Brand Guidelines Template & Tutorial
About this Video
Welcome to the final video in this branding series. I'm going to show you how to put all of the brand elements you've created into my Canva brand guidelines template, which if you haven't already gotten, you can get at designingtherow.com/branding or by subscribing below. And if you've been following along, you have the workbook document filled out with all of your brand elements. So all you're going to have to do is just copy and paste that into the Canva template.
You should have a call to action, a tagline, keywords, SEO description, About page bio, photos, typography (font pairing), and your color palette created. Now let's put it all together, make it official with these brand guidelines.
I'm just going to dive in assuming that you have used Canva before, so I'm not going to go into a crazy like, here's how to use Canva situation. I'm just going to quickly kind of show you how to customize it and make it your own.
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Google Doc Branding Video Series Workbook • Font Pairing Menu • Canva Brand Guidelines Template
So, first things first, let's do the fonts and the colors. You've picked your font pairing, let's go here and I'm going to change them to my fonts. And you can see when I selected that font down here it says change all. If you do that it will change anywhere it had that other font in the template to your new font. This one is already the font that I use. If you highlight your text and click this “AA” icon right here, it will make it not uppercase. Just style it however you have selected your font pairings and go through each page. And do the same so everything is consistent. I made this so it's already my brand fonts, so I don't think there's much I need to change. But go through, you can click through here and change all the fonts if you need to. Okay, so now let's do the colors. I'm going to come down here (sorry if I'm scrolling too fast in the video) I'm going to come down here to page 9 and I'm going to put in my colors. Since I already have them saved to my Canva account, this is going to be really quick and easy for me. But just come over here to your brand document, grab your hex codes that you saved when you created your colors and load them into here. White is my first color, and then I'm going to pick gray, which, again, these are my colors. Let's see if I zoom in here, replace these actual hex codes that are overlaying on top of the colors. So that is already my gray. I'm going to change that font to black so you can see it. Just copying and pasting and then black is already black. Okay, so now I've got the color palette in there. What you should see when you like click on anything and click the color, you should see the document colors. So your document colors are now loaded in as your brand colors. If you just go through the rest of the document and if you want to change these grays and the whites to be whatever your branding colors are, you can definitely do that.
If you open this template up into the grid view, you can see what I've done here with the design is if this is the cover, then you open it up you've got a blank page here on the left and the contents on the right. So there are little tabs on the outer sides. When you're looking at it if it were to be printed as a book (which you can do through Canva). That’s the idea behind those little stripes on the edge. Feel free to change those colors if you wish. This page might be another good one to change colors. Go through and change the document colors so it is on brand for you. That is our fonts and our colors everything is is now on brand so far now I just kind of drag and drop in our information.
I'm going to put my feature image here on the cover and then as you can see that means I need to move this text around here. I'm going to make it white and you can design and situate that however you would like. If you need to move your picture a little bit, just double click on it and you can highlight where you want it to crop. I'm just going to quickly pick some pictures and drag and drop those in here.
Unless you add or edit pages, then this contents and the page numbers should be good to go for you. And then all you have to do is just type, copy and paste whatever you want to do into all these blocks to add in your own brand elements. You can change the font sizes if you want, but I really think it would look very nice and cohesive if you just left the margins and the font size as I've got them, let's see.
Down here for photos, you can write a description of your photos. You can write just kind of the overall scope. If you remember when I had you plan out your photoshoot, you came up with some rules and what you were really after for your photos. You can put that in here. And then this is just a grid of your final photo - you can change the grids by going to elements and then coming down here to grids. You can just delete that whole grid and find one with the number of pictures and the organization that you like if you don't want to use this one I have.
Typography. Again, if you want to say anything about how your brand uses sans serif fonts… however you want to explain your font pairing and then add in your font name here and then actually find them up here in the list so that they reflect the font pairing that you have chosen. One little detail here, some of those Squarespace fonts, even though there's a million and one fonts that exist over on Squarespace and here in Canva, some of them don't cross over. So what I do is just find one that looks as similar as possible over here on Canva and stick to that for any social graphics or anything you make over here on Canva and your website stick to those fonts over there. So just a heads up, you might not find your font here and that's okay. Just find something as similar.
Then we've already got our colors loaded in here. You can explain your colors if you like, like how you envision yourself using them, like what is going to be your, your main color, what is going to be kind of just like thrown in here and there. You can explain that here in the description, and that is your brand guidelines.
If you zoom out, you can see there we have a totally customized brand guidelines with all of your elements. It's kind of fun to look at when you see everything put together. Yeah, I hope you have enjoyed this series. I hope you've gotten something out of it. And I hope you're really proud of your brand guidelines and that it's something that you're confident in, that you're excited to move forward with. And I can't wait to see what you've created.
If you want to share what you've created, come up here in the right corner to click “share > view only link” right here. Click that copy and you can share that with us in the comments so I can see what you've created and you can give inspiration to others.
One more thing, I kind of quickly mentioned this earlier but you can actually print this document so as long as it has 10 pages… you hit this print button here also in the top right corner, you can go through and Canva will print it for you. It’s set at free delivery here and for $10.50 you'll get the little bounding document which is kind of fun.
So that is the brand guidelines and the branding series. Again, everything can be found at designingtherow.com/branding and I just highly recommend that you use this kind of as your brand Bible moving forward. Anything that you create needs to stick within these guidelines so you can create that consistency and have that professional on brand look everywhere that you show up online. Thank you for watching and I will see you in the next one!
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