Best Brand Identity Development Tools to Kick Start Your Business

As a start-up, a small business and an entrepreneur in making, I totally understand the struggle any new aspiring business owners go-through when creating a brand identity for their small business.

At this stage your main focus is executing your business idea and to understand whether you actually are offering the right product / service that will resonate with your purpose. Clearly you are not ready to invest or have a high budget to hire a branding professional or a graphic designer to help you create your brand identity.

Well not to worry, there are some great Brand Identity Development tools in the market for free to help you and your business to get that kick start. But before we start looking at different tools to help us create our brand identity, let us first understand what is brand identity and why do we need it.

What is BRAND IDENTITY?

Branding guru Marty Neumeie defines brand identity as “the outward expression of a brand, including its trademark, name, communications, and visual appearance.”

In short brand identity is amalgamation of how your brand looks, feels, and communicates to people. 

Why do you need a Brand Identity?

Creating a strong brand identity is not just about making your visual elements stand out (Logo, Typeface, Colours); it’s about communicating your brand story effectively with your audience. Design is a powerful tool and it can transform how people interact with your brand. So its important to understand what you want to gain from Brand Identity

1. Differentiation: How do you stand out and differentiate your brand to your competitors.
2. Connection: The more effectively you communicate who you are, the easier it will be for people to engage with you.
3. Experience: How to create an experience that reflects your brand.

BEST BRAND IDENTITY DEVELOPMENT TOOLS TO KICK START YOUR BUSINESS

These tools are extremely inexpensive or completely free which is great for individuals and small businesses who are just starting out

Best Colour Palette Generator

One cannot disagree that a good colour palette can set the mood and convey specific feelings, making it a valued component of your brand identity. Yet, coming up with a professional and creative colour palette can also be a very time-consuming and daunting task. So to make things more efficient and fun here are my suggestions on some of the best colour tools and resources that are available at our disposal.

• Coolors.co is one of the easy to use colour palette generators and is ideal for beginners who are trying to understand and want to explore their brand discovery journey. It lets you create colour palettes from scratch or explore palettes made by others. The tool also includes a useful option for uploading images to pick the base colours from photos.
• Canva’s colour palette generator helps you create colour combinations in seconds. The tool is simple, all you need is to just upload a photo or an image to the site and the tool automatically generates a colour palette based on the main colours from the image. Then you can copy the colour hex codes with just a single click.
• ColorSpace is yet another easy to use palette generator that allows you to create colour palettes with just one-click. All you have to do is enter a main colour hex code to the website and then hit the Generate button. Then the tool generates different styles of colour palettes along with matching gradients.
• Color Hunt is a massive collection of colour palettes made by designers. It includes many different types of colour palettes that you can explore based on popularity or trends. Since these colour palettes are already crafted by other designers, you can easily pick a palette and start your design.

Best Free Logo Generators

Designing a logo for your brand can be an expensive affair. But if you are just starting out and still in the discovery phase, do not have the budget and are not yet ready to make the investment for your logo to be designed professionally, you can experiment creating your own logo using one of the free logo makers available online.

• Tailor Brands offers a quick and easy way to create a logo for your business. Its logo creation process is based on a small questionnaire where you need to answer questions about your brand, industry, and preferences. When you answer the questions, you’ll get your logo done in seconds. It takes you through various options, allowing you to decide which designs you like and which you don’t or continue customise your logo until you’re happy with it.
• Canva Logo Maker provides all of the ingredients you need to create a custom logo, fast and free. It is a great tool for beginners or start-ups who do not wish to invest in a Graphic Designer. Simply drag and drop interface. There are plenty of free elements to play with. But if you need more choice you can pay to use a larger selection of premium elements.
• WIX Logo Maker, you can design a logo that looks exactly the way you want. Each logo is completely customisable — you can change the font, colour, size, text and more to fit your brand style. Plus, you get full commercial use rights of any logo you create. 
• Fiverr Logo Maker is a great choice if you need a final touch by a designer. Simply adjust the icon size, colours, typeface, and then also get an instant option to get your logo reviewed and polished by one of their designers (from Fiverr’s marketplace).

Best Free Font Libraries

When it comes to creating a professional looking website, it’s important to not only consider the colours and images, but also the fonts. Certain typography communicate different values and meanings and these should align perfectly with your overall brand message. When choosing a professional font for your website, it’s also vital to ensure they’re readable. They also must be user-friendly and web-safe -meaning they work across all browsers and devices.

• Google Fonts All fonts in the Google Fonts catalog are open source and free to use in commercial projects. You can download or embed them on your site, and you can even use them in print projects
• DaFont is one of the most wide-known free font sites. With around 170000 fonts on offer either free or paid you’ve got a wide range of choices that you can choose from.
• Font Pair If you use Google Fonts and you can get quite overwhelmed by the amount of typeface on offer. So it might be best to use Font Pair to help you narrow them down to some great combinations.
• Canva is a well-known powerful design tool. It comes with a lot of advanced features and templates to help you create awesome designs. However, you can also use it to create font combinations.

Best Free Stock Images Library

Photography is an ideal way to engage your audience, but paying for a professional photographer is expensive but if you still want to have some amazing, picture perfect, professional images for your blog or website or social media interaction, there are some great resources online to get you started.

• Unsplash is an awesome community-powered platform that has donated hundreds of thousands of its images to fuel imagination around the world. It showcases over 2 million free high-resolution photographs brought to you by some generous photographers around the world.
• Pexels has a vast, well-organised collection of free stock photos and is one of the best curated on the internet. In addition, they have free stock videos too! Pexels is the go-to image source for many bloggers.
• Gratisography pride themselves on being the “world’s quirkiest collection of high-resolution free stock images.
• Canva – Not to forget this all-in one graphics designing app also has some awesome collection of images.

Final thoughts:

Why use online tools to build a brand identity

There are certain advantages to working with online tools over working with a designer. At least at initial stages of your business.

• They offer a great starting point when you don’t know how to begin your branding journey. These tools for logos, colour palettes, typography will give you multiple options to start with. They also help you evolve to get greater clarity through the process.
• With free or inexpensive branding tools you can experiment around till you are satisfied. You also do not have to settle for something you are not fully convinced with.
• If you are a start-up and are just building a on your brand reputation
• If you want a simple and consistent look for your website, then using branding tools is right way forward

Finally, you can always take your brand identity process to a designer at a later stage when your business has found its direction. This way you saves time and money at those initial stages. And you’ve also involved yourself personally in the brand-building process.

Would like to read a bit more on EVERYTHING BRANDING – Check out the following !

BRAND, BRANDING, BRAND IDENTITY – Are they same?

START-UPS AND SMALL BUSINESSES – Should they invest in Branding?

5 MOST COMMON BRANDING MISTAKES – Every start-up makes and how to avoid them?