 We're talking about how to create a brand style guide here on the journey. All right, we're talking about how to create a brand style guide, but I think it's important to talk about why it's so important. Yeah, sometimes it's hard for people to make that investment early on when they're growing their business, but that's actually the perfect time to create a brand style guide. Right, and even if you have a well-established business, it's not too late to create that brand style guide because it's going to save you a tremendous amount of time whether it's redesigning a site, designing a site for the first time, creating your social content, creating content just in the wild, whatever you're doing, that brand style guide will constantly be referenced for years to come. And it's going to make sure that you have a consistent image and brand across all of the different marketing things that you do. Yeah, it's super important before you go and create the brand guide. You really have to understand where your current and future vision is for your business. And then you have to answer a few questions, right? Like what are the foundational components of your brand? These are things like your logo, your type, your color palettes, your jingles, whatever that is, they will be the core of your brand. So it helps to really understand and have those defined. And even things as simple as your font, right? You want to have the same font throughout all of your copy, whether it's website, social print, it has to be uniform, it has to be the same. So make sure you have that down is foundational. Yeah, so start with a brainstorming session and then you can move forward and actually decide what the components are. Yeah, and the next question we really need to ask is, what is our brand's story? We talked about our brand story in a lot of episodes, but this is really the foundational why behind your brand. This is what's going to create that bond with your customers. People love to shop local, put that story into words. You know, what is your why and tell that story? Right, like GoDaddy's why is helping the everyday entrepreneur. And we show that in all of our brand investing. We even have our real customers come in and do videos and content for us because we really believe in putting them in front of our brand. And same with you, like what is your brand story? Put that in front. And speaking of customers, who are your customers? That's another thing to be thinking about with this. You know, whether it's your demographic, your ideal customer, a lot of times people will be like, Oh, anyone, anyone's my customer. But that's way too general when you're thinking of marketing, you need to know who to target, you know, which areas they live in. If you're a bed and breakfast, you know, maybe it's not just the local people you're wanting to target. Maybe it's other areas, other cities where you're getting a lot of your guests from those are important things to think about. Yeah. And with your brand too, if you, if you envision your customers, you tailor all your content to that customer. Now, if you don't do this and your brand's completely off from what your expected customer thinks, they're going to look at your brand like, no, that's not for me. I'm this, this type of person and you're just trying to advertise to this type of person. It just does not connect. Okay. So now that we have this consistent idea of what's going to go into this, let's actually put it into action. We are going to make a style guide, but I'm going to kind of flip it on you and make one for you. Personal branding is all the rage. And as a personal brand, you probably should have a style guide too, even with if you have your business itself, or it's just your brand. So I'm going to ask you a lot of questions. Are you ready? It's okay. I've been needing to do this anyway. Let's go. Cool. So we're going to go to canva.com. Canva is a premium tool. Most of the things we're going to talk about today are the free features inside of Canva. But once you're inside and you set up an account, if you haven't already, just go ahead and type style guide at the top. The reason why I'm having you do this versus one from scratch is it makes it a lot easier to update. I know many of us, I mean, not be the creative types and having to do something from the ground up is a lot of work. Why not take something that's already there and then just tweak it to your brand. So I'm going to have you go through this and pick a quick style that you like. We can always update it as we go. So just let me know. I'm very indecisive nearly. This is going to take a while. Oh, I know. Let's do the music. Okay, let's do the top right one. The sound recording studio. So yeah, I was also saying this guide itself is, it's meant to present like if you're in front of a board, but we're going to update some of that stuff. It just has a lot of the elements that we want to keep in our brand. Oh, I play the guitar now. Alex Wilkins. And then you can delete any element that you may want. I'm going to delete that. And then I'll delete that. So what are some of your favorite colors? I would say navy blue. Okay. It's a little bit darker. So that Darker. Darker. Perfect. Perfect. All right. So that's going to be your primary color there. As your brand guide that that super dark blue color, dark like my soul to my soul. Then you have our brand ethos of branding and the bigger picture. So this is really going to be your story and we're not going to have to go through this now, but this is where you'll type things like, why do you do what you do? What is your brand all about? What is your brand story and your, your voice there? So you'd add it there. Since this is a personal brand, it's going to be pictures all about you, but let's also try to find some pictures that you might use on your website. So when you think of pictures and places, what are some things that you think of? I think of Austin, Texas, where I'm from. That's a huge part of who I am. Has a lot to do with, you know, my person, my personality. Okay. So this is a paid image. Let's see if there's any free ones. Perfect. Austin, Texas right there. And then again, we're going to update the background to your dark blue. What's your second favorite color? Let's go with like a light purple. Light purple. All right. So let's see. And what's great is you can save these color codes so that you can use them in other things that you're creating as well. All right. So let's see, light purple. Ooh, actually, let's do light turquoise. Work it on it. Work it on it. Like that. Lighter. Yeah. Perfect. All right. So in Canada, what's cool is as soon as you change one element, you can go down to the bottom here and change all of that orange color we just did to that element. And then we would just adjust everything else. Probably make this a different color here. There we go. All right. So you'd have your brand ethos, basically your story behind yourself. All right. Let's talk about your personality. This isn't talked about a lot with a brand, but your business has personality, whether it's super professional, it could be over the top, hilarious, it could be serious, whatever that could be. So give me four words to describe Alex Wilkins. Definitely not serious. Let's start with fun. Okay. Good time. Creative. Let's do determined and passionate. And then this has a little bit of a description. We're going to go ahead and skip past that, but you'll want to elaborate on what those actually mean to your brand. Like how is your brand fun? How are you creative? How are you passionate? Things like that. And then let's go forward here. So I like this one. It has iconography. So iconography is just the icons you'll use on your website. It just helps when you design a site to have the same uniform icons throughout that make sense to your brand. We're going to go ahead and skip past it. All right. And then here you'd have your logo usage. So we'd have your logo here. Obviously you're not a computer since you're a personal brand or probably your lovely face. But if it's a business, it's going to be your logo. Let me just search Canada here for logo and see what pops up and we'll just add something there. Are you a crab? I actually am a cancer. So that works. Okay. All right. Let's do it. Which one? Which crab do you want? Let's do this cartoon one. This little guy. All right. That one's fun. All right. That's a universal sign for Alex. It's my logo. It's a crab. I dig it. But logo usage, you'll have some information here on what you use the logo for, the dimensions, the size, the spacing, any information that helps someone else pick up your logo on your site. So go there. Color guidance, how to use your brand colors. Again, add content on how to use your colors. We're going to update these to include what your colors are. So, since this is obviously your color, I'm going to just get rid of that. We'll make that black. But in Canada here, all on the left hand side is all the different elements you can add to your site. So let's add a square. We're just going to go to elements and go to shapes. That way we can update the color here and then change that color. I can duplicate it and add your other color. And I'd probably do a third color just as a compliment and that would be a nice white tone based on your dark colors. Got to balance it out a little bit. Alright, so there's a cool site called Sessions College. It has a color calculator and it helps you really find the different complementary colors for your base color. So if you're a business that only has one, you only know what other colors might go good with it. This is a great site to do that. So with yours, I know you have yours and it does look great. But say you only had one and you're really on the fence of where to go, you can add in this hex code and then see what the complementary color is. And it'd be a brown. Really on brand. And then split complementary and then triadic colors and tetradic colors. So can you change one of those colors and then have it adjust? Yeah, you can adjust all of it. But it just shows you what are basically the exact opposite or your complementary colors. And that doesn't mean that you have to use those colors. They just work together. Yeah, it just gives you some ideas. But I do like your dark blue and your light blue. Thank you, thank you. Alright, so color guidance. You add your colors there. I'd probably add some text so you can add the hex color so anyone can easily copy and paste it over. And again, add some information on how to use the colors. Maybe like a percentage. So if most of your sites should be 80% that dark blue, 10% the light blue and then 10% the white there. And I could even include, hey, I don't want to use the white blue on the white because it's really hard to read. Exactly. Alright, and then typography. So you're going to talk through your type on your website, on your content, on your print. So there's a ton of typography to choose from at the list literally goes on and on. Google.com slash fonts is a great site to go and try to find new type font places. It also shows you complementary types that go with the one you've chosen. So we'll just have you pick one really quick as we go through it. Is there any font that you may like? Amatic SC? I think that's what it says. Alright. Amatic SC. And then you would just change that throughout the site. I dig it. It's kind of like a little handwritten. It looks personal, right? So you just change that throughout the site. Typically you'd have your one type to be your primary like the headings on your website. Then you have type to be your just body text. Right. Like I would never want to use that font for writing a ton of text. It would be really hard to read and wouldn't look professional. But as headlines, it definitely stands out. It's different. It's unique. I dig it. So then you update and throughout your your brain guides, what's the size of different headings? So that way it's uniform or all H1 tags going to be 54 pixels in height or all H2, 40, all H3, 30, whatever that looks like. Have that listed out on your brand style guide to where again, if anyone picks up your site, whether it's one of your employees, a contractor, developer, designer, whoever follows that to a tee and then it looks uniform. And this can also be really helpful whenever you're creating a graphic design that you want to post on social media platforms. That would be really great to know, you know, those fonts, what to use, if you're adding text to a photo, anything along those lines. So we talked about photography a little bit in the beginning. You were all about Austin, Texas and food and everything else. So go ahead and add different examples there. So with your brand itself, add images that really represent your brand doesn't always have to be of your business. It could be just types of feelings and emotions you want to invoke on your audience. And the photos that you want to use, like you were mentioning earlier with those stock photos, what types of stock photos you kind of want to generally follow. Exactly. So we'll update that. What's your favorite food? Let's go with french fries because those just sound really good right now. She doesn't even breakfast. I can't pick a food. All right, what other thing? So we have Austin, Texas, we have food. What other thing represents you? Puppies. This is a great brand style gun. All right, all these are adorable. Which kind of puppy do you want? I want this one. This little guy. I don't know how to describe it. Adorable. That's how you describe it. So photography and again, add some description on your photography of, again, the feelings that you want to evoke in your audience. When someone looks at your site, looks at your images, what do you want them to feel? Whether it's like excitement, whether it's lovingness, whether it's just caring, whether it's sadness, whether it's emotions. Hungry for those french fries in Austin while playing with puppies. Like what could be better live in the life? And then here it has a guide to using images. Again, neutral background, use of white space, use of overlays. Super important to have as much information as you can come up with. And now this is a ton of information. Start small, start with what you know and then grow from there. So as you're developing your site, you're developing your business, you can add on to this and it's an ever-growing process. Yeah, you don't have to go as in-depth right at the very beginning, but you always can if you want to. Absolutely. And you've talked about it a little bit. So social media is also super important. I think it's very, very important, especially just aesthetically, to have the same type of content throughout your page. So whether that's using kind of the same templates, get the same typography, the same colors, the same images, super, super important. So the good thing about Canva is that you can essentially create templates of your social posts and then continually reuse them. So I'd recommend maybe three or four different variations of your different types of posts you may create. And just constantly reuse the update the images, update the text, of course, to be whatever you're wanting to be. Then just continue to use that and then add some of those template examples in this brand style guide. So that way is when someone sees it, they know the type of content to create and go from there. And that's how you're going to get that really aesthetically pleasing Instagram feed. Gotta have your grid game on point. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so now that we've created this great brand style guide, what if my personal brand changes? Can I change this up? Absolutely. This is, again, it's ever-growing. Start with what you have now and as you evolve, just like you do as a person or you do with your business, your brand guide evolves as well. Cool. Well, thank you so much, Nealey. Can't wait to show off more Austin French fry and dog pictures. Yeah, not a problem. I hope this helps you create your brand style guide, whether you're an established business or one just starting out. It's crucial for the success of your long-term business. Thanks so much for watching. Make sure you like this video and add a comment below if you created a style guide yourself. And subscribe to our channel and ring that bell so that you'll know whenever we have more great videos like this. Thanks for watching the journey. We'll see you later.