Brand Building and Brand Management for Copywriters

In this section, you will find all kinds of resources and information related to brand building and branding, from a copywriter and content writer perspective. If you are bootstrapping, you can benefit from both online and offline free solutions and assets without the need to purchase anything.

The following list of branding resources is ordered by priority. Even if some of the resources can be used as standalone, to create more sophisticated brand media you will need to decide, gather and/or create, and curate the resources first to be able to proceed to the next elements.

Palettes

When publishing, creating websites, or doing any other tasks that will build your brand media collection you have to be consistent.  When you begin fleshing out your brand identity, one of the first things you will have to do is decide on a color palette.

Be sure to learn a bit about color theory and how it correlates with customer psychology. Different colors have different power in reinforcing the different stages of your customer journey and you should learn about that too.

But in the beginning, it is useful to decide on five or so colors that will configure your brand identity. Don’t think yet about advertisements, buttons, sales copy elements like CTAs, or anything like that. Only think about which your brand colors are going to be.

Some good online apps for palettes

colors.muz.li: lets you see how your color palette will look in GUIs.
material.io/resources/color/: another tool to see how your colors will look on the web and in apps.
learnui.design/tools/: allows you to create divergent and single hue color palettes.
meyerweb.com/eric/tools/color-blend/: similar to the one at learnio.design.
colorswall.com/palette/generate: the best of the bunch, in a way. It lets you create a custom palette with lots of colors even if you already know the colors that you want to include. It doesn't force you to use any generator. Greatest alternative to coolors.co, now that coolors.co went commercial.

Typefaces

You can communicate a lot about your brand by your choice of typeface. You should start with the main font, which is going to be the font that you’ll probably use in your brand’s logo.

When you are hunting for your ideal brand font you’ll discover many other fonts that you will think you would want to use. Get them as soon as you see them and keep all of them in a folder.

Later on, when the moment to put to use your brand typefaces comes you will be thankful that you did.

Even if you get all the fonts that you think you could use in the future, when you are extremely in need of one, you will feel that the ones that you gathered through time may not be enough.

In the case you gather a lot of fonts, you may probably need a dedicated application to curate them. In that case, get NexusFont which will allow you to organize them much easier than using your operating system’s shell only.

Some of the best sites to download royalty-free typefaces are:

FontMeme.com
Dafont.com
Fonts2u.com
Ffonts.net
Best-font.com
Blambot.com

If you know of a commercial or famous typeface that you would want to use, but for economic or other reasons you can’t, then head to alternatype.net, identifont.com, or fontsquirrel.com/matcherator and using their search engines find and get free fonts that mimic or otherwise approximate the original versions.

Brand Logo Design

If you have design skills, you can use a free vectors editor like Gravit Designer, which has everything you need to design vector graphics. Other free vector editors are Vectr, RollApp, BoxySVG, Veceeze (online), and LibreOffice Draw and Inkscape (offline).

Remember to always use vectors and save your brand designs as vectors. By doing that you ensure the scalability of your graphics without any undesirable loss of the image’s resolution.

If you don’t have design skills, but you think you could create your brand logo with just a little help, then you should try a free online application like Canva. They will not only help you design, but they will give you ideas and inspiration.

They have tons of premade examples from which you can start designing your logo. Canva, for instance, will hold your hand all along the logo design process and make it very intuitive for you not to get lost at any step of the design process. 

Photos, Backgrounds, Images, Icons

In the sites on the list below, you can find all sorts of visual static media to use in your brand-building efforts. These sites have either an option to search only for images that are royalty-free for any kind of use, even commercial or only provide royalty-free images.

As with typefaces, when you are searching for a specific photo or image and you see others that you think will come in handy in the future, get them at once and keep them for later use.

Pixabay
Pexels
Stockvault.net
Unsplash
freepngimg
Veceezy
Getdrawings
Gumroad
Canva
Creative Commons
CCSearch
Foter
Freerange
Flickr
RGBStock
Texturecam
ClipartETC
AnimatedImages.org
Archive.org

If among your brand-building efforts, you are creating a website, squeeze page, or other kinds of brand collateral, you might need icons for your designs.

Sites from where to source free icons are:

Flaticon.com
Freepik.com
Iconscout.com
Iconarchive.com
Freepngimg.com

Ads, Banners, Mockups

Finally, when you know where to source all the elements to create complex brand media, and with some assets already in your possession, you can use any of these apps to create them:

Html-online.com/editor: free WYSIWYG webpage editor.
BeFunky.com: full-featured online photo editor.
Online-image-editor.com: the easiest way to create transparency in a photo or image.
Self-css.org: excellent to create content capsules and other simple CSS designs for web pages.
CSS-doodle.com: great to create all kinds of random CSS shapes.
Fotor: online photo manipulation editor
Pixlr: online photo manipulation
PlaceIt.net: create mockups of products for free. You can create mockups for 3D products and map textures to them. For instance, if you have an ebook that you want to sell, you create a 3D mockup with this app, and the resulting image to promote it is much more attractive than a flat 2D image.

Image Credits
David Buchi

 © Martin Wensley, 2022 — Brand Building