5 Steps to Make Your Brand Look Professional Before Hiring a Designer
Custom branding is worth every cent when the timing is right. But not everyone is there yet, and that's completely fine. When you're early on and cashflow is tight, a full brand or website may not be on the cards. That doesn't mean your brand has to look like an afterthought while you wait. There's a lot you can do right now to show up looking pulled together, and a few ways to go deeper when you're ready. Here's where to start.
01 / Figure out who you are targeting and how you want them to feel
This may seem overwhelming at first, but it’s really quite simple - what do you offer, and to who? Once you know that, picture how you want those people to feel the moment they land on your page. Write down a few words you'd want them to use to describe you. Calm and composed, or bold and energetic? Playful, or serious and refined? Those words become the feeling behind everything you make next, and they're what you'll build your visuals around.
02 / Use your brand keywords to create a mood-board
Go onto Pinterest, or a similar site, and use those keywords you thought of to search for references that you can save to a moodboard. This should help you to gather inspiration that “feels right” to you and what you what your brand feel like. Be careful not to get caught up gathering too much inspiration as this can cause confusion and overwhelm. A good tip is to keep removing your personal preference and trends from the process - keep thinking back to your audience and how you want them to feel and what will connect with them.
Steps 1 and 2 are scratching the surface of something bigger. Underneath sits your actual foundation: what your brand stands for, who it’s meant to reach and how to communicate clearly. When you're ready to work through that, the Brand Reset is the perfect fit for you. It's the same groundwork I do with every client before we design a single thing, so your design and marketing choices are based on a solid foundation.
03 / Keep your logo simple and skip the trends
It may be tempting to follow trends and include some popular illustration styles and fonts. If you believe that strategically these make sense for your brand (and that you’ll be able to stay consistent with them long term) then by all means go ahead, but don’t jump on the bandwagon just because you think it looks pretty. Using trending colors and design styles without strategy will not make you stand out from your competitors. Create something simple and timeless, preferably just type-based (words only, no icon or illustration) — this will work for you until you’re ready to invest in custom branding.
04 / Pick a small palette and one or two fonts, then stick to them
Nothing gives off unprofessional faster than colors and fonts that shift on every post. You've got about five seconds when someone new lands on your page, so give them something steady to remember you by. Choose one or two free web-safe fonts from Google Fonts and decide exactly how you'll use each one. For colours, a site like coolors.co helps you build a palette that works for your brand. And, it’s worth saying again: be consistent with them. Consistency creates familiarity, and familiarity makes a brand feel much more established.
05 / Use high-quality imagery
Strong imagery does a lot of heavy lifting. Book a photographer for proper product or brand photos if that's possible for you, or pull high-quality free images from Unsplash or Pexels for now. Blurry or mismatched photos undo a lot of the good work from the steps above, so it's worth being fussy here. Pay attention to lighting, color, composition, texture and subject matter. Over time, aim to create a recognisable visual world rather than a collection of unrelated images.
If you’ve got all the pieces ready from steps 3 to 5, but need help with how to better use them, the Brand Refiner is designed specifically for this. It teaches you practical designer techniques for using your existing brand with more refinement, cohesion and confidence across the places your business shows up.
Closing thoughts: invest strategically when you're ready
You don't need to rush into a full branding project simply because you know your brand could be better. Instead, think about where the biggest gap is right now. If you need clarity around your brand foundations, start there. If your strategy is solid but you're struggling to execute your existing identity across your business, focus on the design execution. If your brand needs deeper strategic and visual work, that's when a full branding project or a brand audit can make sense.