How to Create a Brand Identity for your Blog if you are not a Designer

You may find yourself in the same sticky situation I found myself in. You have a blog and you want a catchy brand identity (including the logo, fancy fonts and brand elements). But your blog isn’t making enough money to justify spending money on professional help.

My blog is a brand and therefore needed a brand identity to go along with it.

Thankfully I am naturally curious and therefore play around until I figure out how to do what I want to do without purchasing expensive software like Illustrator.

If I could I would! I’ve even considered becoming a teacher in order to qualify for a discounted subscription.

To be fair though – it has taken me years to figure it all out! I have read loads of blog posts, watched countless YouTube tutorials and took the time to play around. Andrea from Bird&Design has some fantastic resources available – I literally devoured everything she said and applied most of it immediately.

I love the Brand that I have Created

Sure, it isn’t a professionally designed brand. But if I am being really honest, I love tweaking things here and there and would simply irritate a designer with my constant little requests.

Getting Started

In this post, I will be sharing where I started and how I put my brand together. The aim is to share a creative process for the average Joe, in order to save you time and help you along the bumpy road.

Here we go – 6 Simple Steps to Create your Very Own Logo!

1.) Play with Fancy Fonts

I love a good old curly or ‘script’ font. So naturally, my design process starts with choosing the perfect script font.

Even though I love all of the above fonts, I knew I could only choose one script font. I wanted it to be playful and fun. Nothing too formal

Tip: Be sure to choose a font that is easy to read.

All brand elements should be easy to read! The idea of the font is to enhance your brand. It should be viewed as an element to be reused when creating little quotes, and or, pictures to pin to Pinterest.

2.) Pair Your Curly Font with a ‘Boring’ Font

Once we have selected our fancy font, we really want to contrast or balance it with a sturdy font. Fonts are a little like people – some people are unpredictable (script fonts) and others are reliable. To run a successful business, you really need both players on your team. The same with a design:

Tip: Little tweaks to the ‘boring’ fonts changes the whole design.

We all know fonts change as soon as you make it bold or italic. Most of us are aware that certain fonts, for example, Franklin Gothic, have different typeface families.

Consider your brand identity and play around with different elements of the font. Also, remember to consider upper and lowercase typography.

3.) Place the Fonts Side by Side

As soon as you have an idea of what you like, put the fonts side by side in a way that is visually appealing to you.

4.) Add a Design Element or Logo

Before I get overwhelmed with excitement, it is worth mentioning, that all of the above may seem simple. To be fair, playing around with fonts is fairly simple – but your brand says something about you. The elements talk to each other and there’s no point in choosing elements if you haven’t considered the bigger picture!

Allow me to elaborate… My blog is called, The Curious Wildflower. Naturally, my logo should be a flower of sort and more specifically, a wildflower.

It seems easy enough, right?

It may seem like the whole process is simple but in all honesty, before you can throw a couple of fonts and a picture together, you really need to consider your strategy, your goal and how it all links up.

Tip: Use a Transparent PNG for your Logo/Image.

Search for Transparent PNG images to use for your logo. PNGTree and KissPNG have some great transparent PNG images to use as logos. (Especially if you are fond of watercolour images.)

Be sure to verify if the download is permitted for personal and or commercial use before using the design.

Once you have downloaded a couple of potential images, add them to your typography design. Because I didn’t know what I wanted initially, I downloaded loads of images and narrowed it down to the below logos.

Initial Thoughts

#1 – The first design, would be perfect if it wasn’t pink. Pink is just a tad too girly for my liking in general. Also, in my mind, curious and pink don’t gel, but I could be biased.

#2 – I loved the layers and the simplistic design, but I was in two minds about the logo.

#3 – Lacked in contrast, really not dramatic enough when considering the difference between the light and dark colours. (Zoom out and you will see what I mean!)

#4 – Yellow, which I love! But unfortunately, my previous blog’s brand identity contained a lot of yellow. So for the sake of change, the image was disqualified.

That left me with option #5. Which I liked until the green stem started irritating me.

In the end, I asked someone really close to me to make a prediction based on what they think I’d go with and chose that design. (Naturally, I didn’t tell him that, it is just how it all panned out! Option 2 Won!)

Tip: You ideally want to use your logo as you favicon design.

A favicon is the little logo next to your website when you have a million tabs open in a browser. Customising your favicon to represent your brand may seem trivial – but it is all in the detail.

Ask yourself – how many times have you closed tabs in order to create order, but kept one (of the 50) Pinterest tabs open, in case you want to refer back to what you were doing in your “lunch” hour?

5.) Add some Colour

One of the reasons why I chose the curious wildflower as a name for my blog, was because I knew I could play with colours. That’s exactly what I did!

Tip: Keep a Record of the RGB and Hex Colour Codes

In order to customise your blog with the exact colours you have used in your logo, without guessing, you need to keep a record of the RGB and Hex colour codes.

The RGB code is typically what you will use when customising colours in a design space. These are 3 values, a red, green- and blue value.

The Hex code or hexadecimal string value is used to specify a colour in HTML/CSS code – i.e. updating colours when customising your blog theme.

Here’s a nifty website to convert RGB to Hex Codes.

6.) White, Black and Transparent Variation

Your work is very nearly complete. For now the most important thing you can do, is to save your logo in a variety of shades. Often when adding your logo to a picture, the colours of the picture deducts from the logo instead of enhancing it.

That is the when you need a logo with either white text and or a transparent version of the logo.

Finalise Your Brand Identity

Perhaps I am a little over the top – or I simply love browsing through Pinterest brand identity inspiration boards. Either way, in my mind – a brand identity becomes a thing when placed on a board with all the visual elements placed together!

suppose with this post, I jumped ahead of myself. In the future, I will share some practical things, like how to download and install a ‘fancy’ font and how I save my logo as a transparent PNG.

Have you ever considered creating your own brand identity? What process did you follow?