The right branding strategy can take your business to the next level

Whether you are just starting your business or looking to enter that next growth phase for your existing operation branding is crucial. Branding is more than just beautiful graphic design but the way you design your brand assets certainly matters. Quality design can’t just be learned over night but luckily there are some wonderful do-it-yourself solutions available these days. In this post we’ll review five free design resources every entrepreneur should now.

Logo Creator

You can design the most beautiful flyer or website but if your logo doesn’t fit the bill it won’t work. Before you tackle any graphic design projects for your business make sure you have a professional logo in place. In addition to hiring a professional graphic designer you also have the option to use a tool like Logo Creator. This free logo maker comes stacked with a database of professionally designed templates that you can easily edit. The templates are sorted by category like accounting, food, real estate and retail. Customization is easy; you can edit the fonts, graphic, effects, colors and much more. Once you are satisfied with your design click download to access your logo in three different file formats.

Design Bold

With your logo in place you can start working on other brand assets like social media posts, flyers and ads. Design Bold offers a web based design editor that’s super easy to use. To get started simply select what you want to design and then pick a suitable template. Any of these designs can be fully customized by replacing images, changing color palette, fonts, etc. In order to download you are required to sign up for a free account. In addition to downloading these files to your local machine you can also access them later from your account.

PixaBay

One of the most efficient ways to give your designs a professional touch is to incorporate images. Not just any images but beautifully shot photography via high resolution files. PixaBay offers a large database of images that are absolutely free for commercial use. Next time you are working on a presentation, social media or blog post try a resource like PixaBay to find a fitting image. All of their images are available for download instantly and in various sizes. In addition to images they also offer illustrations, vectors and royalty free music.

Free Icons

Just like beautiful images, carefully crafted icons can elevate your branding designs. The trick to using icons effectively is to go with entire icon sets and using them deliberately and consistently. To find beautiful icons try a site like Free Icons. They offer a large number of icon packs that are available for download in PNG, SVG, EPS, PSD and base formats. Once you find an icon set that you like use this exclusively across all of your designs like website, banner ads and business cards. The consistent use will give your brand a professional touch.

Google Fonts

Another quick way to take your designs to the next level is through fonts. Fonts are often overlooked as a branding tool and many entrepreneurs just settle for the basic options offered in their word processing software of choice. When you design your website, create social media posts or flyer you want to give your font choices some careful thought. Fonts carry a lot of weight in how your content comes across. Google Fonts is a wonderful resource to find and download a wide range of fonts for free. You can sort the fonts by serif, sans serif, handwriting, font properties, etc. You can download each font family in TTF format with the click of a button. Similar to icons, chose a few fonts and use those exclusively and consistently across all of your communications.

In Summary

Before you tackle your next graphic design project revisit this article and try some or all of these resources. You won’t become a graphic designer over night but the tools listed here will certainly be beneficial and improve not only your individual designs but elevate your brand assets as a whole. Remember, the trick to a professional brand is consistency; so be deliberate with your choices and careful with your implementation.