Hit refresh: Three simple ways to update your brand
BY LESLIE SPRING
Spring cleaning is about refreshing and reinvigorating your surroundings. The same spirit can be applied to your brand while you wait for the right time to launch a full rebranding exercise. (Read our other blog for tips about how to know when the timing is right.) To help you find branding inspiration during this season of spring cleaning, here are our top three ways to refresh your brand.
How do you hue?
Tip #1: Change your color palette
Often, subtle evolutions in your color palette, even just adding a new accent shade, can unlock a whole new world of design and visual opportunities. Since few outside your staff know the CMYK values of your style guide, you can safely shift colors to be brighter, deeper or bolder without too many phone calls to your customer service line. It's amazing how much fresher a brand can feel when deliberate evolutions are made to color palettes, and improvements to printability and accessibility can be made at the same time. Colors evoke emotion, and say a lot about your agency's personality. Choose carefully, and don't be afraid to think outside the (crayon) box.
Save (type) face.
Tip #2: Finesse your fonts
Like your color swatches, residents and customers likely do not know your branded fonts by name, so this is another area of your visual identity that can be updated without touching more off-limit elements of your brand like your logo. There are often font tweaks and new standards that can be created that will breathe some life into old templates, which can start getting your internal team used to a new look and feel. Fonts could be considered the unsung hero of a brand, but in our opinion, they're the backbone of it. Every headline and body copy paragraph helps advance your story, and the right font can help make sure it's read and understood.
A clean slate.
Tip #3: Toss your templates
While we're on the topic of templates and when a full rebrand is out of reach, you can still spruce up your existing materials. Even if nothing else changes in your style guide, per se, a fresh set of templates can make your brand feel all sorts of new. Add in more white space, punch up secondary colors, or reduce the size of your logo (cue, the gasps!). A simple retooling of your existing assets can help stretch your current brand while you build consensus for a comprehensive rebrand.
If you need a change, and you need it now, we are always here to help. If you also need a little inspiration to see how you can gently evolve your brand without sparking hysteria, we can help with that too.
Contact us at [email protected] to get the refresh party started.