional.
Colors are the final piece of the puzzle. Mindful Brew's palette includes a soothing green, a rich brown, and a darker brown. These colors are not just for show; they help maintain consistency across all your branding materials.
Putting It All Together
With your logos, fonts, and colors in place, it's time to assemble your brand board. Think of it as a visual menu of your brand's identity. You can even include different versions of your logo for various backgrounds—light, dark, and everything in between.
Why It Matters
A well-crafted brand board is more than just a pretty picture. It ensures that anyone working with your brand knows exactly what to do. Whether you're sponsoring an event or getting some merch printed, your brand board is your best friend.
Final Thoughts
Creating a brand board on Canva is a breeze, and it doesn't require a paid subscription. In under 20 minutes, you can have a professional-looking brand board ready to go. So, what are you waiting for? Dive in and start creating!
If you found this guide helpful, or if you have any questions, feel free to reach out. I'm always here to help fellow creatives on their branding journey. Until next time, happy designing!
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Transcript
Hi, Internet friends. Welcome to the Dana Show where we BS about business and branding. I'm your host Dana. Today we are talking about a brand board and I'm going to walk you through exactly how to create a brand board on Canva using the free version. So I can show you that you don't need to have the paid version, which a lot of people don't need if you're depending on what you're creating. So I have the paid version. So this is a separate account.
So the purpose of a brand board is to give anyone who's doing any kind of branding work or design work with you to make sure that they completely visually understand everything about your brand that they need to know. So what that means is we want to give them a document and it's just a one page PDF file and it's going to include your logos, your fonts and your colors.
These, course, are not everything that makes up your brand, as I've said before. But for a brand board, this is what we want to do so that we can show people exactly what your, what the technical design aspects of your brand are so that they can maintain consistent in anything that they create for you. So, for example, if you start working with me and you want a new website, you want to make sure
that you are I'm I have the right color. So I know what the background color should be. I know what your preferred fonts are, especially your logo. I need to know, assuming we're not creating a new logo. But so let's use another example. Let's say you're getting a banner made. You're you're sponsoring an event and you need a banner made for this event with your logo on it.
In addition to giving someone access to all of the different versions of your logo, you make a brand board and you also send them this. This explains to them all the do's and don'ts that they need to know about your logo. And it's really useful and really important because if you send this stuff to someone, a print shop, someone making t-shirts and they don't use the right thing, your logo could be completely wonky.
Dana Schulte (02:26.466)
And we want that to be consistent because that is how people recognize you. And especially if you're using it for paid marketing and advertising, we want to make sure it's done right. That just helps level up your professionalism. So we're going to go ahead and go into Canva and there we go. There we go. So we're going to go in here and type in brand board. All right.
And this is under Create. So we're going to pull this first one here. And we're going to go ahead and say, customize this template. And then we're going to let me switch over to that one because there we go. OK. It opens a new window. then my thing's like, my god, what's happening? So.
First thing I want to do is show you the logos. So this is in, this is, I've already uploaded these. We're using a fictional place called Mindful Brew. Mindful Brew is a fictional, again, community and coffee space. It is a third space. This is the company, the business I use when I work with my students in class.
And so we have created this logo and we have the colors and all of those things so that they don't have to kind of get almost lost in those kind of things. It's really easy to get bogged down in these things, especially when you're working on a project. And for school, when I'm working with my students, I'm teaching a writing class.
I don't want them to get bogged down in the details of the design. And as a visual person, that's really easy for me to do. So we, when we're focusing on the writing, I provide these things. So this is mindful brew. I full disclosure created this logo using Canva. Do not do that because this icon is a free icon I got from Canva. You cannot.
Dana Schulte (04:48.27)
copyright or trademark this. This logo is not able to be copyrighted or trademarked, which is a problem if you want to grow. But for the purposes of this, it's completely adequate. We're not copywriting and trademarking this. This is for demonstration purposes only. So this is mindful brew. The reason I picked this is it kind of looks like a heart the way the coffee beans and it fit in with this idea of being mindful.
So the idea of Mindful Brew is it's a green coffee house that has community space. So they follow green practices as best they can. They provide space in addition to obviously having coffee and baked goods and things like that. They're going to have greener options, which includes some vegan options. And then also,
it has a community space. So you can use the space to have community meetings. They have music nights. They have monologues and plays and other theater related things there. So it really the purpose of mindful brew is to really be a community space, not just a coffee house. So that's why we called it mindful brew.
So this is their main logo and these are their colors. Their background color is this off white, but the ones we're mainly concerned about are this green, this brown, which is this brown right here and then this darker brown. Okay, so we're gonna go back up to this template and we're going to make this bigger and we're just gonna save those three. Whoops.
Dana Schulte (06:39.47)
Okay, so I have these in written down. So the first one we're going to do is the green and that is this is called a hex number. This is a number that we use when we are doing design. It makes it easy.
for everyone to see to be on the same page to make sure they have your branded colors. So I copied it, I dropped it in the color and now this color is the same as this number. That does not automatically happen. You have to do that specifically. So then we're gonna do the brown, which is 7A4900. Put the hashtag in the front with a pound sign depending on how old you are.
and
go in here and paste that there. And there's our brown, our dark brown. And then we want our light brown, which is B4AB7A. So this is just like a mix of six letters and numbers in front of a pound sign or hashtag. And go ahead and pop that in there. Yeah, there we go. OK.
So these are the colors that are in our logo when we go back here and look at the uploads. All right. So right here, we want to go ahead and put that logo in. So we're going to delete all of this and pop that in here.
Dana Schulte (08:29.324)
When you get this, it will be better quality. When you get this from a designer, again, this is for demonstration purposes. This isn't a really perfect version. We're just going to pop that right here in the middle. This is our main logo. OK?
And then at the very top, go ahead and change this to mindful brew.
And we're going to change this to our font. Our font is Bristol.
And we want to change this to community and coffee. And this one is monster at which we already have. we're good to go there. All righty. going to bump this down because that will annoy me. There we go. And send that a little bit more. Okay. That would make me crazy. Otherwise, I am also going to change this to our green.
which is from our, I hope it'll pop that up, which is this one.
Dana Schulte (09:44.834)
Because we don't just want.
This we want the whole thing to be branded. I'm going to change it to that. And I don't mind this little background when I don't I don't mind being that color. So our fonts, this one on the right is already monster at classic, which is the same as monster at so monster. I can't monster at. OK. And then this one we want to be Bristol. So we're going to change the name of it here.
to Bristol and then we're gonna highlight and change it to Bristol as well as this. So this is your header font. This is a font you use sparingly. This particular one isn't super easy to read, which is fine because of the way we're using it, but you wanna make, this isn't something you would wanna write a whole document in or a whole add in.
it would be really, really hard. You would not want your whole website to be this fun. It would be very difficult for people to really read it. You want to make it easy to read. So that's why we use the Monstrat. It is pretty consistent. It is a basic, but I like it. It's classic. It's the one that I use in my own marketing. So we want to make sure we use it there.
This could be changed to that if we wanted to. I'm not as worried about it, but let's go ahead and change that just so we're consistent across the board. So we'll change all of this to this font. here, change all. OK. This is done. Yep.
Dana Schulte (11:33.167)
And this we're going to delete. So this is what we have so far. Mindful Brew, Community and Coffee, and then the logo, the font information, the color palette information. And then instead of a mood inspiration, which does have a place depending on what you're doing. But in this case, we want this to be we want to share our specific logos. So we're to change that to logos.
and then we're going to go ahead and start popping in these logos. So I'm going to start with mindful brew, the regular, whoops, no, I just wanted you to come down, there we go. Let go ahead and I'm gonna crop this down.
make this little bigger. And then we're going to do all three color versions in a row. So the reason I have multiple color versions is because you want to have this version which has the colored background. We want to see what this looks like on a white background.
And we also want to see what this looks like on a dark background.
Dana Schulte (13:02.722)
And that's important depending on what your project is. So if you're having t-shirts made and sometimes when you're doing a t-shirt, you're sponsoring an event so you can't pick the color of the t-shirt. You might be sponsoring an event where they have a bunch of their sponsors on the back and let's say they use a navy blue t-shirt. Well, this is what you would use on that. On that, this is how it would look on that dark color because the colors I picked
enough contrast with the dark and the light, we don't need to have two versions of the color of the color t-shirt. Sometimes you do. It depends on what you pick because you want to have enough contrast that people can actually see it depending on what color background it's on. So we have this with our light brown background, our tan background, a white background, and a black background. So this is telling whoever's doing design work this is how this is intended to look.
So make sure that this is accurate, this is appropriate. And then we want to have a black and white version on a dark background and on a light background. So we want to make these the same size roughly. OK. So I'm going to actually put this one here.
And then I'm gonna do the light one.
Didn't want to do that. Control Z.
Dana Schulte (14:38.156)
Okay, I'm going to put the light one here.
Dana Schulte (14:59.66)
give you a general idea. I'm gonna actually drop these down just a little bit because we want to add some content, some text. And then lastly, this is your social media profile. It needs to be square. And we always include this. Well, it's your brand board, it should have all this information on it. But the reason this is important is when you're doing social media,
you're doing that profile picture it's either a square or a circle. This would not show up very well in there. It's it would be way too small because a lot of times when someone is on social media they're on their phone and when they're on their phone it's even smaller and like so tiny. So you want to have something that's easily recognizable when it's very small. So that's why we have this version. When I do create this out of someone's logo
I actually will put a circle behind it in the design program to make sure it fits in a circle because some social media profiles are circles and some are squares and we don't want to have to have two versions. We're going to use the one version and make sure it works for both. So and then we need to label these. So we're going to go ahead and add some text and we're just going to do subheading. We're going to do this in Monstrat. So
Dana Schulte (16:30.944)
to call this full color wordmark.
Okay.
Wordmark is exactly this. It has the words in it. That's what we call it. This would be a brand mark that doesn't have any words in it.
just duplicate this and put one behind under each these and then we'll change the content or the text.
Dana Schulte (17:09.548)
Okay, so this is full color wordmark, full color wordmark.
Dana Schulte (17:16.994)
I'm just going to say on white.
Dana Schulte (17:25.422)
And here I'm going to say full color on, you know, I want to say dark, dark background. You might have to make these smaller on, let's say light background.
Dana Schulte (17:47.256)
make this 24. There we go.
Dana Schulte (17:57.385)
And we'll do the same with this one.
Dana Schulte (18:04.258)
make them consistent.
Dana Schulte (18:15.8)
So this is full color brand mark. And I'm going to have write and social media profile.
All right. That one, I don't mind being two lines because there's space below it. And this is black and white.
on dark background.
Dana Schulte (18:41.376)
And this is black and white.
Dana Schulte (18:47.305)
on light background.
Dana Schulte (18:53.56)
And I'm OK with these two going two lines because there's space down here. And I'm going to delete this bottom one. So the reason we do the black and white versions on the light and on the dark is because sometimes you're in a situation where color printing is not an option. If you're sponsoring a theater production, a community theater production, and your logo appears in the program,
A lot of times the entire middle section of it is in black and white. So you want to make sure that you are sending the right logo and that they understand what the different ones are and for the different purposes. Here, I actually, these are different colors. You can see this one's white and this one's black. This is a light gray. This is a dark gray, white, black. They actually, I think they're all dark grays. They're all just variants of gray, but there's...
These ones are different, whereas this one I went ahead and kept it the same colors. I think it's readable enough on the dark background. So these are six versions of the same logo, right? You have one logo, but you have six versions. And this should be standard for all of your logos, especially if you're doing sponsoring work, if you're doing anything where it might appear on different colored backgrounds.
That's really important. And but just look at how great this is. We'll make this a little smaller so we can see the whole page. Look how great this is. You download it as a PDF file and you just email it to whoever you're working with. And depending on what you're doing, you might just send them the specific logo they need. What I like to do and what I recommend is having a file, a file folder. I use Google Drive.
And I just have that all located in one folder. In addition to, I would keep this PDF file in there. All of the versions of my logo, including PNG, JPEG, SVG, if you have a vector logo, that vector is one that can be made as big or small as needed. No matter what version you have, you want to have them all available in one place. I also have all of my approved headshots and a Google
Dana Schulte (21:11.702)
document with a bio in it. And that way anyone I'm working with, I just send them that folder and they can pull out of it what they need. It's also really great if you are appearing in any kind of earned media. And by earned media, if you're in a newspaper article, if you're appearing on TV, a podcast, radio, anything like that,
you where they want to have a bio or even if you're at a speaking event, they want to have a bio of you. They want to put a photo, a headshot of you, maybe in addition to your logo. I can just keep all of that in one place and anytime that happens, I can just send them the link and then they can download whatever they need. It makes it really easy for whoever you're working with and also makes you look so professional. When you have that ready to go,
And you don't have to be like, you know what, let me go find the logo. I got to find it. I'll have to send it to you. And then you send it they don't get it because the file's too big. And you get all of these other crazy technical problems. Instead, you put this document in that file and then you also email it to them. Since it's a PDF, it should email really easily. It's not super big. And then they have what they need. I like to do it that way because that way they have
the PDF file in their files and then also the link to access anything else they need and then they can download those and they can really easily access that information whenever they need it for whatever they're making for you. So that's your brand board. That's how to create a brand board using the free version of Canva. There's of course lots of other ways you can do it, but this is a really easy way to do it.
in under 20 minutes, you put everything in there that you need to go and then upload that into a Google Doc. I hope you found this helpful. I do have some guests lined up for future episodes. I would love to have you on if you're interested in coming on. You can message me below or you can email me. The email is down below in the notes.
Dana Schulte (23:28.878)
If you are interested in working with me, if you feel like your website needs an update or your logo needs an update, I work with great graphic designers who do logo work because I'm not a graphic designer, obviously. But I work with some great graphic designers if you do need a new logo, but we can put this together for you. You can schedule a fit call with me at the link down below. I have certain
dates and times blocked out every week. And when you schedule with me, it just pops up on my calendar and then we show up on a video call. And I do have open, I do have a few open spaces. I only work with a few clients at a time. And right now I have a couple of open spaces. So I would love to hear from you and see if that would be a good fit. Till next time. Bye.
