5 Tips for creatives for doing your own brand audit
Every 6 months to a year I like to do a mini brand audit across all my visuals, whether it’s my website, social media, brochures, or printed materials. As someone that enjoys creating new images or graphics often, it’s easy for your brand identity to get watered down or confused as time passes. A little check list of things to look out for to maintain a strong visual identity can be really useful, so I thought I’d share mine with you today.
Mini Brand Audit Checklist
Check your logo use - if you’ve had a refresh or redesign ensure your logo is the most current version across all your channels as well as your printed materials. It can be easy to forget things like social media profile icons or on things you don’t look at much yourself like your invoices or letterheads.
Brand colours - similarly ensure your colour palette is consistent - have you got a defined list of colours that you use in certain places? Try to use no more than 5 to keep your brand identity clean and recognisable. It can help to note down the HEX numbers for website use, or the Pantone references for print. Keep them in a handy reference sheet to refer back to.
Review your fonts - when we use helpful things like templates it can be easy to forget to change the fonts over to our chosen brand ones. Are the fonts you use on your website the same across all your messaging? If you don’t know what your designer has used or what your website theme uses then ask, or use a font finder app like Font Squirrel or What Font Is to help you.
Appraise your image portfolio - if you have been in business for a while then there is no doubt your style will have evolved over the years. Be sure to update your portfolio to reflect your current style and the sort of work you want to do more of. Quality over quantity!
Ask your customers - don’t be afraid to canvas customers and clients for their thoughts on what they’d like to see more of from you, you can create a short survey in an app like Survey Monkey for free and ask them what they love about your current look, or what drew them to you. It can be really eye-opening and help you decide how to move forward with a rebrand or refresh if you are considering it.
I hope you find these tips useful and thought-provoking, but if you’d like some 1-2-1 considered help and support on your visual brand identity, an assessment of your core strengths and weaknesses as well as some useful, actionable steps to improve your consistency and clarity of style to welcome more clients, then you can book a session below.
The sessions last one hour and you have the opportunity to ask for help in specific areas. The Zoom call is recorded so you can watch it back at any time to ensure you didn’t miss anything whilst we were talking.
