Consistency is Key: Crafting a Memorable Brand Identity

Ever wonder why faces and bold words dominate YouTube?

Thumbnails.

The psychology goes back millennia and today we're looking at not just making a brand, but making a great looking brand.

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Here's your host, Dave Jackson.

Hey, I'm Dave Jackson, head of podcasting here@podpage.com and we had our October meetup with Jim McLeod.

He is the man behind the book the Visual Marketer.

The the Marketer's crash course for creating memorable and effective visuals.

I'll have links to all this out at podcast website tips.com 3, 2 and so obviously since we're talking about making graphics, some of this webinar and I'll have a Link to the YouTube if you want to watch.

It is visual.

So what I've done is I've gone through and cut out the things that were super visual and so we can talk about great tips on again, not just making a brand, but making a good looking brand.

Because I see things sometimes that just burn my corneas and I'm like, how are you thinking that works?

And the answer might be they were colorblind or there are actual reasons why sometimes people just don't see that that looks good.

So I brought in Jim to help us kind of walk through how to make a great looking brand.

So we started off the webina at the very beginning by defining, well, what is a brand?

So a brand I usually like to start this with what it's not.

Ah, good brand is not your logo.

Ah, like a lot of people think, okay, this is my logo, this is my brand.

But a brand is actually every touch point you have with a customer prospect and it either adds to the brand value or subtracts from the brand value.

So if it every time you get an email, every time you call customer support, every time you're interacting with some sort of business, you're having a brand interaction.

And in order to build a powerful brand, your business needs to deliver on every interaction.

So yes, your logo, your colors, your website, all that kind of help shape what the brand is.

But you don't actually, you don't actually own that it can be because it's so many more things Robert Rose used to say that image is what you project and brand is how it's received.

So your brand, as much as you try to own your brand and say like, this is what our brand is, the brand actually lives in the hearts and minds of every person who is experiencing your business.

I love that your brand lives in those who consume it.

I love that.

And one of the things you might think about is when it comes to making a brand or a logo, start with black and white.

This actually goes back to the old print only days of design, which is when I was originally trained.

So I, when I was studying design was right as computer programs were starting to become more active.

So my freshman year of college, we were setting metal type and then rolling ink on it and putting paper down and doing presses that way.

My sophomore year is when we actually got access to the computers and started using Photoshop.

And you know, and then like a year later they're like, oh, Photoshop now has layers.

Like, this was a new thing and I had a professor who was like, oh, there's this new thing called a portable document file, which we now know as PDFs.

But these were all new things back when I was starting out.

But the reason why it's good to kind of learn, you know, things to be black and white initially was because if you're running a newspaper ad, that's going to be in black and white.

But the reality is, you know, as we get deeper into this, you know, decades now, we're not running newspaper ads anymore.

Everything's going to be full color wherever you are.

But there are times where you need that simplified logo.

So if you have a really busy background or even like a black background, you might want just a flat white version of your logo.

Or if you are embroidering it on a shirt for a golf tournament or something, or a baseball cap, you need your logo to be simple.

If you have a lot of gradients, you think about the Microsoft Copilot logo that kind of like two Cs that kind of sit on top of each other, it's all gradients and drop shadows and all that.

That's going to be insanely hard to embroider on a shirt or a cap or something.

So if the logo works by itself in just black and white, then it's going to translate into different use cases beside just the upper left hand corner of your website.

When I'm designing a logo for a client, I'll do it in black and white first because that will, then we'll determine if the design is good or not?

Because if I present three different logo options, one's red, one's green, one's blue, and the person I'm presenting it to doesn't like the color red, that one automatically gets dismissed.

And once you get your design, then it's time to start talking about colors.

You want to choose colors that evoke the right emotion.

One of the things that I talk about in the book is how colors are interpreted in different parts of the world.

For example, if you've seen the movie Black Panther, Wakanda Forever, there's a funeral scene in there and everyone's wearing white because white represents death in that culture here in the Western world, we tend to wear black to funerals and white to weddings.

Whereas in China they tend to wear, the bride will wear red to weddings.

And so if you think about, you know what this, the message it would convey if you were to wear white to a funeral or red to a wedding, it's drastically different.

So you need to think about how that, that works across all the different regions of the world and the message that you're trying to convey and those.

Messages start by knowing who your audience is.

Analytics.

If you're doing any sort of digital marketing or you know, if you're, wherever you're hosting your podcast or videos or anything, if you look at the analytics, they will tell you exactly what they're interested in.

And so I used to use a video platform called Wistia and that was great because it would give you analytics for every single viewer, how much of the video they watched.

And the best part is where we could see that they went back and re watched a segment.

So that tells me that either one, they didn't understand it or two, they really liked it and they wanted to understand it better.

So then we could take that information and be like, all right, let's go back, let's double down on this, either to clarify it or they want to know more about this.

Let's create more content in this space.

Interesting.

And I know you talk about surveys.

PodPage has a built in survey that you can kind of customize.

Are there any best practices when it comes to using a survey?

Because the mistake I always hear is I can't get people to fill it out.

So do you have any insights on that?

Usually if there's some sort of incentive, people are more likely to fill it out.

But it's the surveys can be interesting because then it turns into a little bit of people like to say the right things, even if they're not necessarily doing it.

So you want to take your survey information, your survey data, but then combine that with the actual analytics of what you're seeing audiences doing.

Because if someone's like, oh, I listen to the very end of every episode, and you see, no, they don't.

Or I scroll to the very bottom of every webpage and like, no, they don't.

So it.

You know, somebody might want to be helpful to you, like, oh, I think you've got the best podcast and you got the best website and you've got the best promotions, and I consume all of it.

And the reality is that audiences don't.

Right.

Like, they.

They trail off as time goes on.

So it's trying to find that fine line between what people are saying and what they're actually doing.

Great.

And then the one thing I really was interested in is I have always been of the thought when it comes to your podcast artwork, that maybe don't put your face on it because, again, it's going to be really small.

And I always, like, make the name as big as it can be.

But you talk in the book a lot about how apparently people love faces.

So can you expand on that a bit?

Yeah.

It's one of those things that we are taught from the literal minute we're born.

Right.

Babies come out looking for, you know, some.

Someplace safe, and they identify that in the mother's face and in human faces.

And what happens is, as we get older, we start to learn.

We start to learn how to read facial cues of who is friend and who is foe.

Right.

Like, these are survival instincts that go back millennia because, you know, we used to be hunted to a degree at some point.

Right.

So we need to learn these things.

And a lot of that's still ingrained in us.

So faces are.

We're drawn to faces because it.

It can be the difference between life and death.

Like, it's just wired into the deepest part of our brain.

Yeah.

And I know on YouTube especially, it seems like not only are there faces, but everybody has to be going or something of that nature.

Any best practices for YouTube design for their thumbnails?

Yeah, no.

And it's great because I'm actually working on my next book right now, and I just wrote the video chapter yesterday or the day before or the video thumbnail chapter.

And.

Yeah, so it needs to be a combination of faces and bold typography.

But there needs to.

But they can't be competing with each other.

Like, there needs to be a clear hierarchy of what you're supposed to look at.

First and what you're supposed to look at second.

So sometimes the text is so loud, sometimes you want the text to be really loud and then the photo to be secondary.

Other times you want the photo to be primary and the text to be secondary.

So some of that has to deal with your brand recognition.

Like, do people know your name?

Do they know your face?

And.

And then other times, is it the topic that are more likely to draw people in?

So you look at somebody like.

Like a Mr.

Beast who actually.

His video thumbnails don't match.

Kind of what a lot of best practices are right now.

But it's because he's Mr.

Beast and he can do those things, but he.

His face is on every single one.

Now, granted, it's all AI and it looks really odd right now, but it.

His face is more recognizable than his name to his audience.

Right.

And it's all about that recognition of how quickly can you see something, understand it, and then move on to the next bit of information you need to consume.

And that's one of the reasons why faces are so critical.

But then, yeah, type can really make a big difference in there.

But one of the things that I've noticed with typography on YouTube thumbnails is it seems like most type is either white or.

Or yellow on a dark background.

It's that high contrast and high energy that you want to be able to grab people.

Because if you're looking at the desktop interface or on a smart tv, you have a lot of different thumbnails to choose from, and your eye is going to go to the one with the most contrast and whatever you, as an individual, are most drawn to.

And speaking of how people consume graphics, you kind of need to think like a zoo.

And what you want to do is make sure that you're guiding the viewer's eye around.

And what you have to think about is here in the Western world, we start in the upper left, and then we go to the upper right, and then we kind of scroll down.

We move in a Z, like fashion.

And what you want to do is use contrast and placement in order to move the viewer's eye around.

And so we already talked about some other colors, white and red.

What do other colors mean?

Yeah, One of the reasons why you see a lot of blue in technology is because blue often means trust, and it means kind of safety.

And whereas red means, you know, excitement or danger or fire or blood.

Like, red can have a lot of negative connotations.

But if your number one competitor is blue, then you're Obviously going to want to go over to red.

But then there are others.

Like, green usually means nature, green energy, solar, all that sort of stuff.

Or money in some cases.

I'm looking at some of the books behind over my shoulder here.

But then it's funny because if you think about it, John Deere green, people talk about that as a color.

They're like, oh, it's kind of John Deere green.

So there's another company that's owned a color.

Yeah, yeah.

And you see it at Sherwin Williams and other big paint places.

They will have dedicated colors to that.

I know up here in the Boston area, Fenway Green is a color.

Right.

Like, everyone knows what that green is and it's something that they own to a degree and they're able to produce products with that.

But then other colors, you know, yellow is kind of life and sunshine and fun and excitement and energy.

And even though.

Which is weird because a long time ago I heard about a study that said yellow is actually a very aggressive color because you think about the most dangerous.

You know, you think about bees and you think about snakes with yellow coloring.

And there are times in nature where yellow is actually a sign for danger.

So it ends up triggering different parts of our basic brain because in some ways, like, oh, it's happy in sunlight, but otherwise it's a sense of danger.

Yeah.

Interesting.

Stephanie Graham from Nosy AF.com says, what about neon colors?

Neon colors, they're really popular right now and you're seeing a lot of that because the.

With.

Especially with the rise of AI over the last couple years, everyone's trying to be different.

It's a tech company, but it wants to be a new type of tech company.

So they're not playing the kind of safe, flat colors with sans serif typography.

A lot of these AI companies are going for this kind of more electric dynamic because they want to give you a sense of vibrancy and life that's actually going on underneath this.

The pink to purple kind of gradient colors.

We've been seeing that for about 10 years now.

So I'm curious to see how long that popularity cycle goes.

Because colors come in and out of fashion.

Right.

Think about the 70s when everything was orange and brown and yellow.

You're not going to see a whole lot of that these days.

Yeah.

But yeah, neon.

Neon especially, like there's a new Tron movie coming out maybe tomorrow that, you know, it looks great and that they've been tapping into neon for 40 years, 50 years now.

Yeah.

Zita Christian has A great comment.

She says, etsy shut down my shop.

Shut down my shop once.

Because I described something I made as Tiffany blue.

Lawyers from Tiffany wrote to me to make sure I got the message.

So that's legit.

They're not kidding around when they're like, no, no, that's our color.

You can't even.

Don't even.

Don't even look.

It's almost like Spinal Tap.

Don't even look at it.

Don't know.

It's crazy that way.

And so one of the things you might want to do is the direct opposite of whatever your current competition is doing to help you stand out.

What I thought was funny because you mentioned how red and blue are opposite, and then you spit out a bunch of different companies that are the opposite.

Can you remember what those were?

Yeah, it's, you know, Coke and Pepsi are obviously the two biggest ones.

Marvel and DC are red and blue.

CNN and Fox News are red and blue.

Red Sox, Yankees are red and blue.

There are so many different examples out there.

Target and Walmart, red and blue, like the number one and two players in most spaces tend to be red and blue.

And then everyone else falls into another color beyond that.

And so once you have the artwork for your podcast, that's an easy place to start when it comes to building.

Your website, because one of the best things you can do is own a color.

There are.

You think T Mobile Home Depot, you know, they're at Target.

There are so many of these big brands that you know what that color is the second you say it.

You know, Dunkin Donuts or Starbucks, they're drastically different.

They're not Coke and Pepsi, red and blue, but they are the opposite ends of the color spectrums.

But.

But they own their colors.

So if you can get that.

Get that color, own that color, use that color in everything you do, that helps cut down the recognition time so people can better recognize that it's you.

And sometimes maybe you're colorblind, maybe you're just not a graphic person.

How do you go about picking other colors to be part of your brand?

Yeah.

Color.

Adobe.com so that will allow you to pick a hex color and then come up with the colors that go that work well with it.

And those can be complementary colors.

They can be tertiary colors.

There are like five different categories that you can choose from, but it kind of sets your main color as the pivot point and then changes the colors around it.

And Jim and I agree, when it comes to one thing that I see over and over and over and that is, is people leaving room.

There's just no white space whatsoever.

Another thing that a lot of people are allergic to, and in my space, it tends to be executives, is white space.

It's okay to have white space around the elements that.

Because that helps draw attention.

Think about a museum.

A museum is probably 98% white space, right?

You go, you see a wall, and there's one, one painting or photograph or a sculpture on a wall with a little description next to it.

And the reason is because when you surround something with a lot of white space, it forces you to pay attention to just that one thing.

So when you have the white space, you know, around your item, it tells the viewer exactly where to look.

There's no confusion.

Yeah.

Don't give them an opportunity to get distracted or confused.

Next up is time to put some type of into your graphics.

One of the things I've noticed with a lot of Canva templates is a lot of cursive.

They will.

They will mix up typefaces.

And so you get these kind of really elegant, swoopy kind of cursive letters and then some small.

Some small, basic sans serif type.

But the problem is, as you were joking about, people aren't learning cursive anymore.

Yeah.

Also, it's really hard to read at small sizes.

So think about how it's going to be consumed and then find typography that works for that space.

And so if your audience has to squint or they're not really sure what that says, well, then you're in this situation.

There are better ways to represent your brand because if it is hard to consume, people just won't consume it.

And so once you've got your color palette, you've got your fonts picked out, you want to stay consistent.

Jim mentions this over and over in his book.

And then finally, consistency is the name of the game.

You want to keep things consistent because you want people to be able to recognize what it is that your brand is portraying.

By reusing fonts and colors and layouts.

This helps create a shortcut to brand.

And a lot of times the example I like to give is if you're scrolling a website and you see a banner ad over on the right, and.

And it is.

Has a red background with a yellow M in it, you know that's McDonald's, right.

You don't.

They don't have to explain to you, hey, this is a burger place or a fast food place.

You already know what it is because of that brand recognition.

And it helps you get to, you know, get to that brand recognition faster, and you can get to your offer that much quicker.

And what are some of the common mistakes that Jim sees in branding?

So one of the things you want to do is figure out your space around you when you're coming up with your visual brand, you know, and one of the ways that I suggest doing is create a Pinterest board.

Whenever you see something from one of your competitors, you can create multiple Pinterest boards, same as a swipe file if you'd rather do something like that.

But I like Pinterest boards because you can see, okay, these are a whole bunch of ads from this company.

And here are a whole bunch of ads from this company.

Figure out what everyone else is doing and figure out what the white space is, what, what area is not being covered.

Because you want to stand out from your competition, but you don't want to stand too far out from your competition.

So an example I give in the book is I actually, I. I hired somebody to design a death metal, like a Swedish death metal type logo for Goldman Sachs, because that's not going to look anything, you know, like.

So I've got this Goldman Sachs logo that's, like dripping blood and all this, you know, that's way too outside of your area, you know, so you want to stand out from the crowd, but you don't want to stand in the wrong crowd.

And then the.

Another example that I have in there with knowing where you stand and how to stand out is actually the energy drink space.

So I talk about all these kind of like extreme and neon and, like, it's always dark backgrounds and bright colors and lots of loud motion and everything.

Except for the number one player in the space, which is Red Bull.

They do these silly little cartoons, and Red Bull gives you wings.

We've all seen those.

So they actually stand out on their own, which is really interesting because everyone else is going after that kind of video game, extreme sports audience, whereas Red Bull's like, no, this is just for everyone.

It'll just help your day.

So Red Bull's trying to transcend their brand in their space.

Well, and it's weird because I see those on TV, on YouTube.

I'm constantly getting people doing these just insane stunts as they rolled down a ramp.

This one guy, he set a world record of going down a ramp and then just went into a giant wall of foam on a skateboard.

But everything he did, you know, Red Bulls on the ramp, Red Bulls on his helmet, Red.

It was just, like, interesting.

And I Thought, well, that's.

But it's, you know, for YouTube, that's the kind of audience that, that will resonate with.

Like, oh, that's cool, we're on TV and I'm watching whatever, Nickelodeon and I'm watching reruns of friends.

So everybody's 40 and above.

You know, the Red Bull gives you wings.

Will probably resonate a little more with that, which goes back to know who your audience is and give them what they want and test, test a lot.

And I'm not sure how we did it.

We went over 20 minutes without bringing up AI.

AI is really changing things.

Obviously how people are using AI in their visuals is changing.

You need to be careful with some copyright type stuff.

The new Sora 2 that just came out last week, the video, the new OpenAI video Social media platform is insane with the video that they're putting out.

But one of the things that you're seeing is all the AI companies all have similar logos.

So if you're working with AI companies or you're talking about AI or whatever, try something outside of the star.

And we mentioned earlier the importance of consistency.

But when you're not designing it, AI is.

And AI doesn't even know how it's doing it.

How do you maintain your consistency if you're using AI?

Yeah, you need a good prompt.

And one of the things that you can do is if you come up with an image that you like, take that image, feed it into one of the other AI systems, ChatGPT or Meta AI or whatever, and say, give me a prompt to recreate this type of image and that'll give you the core of the information that you need.

So for my newsletter, I create AI images every week and I have a big long, you know, I say what I want and then I paste in a big long prompt from my prompt library that says this is the color, this is the lighting, this is the angles.

This is the type of subject that I'm looking for.

So that each week you can tell when you see this cyan magenta in yellow image.

It's probably coming from my newsletter.

Nice.

And again, Jim's newsletter, you can find that at marketingbydesign Kit.

You can find the book at visualmarketer.

Co. Stephanie had a question.

Should we trust AI to give us a color palette?

It can.

I would say yes, but then double check it with color.

Adobe Canva is actually pretty good with creating color palettes for you.

So if you have a color that you like, try going in there and playing with it.

If you have the pro version of Canva, the brand guides that you can build into that can really help build out the rest of your graphics.

I'll have links to everything.

Jim's book, Jim's websites, Jim's newsletter.

It's all@podcast websitetips.com here's what I was saying as we were wrapping up.

Yes, you're talking graphics and things like that, but it's also marketing.

And all of that marketing really applies to a podcast.

It's the same thing.

Know your audience, give them what they want.

Keep it simple.

You know, that whole nine yards.

So again, VisualMarketer Co Jim, thanks so much buddy.

Great.

Yeah, thank you for having me.

And again, I'll have links to everything out@podcast websitetips.com 32 thanks to Jim again.

And I'm still reading the book.

It's an amazing book.

You should check it out.

And in November I'm very excited.

We got another great guest.

Been very lucky with this.

If you've never watched Matt Diamante on YouTube or Facebook reels or things like that, he is an SEO guru.

And the thing I love is all of his tips are super easy.

This is Thursday, November 13th at 2:00pm Eastern.

I'll put a link in the show notes where you can click and there's a one click register.

Definitely want to check this out.

So you'll be hearing this on the website or in the podcast as well.

But Matt really knows his stuff and just has so many tips and tricks because as always, they can't hear you until they find you and then once they find you, well, hopefully you followed all the great tips in Jim McLeod's book so that they then click on you and they finally hear you.

But I'm really looking forward to this because SEO is a topic that a lot of people are.

Is SEO dead?

Wait a minute, what about AI?

Yep, Matt's gonna clear all that up on November 13th.

Links in the show notes@podcast websitetips.com 32 and if you haven't tried out PodPage yet, you should just go out to podpage.com preview and you can type in the name of your show and we'll look it up in Apple.

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Find this and all of Dave's shows@powerofpodcasting.com.