LaFaye Pye, the Prosperity Strategist, is one of my business besties. We met via an intensive 6-week online course (of course!) in which it turned out that there were only a small handful of us who posted regularly and did our best to keep up with the content. After this course was finished, we all had to take a step back from what we were working on to decompress. But I would never trade that experience as all the amazing friendships that have come out of it. When LaFaye was going through a re-brand, she brought me in to help. We looked at her current color scheme and visual elements, and talked through exactly what she was trying to communicate. She was very attached to her pinks and browns, only they weren't quite the right shades to communicate her position as an expert in her field. She was also attached to the Summer color psychology group with its flowing and feminine elements. To communicate her expert status, we tweaked her palette to encompass a Winter color scheme, and then added in Summer through her lovely feminine elements such as fonts and patterns. Here is her final brand identity style sheet (note: I did not create this final version, but I do love it!)-- ![]() Recently she brought me back in to help with her graphics to update her webinar slide deck. She runs the Business Builders Lab, and was getting ready for a big launch of her new program, the Visible Woman. Her slides were okay, but they didn't have a cohesive look and feel, and they were not on brand. You can see from this "before" slide that the font she was using was big and clunky (great for Autumn brands) and the colors weren't right. Notice the gray shadow - while it is just a supporting element on the page, it does not harmonize with the palette. ![]() Here is another example of her "Before" slide listing the package prices, and then the updated slide I created for her: After: Luckily all her deck needed was a little bit of magic that gave it a classy, upscale feeling to reflect her brand. Here is a screenshot of the final master slide templates; Now she has over 25 slide templates to chose from (not all pictured) when pulling together her webinars for the Business Builders Lab and, coming soon, The Visible Woman and the Marketing Map. Stay tuned!
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I met with Misty at a cute corner coffee shop in downtown Bath, Maine, the city of ships. Cafe Creme is the hangout of choice for many of the locals and boarding school students alike. Its intimate atmosphere encourages conversation and camaraderie, and the sea of treats under glass domes at the counter along with row of local coffees along the wall encourages you to stay awhile. Misty had heard about me from my SCORE mentor. If you are unfamiliar with the SCORE program, its mission is to match entrepreneurs with seasoned business veterans. Misty, a mom with young kids like myself, was a massage therapist by trade, and working on developing an incredible app she called Thoughtful Giving. At the time she had entered the LA Top Gun competition to win funding for her business idea and wanted to connect with me to learn more about branding and design. I was more than happy to meet with her as one, she was obviously a fellow go-getter, two, I love talking branding and design, and three, my mom ran a gift shop my whole life up until this past year so I felt Misty would be a kindred spirit. Once we had our coffee and pastries in hand, she explained to me the beautiful idea she had that was the Thoughtful Giving app. "If you have nieces and nephews and want to get them a gift for their birthday, you always have to ask their shoe size, their clothing size, who their favorite super hero is etc. This app will allow you to share profiles of you and your family members with friends and family so they will always have access to the crucial information needed to purchase gifts," she said. "Furthermore," she continued, "it will be connected with banks so you can contribute to their college fund, or make a donation to a cause they support." As a mom myself who gets invited to birthday parties, this idea sounded brilliant. No more having to interrupt my friends and family members to ask what they or their children wanted for holidays and birthdays. I told Misty about the applied color psychology system I use to style brands, and we went over Spring, which she absolutely needed to use as either the dominant or supporting season as it communicates youth and aspiration, and Autumn, as Autumn communicates friendliness and philanthropy. I sent her home with printouts of the Spring and Autumn style cheat sheets, and wished her good luck in the competition. Fast forward to a year later, and Misty reached out again to see if I was interested in helping her create a brand identity for the app. She had a developer on board and with Covid, was able to spend more time than usual on forging ahead with launching this oh-so-helpful app. I told her about my Done & Dusted special, and we set up a time for our first meeting to go over the brief. Now, as we had already spent some time together in person talking about this brand, I felt I had a good grasp on what she was looking for. Our first meeting went more quickly than most. We went through her answers to the questions I have anyone working with me fill out and then I told her I was excited to get to work on the project. Here is her original logo that she had created for the Top Gun competition. She hired someone on a design site I believe for $25 to get this created: The colors are not harmonious, and while it is very legible, it feels like someone used clipart to throw together. I started with creating a new color palette pulling from Autumn. These colors are so rich and lovely, they unconsciously pull you in. Here is the palette I created for her, I then worked on creating a logo. Now, I love the raspberry color, and felt it was very festive. So all the logo designs I worked up used this as the main color. Here is one of my first designs also showing some of the different gift images she could choose from: However, on our next Zoom meeting, we decided to go back to the original main colors of orange and teal as the dominant colors. Orange because it communicates warmth and abundance. And teal because it's a blend of the nice balancing and abundance properties of green and communicative properties of blue. A gift is a type of communication that you appreciate someone. We spent quite some time both apart and together looking at typefaces. We tried Andika, Arapey, Arima Madurai, Bellota Text, Comfortaa, Harmattan, Mada, Thasadith, and ultimately decided upon Mallanna. It was friendly and simple, easy to read on a very small screen. As for the gift, we liked the one with the gradient package, and knew we wanted to keep the heart-shaped bow from the blue clipart gift. I tried doing a small tweak and seeing what it would look like if the ribbon jumped up and crossed the "T" of Thoughtful, but ultimately we decided to keep the gift on its own as it was more legible across applications. Gift with the ribbon on the "T": And here is the final logo: I also created a few different versions that could be used across different applications: Lastly, I created a mock up of what the phone app image could look like:
Now that we had the logo finalized, it was time to continue with the brand identity creation. In order to do this, I find it is easiest to find an application to which you are going to apply the brand style. Luckily for me, Misty had shared with me a Word document mock-up of what one of the profiles would look like. BEFORE: We had used Autumn colors, so I knew we next needed to add some Spring elements to bring that lightness and aspect of future aspiration. I created a fun confetti pattern of little repeating triangles in the brand colors. Next I found some icons on Canva.com that allowed me to edit their colors to match the brand identity colors. And I knew it needed a bit of a gradient pop so added this texture: Then we played with typefaces in a Word document to decide on a fun heading font and a simple paragraph font. Here is the final profile mock-up with our updated brand style elements applied. AFTER This is what the app would look like if you were logged in on a computer, and we talked a bit about how it would be designed differently as a phone app. We did a Google image search around phone app user interfaces and Misty now has an idea of what she likes. Once the developer is ready for a user interface, that will be the next piece to design. The Thoughtful Giving app now has a one-page style guide, so Misty is able to easily share the styles with anyone working on the project. Good luck to Misty, and I know I am excited to be able to use this amazing app! Red is a very powerful color. Just looking at it raises your blood pressure and whets the appetite. Red is physical, it is the color of life itself. Red blood, red lips, full red tulips and roses. Apples beckoning you to eat them, bright red berries enticing you with promised sweetness. Red screams come closer and consume me. It is associated with masculinity, and exudes strength and power. (Let's just be clear here – women have just as much strength and power, this color just happens to communicate the strength and power of the male variety.) Super heroes done red capes, and countries often choose it for their flags. Red is one of the colors that jumps out at you and makes you think it is closer than it really is. Which makes it an excellent choice for stop signs and red lights. It also makes it an excellent choice if you have a brand that you want to be noticed. The most prominent brand of all time uses red as its main brand color: In fact, before Coca Cola, Santa Claus wore white. Which makes sense, it's the color of snow and winter. But then in came Coke and published the iconic image of Santa in Coca-Cola red robes downing a bottle of the sugary liquid. And ever since, at least in the U.S., Santa has donned only red ensembles. Side note - it is in thanks to Finnish artist Haddon Sundblom (1899-1976), commissioned by the US Coca Cola company, who painted the first Santa in red drinking coke in the 1930s. In languages that only have two words for colors, those are black and white. But in languages that have three words for color, those are black, white, and red. If you want to build your brand around one of the following, red would be a good choice to use as your main brand color,
For example, here are some brands who want to make us hungry for food; And some who want to make us hungry for adventure and excitement; Once you have decided that red should be in your palette, next you will need to choose the shade of red. Here is where our secret weapon of applied color psychology comes in. If this is the first time you have heard of color psychology, go ahead and jump over to my explanation here. You can also download the Brand Personality Traits by season handout to see if you can get a better idea of which of the four groups your brand should be based in, based on the traits you want your brand to be known for. Here are guidelines for which shade of red to choose, depending on which group your brand is based in-- Group 1: Spring reds will be light and cheerful. They will have more yellow in them vs. blue. Think scarlet. Group 2: Summer reds have touches of gray, and no yellow. Mauve and maroon fall into this category. Group 3: Autumn reds are vibrant and rich. They have more yellow in them. Think of the old masters paintings with that rich, vermillion red, or of leaves in the fall that have transformed from green to red before alighting to the ground. Group 4: Winter reds are crystal clear and powerful. They are primary red, crimson and ruby, imagine deep red berries in winter against the white of new fallen snow. What to watch out for when choosing a redIf you have chosen the right shade of red to match the color harmony of your brand palette, it will communicate the energy, passion, and excitement you mean to communicate. However, if your brand color palette contains more than one color, or multiple shades of the same color, please take caution to choose all of these hues from the same harmonious color group. If you mix in a disharmonious color, the negative aspects that the red will communicate include:
The best example of the misuse of red was when it was mixed with pure black in the Nazi swastika logo. The only colors that should be paired alongside black in branding are those in Group 4: Winter. If your brand is based in a different group and you would like a dark black-like color to use in your copy or on your website, opt for a darker shade of gray from that group. Using applied color psychology to confidently chose your brand's color paletteChoosing colors for your brand palette doesn't have to be as hard as rocket science, and in fact can be much more quickly chosen with confidence when using the science of applied color psychology. The steps to choosing brand colors that attract and communicate are as follows,
I'm hoping that you are now a bit more acquainted with the color red and what it means, especially related to branding and communication. I challenge you to start noticing the brands that use red. What do they sell? How would you describe their brand personalities? What are they trying to convey with the use of red? Which of them is conveying a personality similar to your brand? Do they pull you in more quickly than other brands? Do you feel your pulse increasing? Good luck with your color choices! |
Jenny CBrand stylist, colorist, graphic designer, web developer, marketer & mom, dedicated to making the world a more harmonious place Archives
November 2024
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