5 designer’s shortcuts to help your new startup prioritize brand work
Don’t get bogged down in the unimportant stuff
1. Text logos are underrated (and all logos are overrated), so stop obsessing over them
Early-stage startups often give way too much weight to their logo and its inherent symbolism.
So, I’ll be frank: spending time perfecting your logo is a huge waste of time, creativity, and cash.
The world is so saturated with logos that it’s near impossible to create one that’s completely unique and identifies your startup from the moment it’s created. Much more important than trying to recreate the iconic McDonald’s or Nike symbols for your B2B startup is getting people to remember your name – and for that, simple text logos can bring some much-needed repetition.
If you don’t believe me when I say simple is beautiful, justlook at companies like Burger King, Toyota, and Warner Bros who are jumping on the debranding bandwagonand simplifying their logos to their bare bones.
2. Don’t pay for staged photos that look like they’re stock
Meme accounts making fun of stock photos have made us all weary of image banks, but commissioning your own custom photo shoot isn’t always the best option.
Even real photos taken at your office using your own employees often end up looking fake – because let’s be real, no one sits five inches from their closest colleague pointing intently at the same screen.
Instead of paying for a custom photo shoot, there are great free image banks likeUnsplashwhere you can get started, and cropping photos differently or adding colored layers can help customize them for your brand.
But a word of warning: don’t just go through the first five pages ranked by popularity, unless you’re going for the same look as your five closest competitors.
3. Only customize where it matters most
With limited resources for branding, you should focus your efforts on where your visuals can make the biggest impact.
For a SaaS company with a technical product, it’s imperative you have a high-quality image, animation, or video explanation of the real solution and how it works – not an oversimplified cartoon or artsy brand image – whereas a D2C brand will probably want to invest in packaging for the perfect unboxing experience.
And no matter what your brand agency tells you, unless you’re Coinbase or Spotify, you don’t need to pay thousands for a customizable icon bank or fonts (check out existing templates fromGoogle,Streamline, orFontawesomeinstead).
4. Buy templates instead of material production
Using an external partner to sharpen your visuals for key materials like pitch decks, your website or product packaging is often a good idea – because even if someone in your founding team speaks fluent Adobe, their limited time is likely better spent on other things.
However, when it comes to repetitive content like visuals for a social media post, paid campaign materials, or one-pagers, you can save a lot of resources and brief time by commissioning templates that someone on your team can reuse and freely modify.
Rule of thumb: if you need more than one version of something, a template is a must. If you need 20 versions of the same design, the first one might take you an hour to get right. The rest should be over in a couple of minutes, and if not, you’re doing it wrong.
5. Accept that your identity will expire in the first 2-3 years
Finally, companies are taught to fear brand renewals (“you shouldn’t change your colors now that customers are finally beginning to recognize you!”) but for startups, changing your visual identity in the first two to three years of your lifecycle often makes good business sense.
Startups tend to have limited resources to start building their brand, so it’s likely that you’ll want to amp up your brand once you have more learnings about your market-fit to do so.
More importantly, startups’ growth cycles are short, so it’s unlikely that the same visual identity will serve its purpose for over three years. As you enter new markets, broaden your focus from early adopters, or introduce new products or verticals, your brand will require a different approach.
Just think about Oura, whose entire vibe recently changed from performance-heavy biohacking to a more wholesome lifestyle approach, or Dropbox, who metamorphosed from a somewhat generic blue SaaS brand to amore consumer-centric and colorful brand.
Story byJesse Pyy
Jesse is ex-CMO at Slush and Founding Partner and Head of Design at Bou, a brand agency working with 100+ European startups, scaleups, and e(show all)Jesse is ex-CMO at Slush and Founding Partner and Head of Design at Bou, a brand agency working with 100+ European startups, scaleups, and established organizations.
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