Your brand aesthetic refers to how your brand looks, acts and presents itself to your audience. Creating a solid aesthetic can be tricky, but it’s key for looking professional and consistent.
What is a brand aesthetic?
Everything you post, create, say and share through your brand will make up your brand aesthetic. It embodies your brands mood, vibe and personality, and will be the first thing potential audiences see when visiting your pages and seeing your content.
By creating a strong brand aesthetic, you can ensure consistency across all of your pages and content, whilst also appearing professional and appealing to your fans and audiences. Studies have shown that consistent branding can even increase revenue by 23 percent so it’s worthwhile spending time on it.
Everything you create and post across all of your platforms all contributes to your overall brand aesthetic, including:
- Photoshoots
- Videos
- Fonts
- Your tone of voice
- Comments/responses
- Images
- Colour palette
- Adverts
- How you act
How can I create a strong brand aesthetic?
1. Get to know your brand
If you don’t know the ins and outs of your brand, you’re not ready to create a brand aesthetic. The clearer you are on what your brand is, what is stands for and who your audience are, the easier it’ll be to create an effective identity for your brand.
Sit down and brainstorm questions such as:
– What do I want my audience to think of my brand?
– What are the values/ethos behind my brand?
– What sets my brand apart from my competitors?
All of these questions are key to you understanding the fundamentals of your new venture and exactly how you want to present it to the outside world.
2. Get inspiration
Take a look through other brands and businesses aesthetics and get some inspiration. Ask yourself what you like about their branding, and what you don’t like about their branding.
Remember that you don’t want to copy and steal other brands identities, but it’s ok to pick and choose different elements that you like from various different brands.
Inspiration doesn’t just have to come from the internet or socials either, open a magazine, walk down the high street or look through some books. Notice any fonts, colour palettes, or photos that catch your eye; these are all fundamental parts of a brands aesthetic.
3. Collate it all together
So now you’ve got your inspiration, put it all in one place so you can refer back to it. Pinterest is a great place to compile visuals and inspiration which you can also share with friends, or other members of your business.
If you’re wanting a more cohesive form of documentation, place all of your inspiration and notes in a word document. Note down any fonts you like, videos you draw inspiration from and other resources along with links to each.
4. Put it all into practice
You should now have a good grasp on your brand and the audience you want to appeal to, along with a refreshing amount of inspiration and a document where it’s all contained. Now it’s time to start using it all!
There are various websites like Canva, which offer visual templates that you can design to be in keeping with your brand. If you’re feeling confident, then you can dive right in with an image editor such as Photoshop and start creating visual content for your socials and sites.
When posting to socials, you can also consider using template apps for your posts and stories, such as Unfold. These are great resources at creating cohesive feeds and require no photoshop of image editing experience.
Resources
If you’re struggling where to start, here are some great free resources you can use to source various aspects of your brand aesthetic:
