Have you ever worked with a designer, printer, or other creative professional and were left scrambling when they asked for your brand font or colors? Do your brand assets all live in obscure folders that need an extensive hard drive search to be found? It might be time for one of the most useful visual tools any business can have—a brand board.
What Is a Brand Board?
A brand board (also known as a brand cheatsheet or guideline) is kind of what it sounds like—it’s a collection of your brand’s logos, fonts, colors, patterns, textures, icons, and any other assets that are an essential part of the look and feel of your business. This board can be laid out in a variety of ways, but the core purpose is to collect and display everything that visually defines your brand.
This excellent brand board features primary and secondary logos, spacing/printing guidelines, colors (with codes), fonts, materials, and more!
Why Is A Brand Board Essential?
Having a brand board makes designing, writing, and doing work for your business easy. Instead of hunting down a variety of files, color codes (CMYK, RBG, or HEX, anyone?) and font names, you can display everything someone might need to reference all in one neat and professional package. Plus, it keeps your brand consistent across all platforms, print materials, and posts should different people be managing different parts of your marketing or design efforts. Having a brand board makes you look prepared, polished, and proud of who your brand is on paper (literally).
This simpler brand board still packs a punch with lots of assets in one layout.
What About My Other Brand Files?
In addition to a brand board, another essential brand asset is a folder, shared drive, or presentation with all the actual files that your brand uses (or links to them). This can include logo, color, font, pattern, icon, or other files that a designer or marketer would need in order to create projects for your business. A brand board is the beautiful introduction to your brand, but these assets are what actually get the work done.
A brand board is the key to professionally presenting your business’ brand identity to the world. No matter what assets you choose to include, make sure to keep it clean, easy to read, and visually refined to really wow anyone you send it to.
Looking to create a brand board for your business? I would love to help. Drop a comment below or shoot me an email to get started.