Branding 101: A Guide to Building a Brand

Learn to build a brand, with 0 design experience

A guide to building a brand, from scratch.

You don’t need design, marketing, or strategy experience.

We cover all the basics that you need to know to build a impactful, strong brands.

After following this guide, you will be able to:

• Build an impactful brand from scratch
• Think strategically to build the brand for a specific audience and goal
• Know how to create a logo and brand visuals that make an impact
• Think strategically about design choices
• Be able to communicate those design choices

The goal is to help you build your own brand as a small business owner, or help you transition into branding as a designer. For this reason, the guide is actionable, to the point, and covers all essential steps.

We cover the following topics:

1. Understanding the business
2. Doing 3 types of research
3. Formulating the brand strategy
4. Deciding the visual direction of the brand
5. Create a mood board for the visual direction
6. Creating logos in 3 steps
7. Designing the brand visuals
8. Overview of the different logos variations
9. Understanding type pairing
10. Creating your brand colour palette
11. Creating brand patterns & brand application

Along with the guide, you will receive 6 templates to make the process easier and to create more impactful results. These include:

1. Understanding the Business Notion template
2. Brand Strategy Notion template
3. Persona Story Notion template
4. Persona Overview template
5. Mood board template
6. Brand board template

Branding is a costly asset for a company, rightfully so because it is so valuable. But in the early stages, not everybody has the budget for it. By being able to build your own brand in the early stages of starting your business, you can start running your business. You will learn the process of design and what it takes to create a good brand. For in the future, when you hire a professional designer to work with i.e. to rebrand, you will be able to communicate more effectively with them.

This guide provides more than just directions on how to build a brand but also shows you how a designer thinks. That makes your future collaboration with designers much more effective.

Note: this guide is constantly in progress. When I provide additional materials or updates, you will receive them for free when you have already downloaded this guide.

I would love to know what you think of this guide. It would greatly help if you could leave a review or send your thoughts to iris@andthedesign.nl. That way, I can improve and create better material in the future!