How to Find Inspiration for Creating Your Brand Elements

Developing the brand elements for my personal brand was one of the most fun yet challenging components of creating my creative strategy, and for me, the challenge really stemmed from having to reflect upon myself in a way I had never done before. While taking Integrated Marketing Communications, your idea of being a “marketer” is truly transformed as you are required to reflect internally and make decisions about how YOU wish to be marketed. Being confident in your decisions regarding your brand elements is extremely important as the brand elements are what will allow potential employers to make positive brand associations or mental shortcuts to your brand promise. Your brand elements are also a necessary component needed to achieve awareness, the first communications objective defined in the Communication Hierarchy of Effect, which is achieved through the exposure of your brand elements over and over again. So once again, make sure you LOVE your brand elements because you and potential employers will be seeing them a lot. 

During my conversation with Chris Copacino in the third installment of Marketing by the Minute: After Class, Copacino really honed in on the importance of understanding how to market YOURSELF as a marketer in order to successfully apply for jobs in the marketing field. When you submit a resume to a company they are making quick judgments about who you are based not only on your skills and accomplishments but also on the colors, fonts, and look of your resume. Your brand elements are one of many ways that you can work to differentiate yourself from other entry-level marketers! 

The Brand Elements that are to be included in your Creative Brief are: 

• Colors 

• Fonts 

• Logo

• Tagline

• Tone 

• Look

• Smell

• Sound 

• Taste 

• Feel 

With any project, especially one like creating a Creative Strategy with yourself being the brand/product which requires you to reflect internally, the hardest part is getting started! So here are some tips and tricks that helped me develop my brand elements… as I have stated before the challenge of this project is that YOU are the only one with the answers, so getting that push or spark of inspiration can be quite challenging. The first thing I did as I began developing my brand elements was by looking at my room. This may sound silly and simple but to me, and I’m sure for many people, a bedroom is a great reflection of who you are. So when looking around how does your bedroom or whatever you consider your safe space to be, think to yourself about what that space looks like and how it makes you feel. When I looked around my room I noticed that I have lots of flowers and nature-inspired art, so I knew I wanted to include that in the “look” of my brand elements. Flowers were also included in the “smell” of my brand. I also saw that I have lots of blue, terracotta orange, green, and beige throughout my room… and those became my brand colors! By finding inspiration from my safe spaces I knew that my brand elements were a true reflection of who I am.

When deciding the fonts for my campaign I first went through Canva and looked at all of the fonts they had available and found that I really liked the look of “Prata”, but it is important to have multiple fonts selected for various headings and content throughout your website. I recommend using the website Typewolf, which provides the names of similar fonts, closest match Adobe fonts (which can be extremely helpful when designing your logo), as well as suggested font pairings. You can also download the fonts onto your computer from TypeWolf if they are unavailable on Canva, which is what I used to format and edit my Creative Strategy. 

Once you have decided upon the colors, fonts, and look of your brand you have nearly all of the components needed to create your logo, but combining all of those elements together to create an effective logo is of course easier said than done. In order to find some inspiration, Canva was a great resource- here is what I did! First I created a new design and selected “Logo”, from there on the “Design” side panel you can search through logo designs. When I was designing my logo, I wanted to somehow incorporate flowers in the logo, so I searched “floral” which inspired me to create the first iteration of my logo design. But as I continued editing my design and looking at other logo designs on Canva I wanted to swap out the floral element for a sun element to be more cohesive with my tagline, “Clear Sky Marketing”. 

Here is a snapshot of my brand elements from my Creative Strategy! 

Getting inspiration for your brand elements is one of the hardest parts, so don’t be afraid to utilize the resources available to you to aid in your creative process!