With tools like Canva, Easil and Stencil, most businesses can create graphics themselves which means they don’t have to outsource their graphic design.
And they can take it one step further and design a logo using these tools. Then Bob’s your uncle and you can paste the logo on your graphics, and you’re good to go.
But the thing is, if you’re going to build a business selling what you’re most passionate about, then investing in brand development is essential. You don’t have to pay a graphic designer for everything but consider having a professional develop the brand personality and the colour palette, and most importantly, design an amazing logo with a striking icon. This way you have something unique to your brand that expresses its personality, and shows people exactly what they can expect from your business.
Your branding is the way you introduce your business, its services, and your products to people. You want to make sure it’s memorable and it stands out!
Once you have that in place, you can use the logo and pop it on your business images using one of these free tools. This way you save some money, but you’ve already invested in the visuals that matter most. The branding that can take you from just another one of those businesses to that business.
Be memorable, be iconic, and stand out with something that’s uniquely your brand.
When your iconic branding is in place and you need to get graphics out for your online content and marketing, using these tools can be tricky, so we definitely recommend using the premium version because those give you a wide variety of free stock images and effects, so much more than you would get with the free version.
Then the most important part is to use this to build your business to the point where you don’t have to do your own graphics anymore, and when you decide to outsource graphics to someone, prepare to be blown away!
The investment your designer has made in the advancement of their skills is something that you can’t learn in your spare time. Knowing how to manipulate colours, textures, vectors and illustrations, and then pair the graphic art with the right font, is a whole other skill. It’s not even a skill, its an art, one that takes years of practice and learning.
We honestly feel it’s like magic and that graphic designers actually go to Hogwarts, because they have this amazing skill that has them take something, wave a magic wand (the wand waving can take a few hours), and then they create something magnificent, which us mere mortals wouldn’t have been able to do on our own.
People read less and look at more, so it’s important to have them look at something that is spectacularly YOU.
When we started, and we hate to admit this, but we created one of our logos in PowerPoint and created social media graphics in there too… Below are some examples of what we did on our own, versus what our designers have created for us over the years. Remember we didn’t know about Canva, Easil and Stencil back then… So we worked with what we could!
First up, we have the logo we created ourselves… Not the worst attempt, because if we had to show you the concepts that came out of us along the way… You would die.
Then there are the images we made in PowerPoint, and obviously, this is a selection of MANY crazy pics… Shame, we tried…
The birth of our new logo inspired us to find a designer who wasn’t just a designer, but a visual artist… While we made a few images with the logo ourselves (using PowerPoint and Paint) we asked him to be creative and find a way to make the brand pop… Normally for clients we have specific briefs, but we weren’t even sure who we could be so we had to explore and discover how we could be MORE, and how we could visually show people who Arrive Online really was.
Our logo came long before the new graphics, and in the process, we learned what questions needed to be asked and answered in order to complete the right brief for a client. Because we were our first real logo design client, and we also had no idea what to tell a designer… We like light bulbs and pencils isn’t enough of a brief to create a phenomenal design…
We also found out how to hear what wasn’t actually being said, and how to bring a client’s passion and vision for their business to life.
These images were the gift that kept on giving, without a designer to guide us and show us who we could be, we wouldn’t have been able to start driving a new message and we wouldn’t have been able to make our brand memorable, and in our opinion, iconic.
Now here we are in 2021 and our in-house designer can create and develop graphics that mean something, not just to anyone who sees them, but to us as a brand. And the lessons we’ve learned creating our own branding is something that can be applied to all our client briefs.
At the end of the day, to us graphic design matters. But so does growing your business, and if you are a start-up minus any funding, you gotta be as resourceful as all hell! But when you’re ready to take things further, we can help you build and design graphic concepts that don’t just matter, ones that pop and make your brand more memorable than ever before.
Together we can help you build to sell, and create a business that isn’t just about you as the person behind it, but a business that is a stand-alone brand.