branding

Curate Your Brand In Really Meaningful Ways

Curating your brand in meaningful ways by using the 80/20 rule

In today’s world, it is easy to get caught up in trying to do all the things, do them perfectly, or make them more complex than they need to be. What is hard to do, and something I have been really intentional about focusing on is to do less. Something I have found to be really beneficial for me to truly curate my brand in meaningful ways is by taking the time to reflect and figure out how to pare down my efforts and focus on the things that make the most impact.

I learned this strategy from one of my favorite books: Do Less by Kate Northrup. In this book, she explores the Pareto Principle — otherwise known as the 80/20 rule. In the exercise, she asks you to list out all of your biggest wins. Then next to it, she has you list out all of your biggest efforts — for business this could be marketing efforts, sales efforts, or any way you have put yourself out there to grow your business and move the needle forward. Once you have the lists side-by-side, draw a line from your biggest win to the effort that you put forth in order to make that win a possibility. By the end of the exercise, you should be able to see that out of all of your efforts, 20% of your efforts brought 80% of your results.

This exercise should help you see what is working best for you and what you can potentially eliminate or pare down on to give you some more time back in your business. How does this work with curating your brand? Instead of spending time doing all the things, spend time doing the things that are going to bring you the biggest impact with the time you have.

My top two were writing and relationship-building through in-person events.

In my business, this looks like writing blog posts, and most recently, being intentional about showing up on video as a form of a blog — vlogging. When I do a video, it is quick to transcribe and a lot faster to create blog content if I can get good at it.

In person events are something I absolutely love! It doesn’t feel like it requires as much effort to build key relationships when at in-person events. What stinks is I figured this out right at the beginning of the pandemic, so I had to start brainstorming how I could still authentically show up to build relationships without being in the same room as someone — the solution for me was the use of video.

What efforts are your biggest business wins connected to? As you’re gearing up to do impactful work with curating your brand you want to be thinking about how you can do it with less so you aren’t spending more time. Take a minute to do the exercise Kate Northrup suggests — jot down your biggest wins, line them up with the effort that you put forth in order to get that win & see where you should put most of your effort going forward.

3 Simple Steps to Bring Awareness to Your Preferences & Brand Cohesion

Bring awareness to your preferences and establish brand cohesion

Step 1: Define what is holding you back

Have you ever been in a situation where you’ve toiled over and worked on something all day long and it still just doesn’t feel right or as good as it could be? Then you go to sleep, and wake up the next day with this sudden clarity and you just know exactly how to move forward or what to tweak to complete that task or project? This happens to me quite often. Oftentimes, it takes a tiny little shift in perspective, taking a step back or removing something — giving yourself the space to reflect on what is working and what is not that helps you move forward.

So take a few moments to define what’s holding you back within your brand materials. What brand materials am I referring to? These would be your visuals, your voice, and your communication platforms. Think about what is not feeling right? What is disjointed? Define it so that you can take it off the table and move forward without it for the time being.

Step 2: Collect the brand assets you like

It’s really important to acknowledge what’s currently working and collect it. Put it all together in one spot —create a brand assets folder on your computer to house these items. Add any colors and/or images that you like or that are working well across your branding platforms and any copy that is really speaking to you or your audience. Keeping it altogether makes it easier to see and visualize how it all can work together for your brand.

Step 3: List what is currently working

Write down what about your branding is working? Why is it working? What is it that isn’t working and why you think that is? This is an exercise in awareness. Knowing this things is going to help you in every decision that you make going forward relating to your brand and it’s going to help you be more cohesive automatically.

I’ve written about this topic in a prior blog article, but I wanted to dig in a little bit deeper in this latest video. If you want to take a look at the prior post, click here.

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Creating a Style Guide

Website Success Tips

Creating your brand cheat sheet

I am excited to share some important things you want to be considering when it comes to the visuals you have on your website and something I always create for my clients is a brand cheat sheet (also known as a style guide).

A style guide is a cheat sheet for yourself that helps you stay consistent and cohesive throughout your website and your communication platforms. Examples of this would be when building an email template, building or editing different aspects of your website, or when creating social media graphics. In addition to creating brand cohesion, having a brand cheat sheet allows you to work so much faster! You aren’t wasting time trying to figure out what color you used last time, what font did I use as my body font, etc.

Brand cheat sheets are pretty simple to make, I would suggest using Canva or Adobe Express to make one for your business if you don’t have one already. Listed below are some things to include in your brand cheat sheet if you are creating your own.

What to include on your website brand cheat sheet

Hex Colors

What are hex colors? They are color codes that have a hashtag followed by a combination of six digits (can be letters or numbers or both!). For example, one of my hex codes is #3C462D — the super secret code for the dark green in my branding.

How do I find out what the hex codes are for my brand colors? If you have the color makeup for your brand colors in CMYK or RBG you can convert to HEX here: https://g.co/kgs/Tynft2

I would suggest having 3-5 hex colors for your brand. You should be able to use these hex codes throughout your email marketing, social media, and website seamlessly.

Fonts

It is always nice to outline the fonts you are going to come across throughout your branding. Having two to four font treatments gives you some great variation to make your brand stand out. The two types of fonts you want to make sure you include are a headline font and body copy font and make sure they flow well together.

Logos

All variations of your logo—horizontal, vertical, square, emblems, one-color, full-color, etc.

Brand Imagery

Images you want to show alongside your logo. You want these to be cohesive with your brand and serve as examples of what type of imagery you want to use and want people to associate with your brand.

I hope the tips above help you create a quick style guide that serves as a catalyst for brand cohesion in your business if you do not have one already.

How to Use Passion Projects to Find Your Style

Using Passion Projects to Find Your Style

I’m coming up on a decade of running my small art and design business. I can still remember what it felt like to finally make the decision to start living my life—I was single, had a mortgage, and big dreams. I was restless and felt my heart pulling me in a different direction. Something had to change in order for me to get closer to where I was really meant to be.

I still remember the stack of books I read about intuition, self-discovery, and intention. On a personal level I knew I wanted to get married and have kids, so one of the books was called “Getting to ‘I Do’”—laugh all you want but it’s how I met my husband (a story for a different day)! And on a professional level, I had big dreams but no clue how to actually connect the dots. Especially because I was interested in a lot of different directions and not sure which way to go.

I hear a lot of stories about stumbling across the perfect career path, or finding the perfect offering and niching down. That is not my story. My story has a lot of twists and turns. It’s about following my intuition and not the popular opinion. It’s about carving my own path and really following hard after what lights me up. When things feel misaligned, it means assessing how close I am to where I belong and course correcting. And now, nearly a decade later, I am blown away by the work I get to do almost daily. I’m finally able to embrace my true passions—professional design and fine art—and integrate them both into my career. I’m still carving a path for myself and things are always changing and evolving, but I feel more aligned than I ever have.

Maybe you can relate to where I am now. Or maybe you’re really resonating with how I felt early in my professional and personal life. Either way, I grew a lot through my journey of exploring my passions and infusing them into my work, so I want to share a few pivotal lessons I learned along the way.

3 Lessons I Learned From Putting Passion to Work

1. Embrace every part of yourself

Do not fall prey to the popular opinion of niching down. If that feels aligned, great. Go for it. But if it’s making you feel constrained, it’s okay to buck the system and do something different. It wasn’t until I finally let go of that restraint that I fully discovered my ultimate love is combining the two things I love. So embrace every part of yourself, your talent, and your passions—and don’t feel like you have to “niche down” and ignore something that lights you up!

2. Let your style be influenced by what you’re passionate about

By understanding your motives, strengths, and what you’re passionate about, you naturally attach a driving force behind what you create. That driving force becomes an undercurrent to what you are creating. When you create work that relates to your interests, it shows—people connect with it, and suddenly your style begins to emerge. So don’t forget to embrace your passions and let it guide your creative exploration.

3. Embrace failure

Failure can feel so deflating as a creative, especially when you put your heart and soul into the work. It feels deeply personal. Knowing that you are going to come up against it often and embracing it as part of the process will enable you to keep moving forward when it smacks you in the face. I still struggle with this one. Each time I’m rejected my thoughts sound something like this “What’s the point? Just give up. No one cares. Etc.” But try your best to see the opportunity that lies ahead and don’t get stuck in the cycle of self-doubt. After all, most of the success stories you hear are about someone who persevered through rejection and discovered a beautiful opportunity in spite of many “failures”.

These 3 things—embracing each part of myself, allowing my interests to guide my work, and embracing failure—have led me to where I am today. To a design style that feels uniquely me and to a career that’s more fulfilling than I ever could have imagined.

So, if you’re on a similar journey, I want to challenge you with 3 steps to take to start nurturing your passion.

3 Challenges to Embrace Your Journey to Put Passion to Work

Make a list of the top ten memories you hold and spend time reflecting what makes them unique or special.
Begin a daily creative practice—keep it simple and doable. The key is to commit to 30 days or more so that you can begin to find marks or subject matter that feel aligned with your natural tendencies.
Begin a passion project that you’ve always desired to bring to life, create time in your schedule to work on it, and set a goal for when to share with those around you!

Be patient with yourself during this process, and embrace the unexpected twists and turns. It’s a journey after all!

I hope this encourages you and inspires you to trust your gut, follow your design intuition, and truly embrace your passions. From someone who’s on the other side of that journey, trust me, it’s worth the process!

Where art meets design

How to create cohesion in your art and your brand

I throw around the word “cohesive” quite a lot—whether I’m working on a client’s brand or website, composing a pattern, or painting a composition. But what does it really mean to be cohesive?

Cohesion is “the action or fact of forming a unified whole.” I’m interested in creating a feeling that something is complete, not lacking anything. And while being cohesive is so important for creating consistency with a client’s brand, I find that it is equally as important when composing a pattern, creating artwork, or designing an illustration. In my latest Skillshare class, Watercolor by Design, I review how seven basic design principles influence my painting practice. In the last few years, I’ve worked hard to understand my preferences, both style wise and what I’m passionate about. By doing so, I’ve been able to understand where art meets design and why the two can live harmoniously together in my work. It comes down to cohesion.

By making intentional choices using design principles, you can create cohesion within your brand or your artistic style. Let’s review the seven basic design principles I share during my class and how they influence my design and artist practices.

Seven Basic Design Principles

1. Hierarchy

Knowing what is most important allows you to create a visual hierarchy to communicate a particular message, emotion, feeling, or mood. Creating a visual hierarchy guides the viewer’s eyes and allows them to land on a particular location within your composition. Scale, density, detail, and overall prominence play a role in determining where the focal point will be.

2. Contrast

Contrast is an excellent compositional tool. Adding a spectrum of color values allows you to emphasize (or de-emphasize) specific areas. It can be used in combination with other techniques to create a pathway for the viewer to move through the piece. It can apply to how we use color, fonts, imagery as well as our painterly techniques.

3. Repetition

Repeating elements, style preferences, colors, etc. can provide uniformity—or in this, case reveal your style. Recognizing and repeating patterns in your work is a great way to enhance your signature style, as well as lean into what is working for you. Repetition is also a great way to create cohesion.

4. Proximity

In design, proximity is used to create organization and cohesion within a space. When it comes to fine art, proximity can be used to create friction, breathing room, consistency, or a combination of the three.

5. Balance

Balance is also a tool that can be used to create a sense of friction or ease. Balance can be achieved by creating or placing objects, colors, or images at an equal distance from the center on opposing locations within the piece. I prefer compositions to feel balanced because it creates a feeling of wholeness to me.

6. Color

Color can evoke certain emotions and express values. Warm colors create a different feeling from cool colors. Complimentary colors can create balance or contrast when placed next to one another or cancel each other out when combined. Color can add depth, or lack of color can make it feel flat—both can be intentional choices.

7. Space

Space, like balance and proximity, is important to keep in mind for compositional purposes. Negative space, in particular, can be an excellent tool to keep in mind while you are completing a composition. Space creates a pathway or a natural shape that works as a tool alongside contrast, balance, and proximity.

When a brand is well designed and adheres to a style guide, it allows us to quickly recognize that brand at a glance (almost subconsciously) and forms a sense of reliability. When an artist intentionally moves in the direction of their style preferences, we can also recognize their work. It allows an audience to engage with that artist, builds trust, and creates a connection to the work.

If you’re interested in finding ways to use the principles listed above in your brand or your artwork, here are a couple of suggestions:

For your brand

Try listing out the above design principles on a piece of paper. Then under each item, brainstorm ways that you are currently creating cohesion in your brand using these principles. Or, if you feel there are areas for improvement, think of new ways you could begin implementing these techniques.

For your artwork

Start by creating a lot of work (or look back on a large batch of your recent creations). Then reflect on what works well and what doesn’t—what feels cohesive to you? Write down the design principles you’re using that are giving you that cohesion. Then, create a new piece of work using the style preferences and principles that you enjoy in your previous works. If you like the outcome, consider continuing to move in that direction going forward.

Just like the seasons, your preferences will change over time—whether you’re reviewing your brand or your artwork. Just recognizing those changes over time allows you to continue making intentional choices and creating cohesion within your artistic style or your brand.

Demystifying (logo) file types

Do you know what type of logo you need?

So you had your logo designed and you are ready to share your new brand with the world … and then you send your business cards off to the printer, fantasizing about what it feels like to hand out these new, professional, branded cards… You finally receive the box in the mail only to feel disappointed when you open them and see a fuzzy-looking, crappy business card—to put it nicely—and you are left feeling defeated, confused, underwhelmed. Hopefully, the printer warned you of this prior to making the print run (as any good printer would). But if not, I wrote this for you.

I receive inquiries about recreating logo files often. And usually, it’s because a client doesn’t have all of the logo file types they need. So, I created this to help you get the files you need right from the start. (If you’re working with another designer, I suggest running the below list of file types by your designer to ensure you have each of them in the correct format as a final deliverable.)

Let’s start with the type of file the logo should originate from: AI or EPS

An AI file is short for Adobe Illustrator. If you’re paying someone to help you create a logo it should be created using a vector-based application, like Adobe Illustrator. A vector file is a file created using points and paths to render a shape in a mathematically and infinitely scalable format (imagine your logo on the moon!). This means that you can print them on a large sign, add them to a billboard, have them turned into embroidery, an animation, a special stamp, or perhaps a wax seal—the sky is the limit with vector files. You’ll want your designer to save the AI file as an EPS—that’s the file you’ll need for future printing projects. An EPS file stands for Encapsulated PostScript. It’s basically a fancy way of saying a vector file—or a mathematical formula that establishes points on a grid. Have I lost you yet?

Ask for a vector-based PDF file

While your designer is at it (still in Illustrator) ask for a PDF file. EPS files are needed for your brand library and future use, but chances are you won’t be able to open them from your computer (unless you have Adobe design programs). PDFs can also be vector-based files when saved from Illustrator or other vector-based software. Have your designer save the vector art as a PDF so you can view it from your computer. What is a PDF anyway? It stands for a Portable Document Format and was originally created by Adobe to enable users to open up different files across operating systems, programs, and now devices.

One more Illustrator-based file you’ll need: SVG

Next up on your list of Illustrator files is an SVG file. This happens to be my personal favorite file type because it has so much information packed into a small file size. This file type enables logos to come across crisp and clean across devices on the web. SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphics—and is an XML-based vector graphic that can scale and be manipulated using code. Creating this file is as easy as hitting File > Save As > Format > SVG and, voila!, you will have the perfect file type for your web designer to render your logo online.

The final two file types to request: PNG & JPEG

These two files are good to have for your use on social media and other platforms that aren’t currently supporting SVG files. Both are rasterized files—meaning that they are converted into pixels. Pixel-based files cannot be scaled up/enlarged. It’s important to request a specific dimension for these files. For instance, if you are using a 50 x 50 pixel (px) JPEG file but the requirements are 250 x 250 px the image will be scaled x5 and will look pretty awful in return—in other words, pixelated. I like to send logo files that are 1000 px or more for the client’s library. That way they can reduce the size if needed but they are working with a larger file type to begin. Why do you need a PNG and a JPEG(JPG)? PNGs have the ability to save a transparent background. JPGs are similar to PDFs, in that anyone can open them. I use them as a last resort. Whatever you do—do not save over the files sent to you—get into the practice of “saving as” so you don’t lose that original quality.

Let’s recap …

If you are printing or rendering your logo in a tactile medium, it’s best to use an EPS file (it’s good practice to include the vectorized PDF file for viewing purposes). If you are sending your logo around to your social circles to celebrate the beautiful design, send along a PDF. If you are passing your logo off to your web designer, send them an SVG file. They may request a PNG or JPEG but ask them why they can’t use an SVG… after all you just spent time and money on your new logo design. Showcase it in the best possible light. Finally, when you add your brand to all of your social media and email marketing platforms, upload a PNG. On the odd occasion, you might need a JPG file, but this can usually be a last resort if you have all of the other file types listed above. (I anticipate that SVGs will be supported by most social platforms very soon, so once that happens, I would use SVGs instead.)

And here’s a quick cheat sheet for you:

AI/EPS: A Vector-based file that is scalable and can be used in a variety of formats (and sizes!) while still looking crisp and clean. It’s the most important logo file type to have!
Vector-based PDF: A vector file you can open on your computer if you don’t have Adobe Creative Suite programs
SVG: The best file type to use on the web
PNG & JPG: Rasterized files used in specific sizes for social and other small-scale places

I hope this helps. Here’s to beautiful logos, and having the right file types to showcase them! 🥂