12 Essential UX Designer Tools for All Levels

Common misconceptions about brand identity

A common misconception is that logo design is the only element of a brand identity. 

While logo design is an important part of the brand identity, it is only one piece of the puzzle. A full brand identity pack includes a range of elements that work together to create a strong and consistent brand image.

Another misconception is that ‘brand identity’ is only for large corporations. 

Regardless of size, any business can benefit from a clear and consistent brand image. A full brand identity pack can help any business stand out from the competition and build trust with potential customers.

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Key elements of brand identity 

Brand identity includes a range of design assets alongside your logo. Here are the key elements:

• Colour palette: A well-chosen colour palette can evoke emotions and help communicate the brand’s personality.

• Typography: The typefaces used in a brand's visual identity ensure consistency, and help communicate its personality and values.

• Imagery: Images and graphics can bring a brand to life, creating a visual language that customers will recognize.

• Tone of voice: The words and language used in a brand's messaging create a consistent and recognizable brand voice.

• Brand guidelines: A comprehensive set of guidelines will ensure consistency across every touchpoint and all elements of a brand identity.

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5 tips to ensuring consistency and cohesion for your brand

Here’s how to achieve consistency and cohesion for your brand:

1. Start with a clear brand strategy: Before designing any visual elements, get a clear understanding of your brand's values, personality, and target audience through detailed market research.

2. Establish brand guidelines: A comprehensive set of brand guidelines will ensure that all the elements of your brand's visual identity are used consistently, no matter where you show up online or offline.

3. Use a consistent colour palette: The use of a consistent colour palette across all visual elements helps create a cohesive brand image. Choose a palette and stick to it everywhere — from your website to business cards.

4. Carefully choose typography: Typography should be chosen to reflect the brand's personality and used consistently across all visual elements. Limit the number of fonts in play and ensure they’re visually compatible. 

5. Develop a visual language: This includes consistent use of imagery and graphics can help create a recognizable brand identity.
   
   

Advice for small business owners

When deciding between investment in a brand identity or a logo design, it's important to consider the long-term benefits of a brand identity pack. 

A full brand pack from a design studio will give you a suite of logo files in every version and format you’ll ever likely need in a range of digital and print formats. 

Here are some places you might need it:

• website
• social media
• marketing materials
• email
• letter header
• billboards
• business cards
• merchandise

Each of these uses will need different file formats, colours, and variations.

With a full brand pack, you can successfully roll out your logo anywhere — wherever it’s needed — without spending more time, money, and effort converting it into different file formats (whilst trying to retain the highest resolution). 

A brand pack also gives you clear brand guidelines. The great thing about having a brand guidelines document is that it helps you control how your brand shows up at every touchpoint — no matter whether content is being handled in-house or by an external contractor or agency.

Brand guidelines help you — and your suppliers — to ensure brand consistency, which format to use, how to scale the logo, and even, what not to do with it. A logo design on its own won’t cover these bases, which can lead to inconsistencies in your messaging and inferior image quality, impacting perceptions of your brand. 

A full brand identity pack helps your business create a strong and memorable brand image that sets it apart from the competition, establishing trust with potential customers and ensuring a professional image.

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Measuring the success of a new brand identity 

The success of your brand identity can be measured in a number of qualitative and quantitative ways. Here are some metrics you can use to evaluate its effectiveness:

• Brand awareness: The extent to which your brand is recognized and remembered by its target audience.

• Customer loyalty: The degree to which customers feel an emotional connection to your brand and do repeat business with you.

• Sales: A higher quality brand image can help raise the perceived value of your brand’s products and services, attracting higher-paying customers.

• Brand consistency: The extent to which your brand identity is used consistently across all touchpoints.

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Brand pack or logo design?

Whether you opt for a logo design or a full brand identity pack is your choice. It comes down to the needs of your business, your budget, and your future aspirations. 

An off-the-shelf logo design (built using a template) can be an ideal quick-fix for a business that’s just getting off the ground and has limited funds. But over time, as the business grows, inconsistencies in how the brand shows up across different touchpoints can take its toll.  

With a brand identity, you get much more than just a logo design. A full brand pack gives you a collection of visual and verbal elements that work together to create a consistent and memorable brand image that can last for years to come.  And it’s not just for enterprise-scale organizations! 

Investment in a full brand identity pack helps create a strong and lasting impression with your target audience, and other stakeholders. Take a look a rebrand we did for trimble group here, to see an example of how a brand identity and visual system can help create a cohesive look and feel across all touch points.

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Looking to refresh your brand's visual system your small business or organization? Khula can help! Book a discovery call

Our Portfolio Of Digital Homes

We’ve worked with a lot of businesses in the home design and property management sectors. Here are three examples of digital homes we’ve built:

PROCAD Designs

Custom home and renovation design professionals, PROCAD Design, were struggling to keep their WordPress website updated and fresh. They didn’t have time to update it themselves, so they reached out to Khula Design Studio. Read more  

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Forty Ninth Living

A single, well-designed, user-friendly website is worth 20 individual crummy ones. Just ask Kristie at Forty Ninth Living! She built a Wix website for each one of her properties. This took time and money she’d rather be putting into her business. Read more

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Morris&Co

Award-winning interior architect, Adrian Morris, needed a beautiful and functional website for his new studio, Morris&Co. He wanted to be able to update case studies himself without paying out for developer or agency time — so he came to us. Read more

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Building Relationships

One thing that Khula’s founder, Jamie Windell, loves about working with other designers is sharing experiences of the design process, as well as operational tactics! Designing websites has a similar iterative process to home design, from the discovery phase right through to the final design. 

Having previously worked for the award-winning interior design agency, Design Partnership Jamie has a deep understanding and appreciation of the industry. Here’s a testimonial we’re particularly proud of:

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“Jamie’s positivity and ability to plan, lead, unite and inspire the team at DP not only did wonders for the productivity of the team. In turn, it added immensely to strengthen positive relationships with our clients." — Callie Van Der Merwe, Principal & Founder DP Australia

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Design, after all, should be a collaborative process. Whether you’re renovating a home, building one from scratch, or building a digital home in the form of your website, great design relies on good communication and understanding of people. At Khula Design Studio, we don’t just build great websites, we build lasting relationships. Let’s talk.

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Side note: Are you an HGTV fan? We definitely are! We love seeing the before and after transformations and different types of homes and interior design styles. At Khula, we do the same transformations but from a branding perspective —  especially the before and after transformations. Here are our top 4 shows:

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• Fixer to Fabulous - Dave & Jenny Marrs
• Home Town - Ben & Erin Napier
• Fixer Upper - Chip & Joanna Gaines
• Dream Home Makeover - Studio McGee (Shea & Syd McGee)

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Want to discuss how we can help you update your digital home? Book a discovery call today.

Stock Photos

The most popular and reliable way to source free images is through an online library of stock photos. General topics are very well-served, but anything more niche might require a one-off royalty payment to a paid provider. 

• Unsplash: With a global community of nearly 300,000 photographers, Unsplash has over 3 million free images for commercial and non-commercial use —  no permission needed. 

• Pixabay: Alongside video and music, Pixabay offers over 2.5 millions royalty-free images for print and digital use. Modifications can be made, and attribution is optional but appreciated for commercial and non-commercial use.

• Pexels: An extensive library of free to use images and videos. Like Pixabay and Unsplash, there are clear rules around commercial usage such as not implying endorsement of a brand by identifiable people, or presenting people within the images in a bad light. 

• Burst: Powered by Shopify, Burst provides access to beautiful free stock photography created by a global community of photographers. The library contains   thousands of high-resolution, royalty-free images aimed at designers, developers, bloggers, and entrepreneurs. 

• Freepik: If you’re looking for high-quality illustrations and icons, as well as photos, Freepik offers over 4.5 million graphic resources. Alongside premium, paid-for content, it has a wide catalogue of free resources which must be attributed with the words “Designed by Freepik”.

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Other Free Resources

Stock photo libraries aren’t the only places to source high-quality free images for your projects:  

• Wikimedia: Approaching 90 million media files, Wikimedia is a mammoth resource of free images. You can even search via the type of licence agreement by refining your search from a dropdown menu.

• Library Of Congress: This portal of free-to-use and reuse digital images is ideal for a more retro feel. It includes artwork, artefacts, historical figures, and landmarks. 

• Creative Commons Openverse: There are over 600 million searchable audio and image files in the Openverse, either in the public domain or under a Creative Commons licence.

• National Gallery Of Art: Under Creative Commons Zero (CC0) the gallery has made any digital images of works of art believed to be in the public domain available to the public. Over 50,000 images can be downloaded and used for commercial and non-commercial purposes. 

• The Smithsonian: Download, reuse, and share over 4.4 million 2D and 3D images for free from Smithsonian Open Access. It includes images from across the museum’s estate, including the National Zoo and 19 museums.   

• Art Institute Of Chicago: Filter your search by clicking the option to show only ‘public domain’ and gain access to a treasure trove of free images of famous art.

• New York Public Library: With new additions every day, this collection of around 1 million assets includes prints, photographs, maps, and video. Click the search bar and check the box to ‘search images in public domain’ which are free-to-use. 

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Here is a list of additional sites where you can obtain PNG images from:

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• freepngs.com
• kindpng.com
• pngitem.com
• pngtree.com
• rawpixel.com
• pngimg.com
• pngwing.com
• stickpng.com

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Paid Sites

Many paid sites offer a selection of free stock images, covering a limited range of categories. This impacts the relevancy of the images, and sometimes key search terms can produce some fairly obscure results. So when you need a highly-specific image, paying for the right one is sometimes the only answer:

• Shutterstock: With over 1 billion images, video, and audio tracks, Shutterstock offers a range of monthly pricing plans to suit a range of budgets depending on how many images you need. Licensing and legal protection is included as standard.

• Getty Images: A high-end solution for royalty-free images, priced per image and also available as mix and match packs.

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Optimizing Images 

Once you’ve successfully sourced high-quality images for your marketing materials or website, it’s time to ensure they’re in the correct format, and fully optimized for your needs. For example, reducing the size of website images helps to improve loading times and performance. At the same time, it’s important to retain the quality. So, can you have both?

Thankfully, it’s possible to reduce the size of image files and maintain that high-quality look and feel by using free online tools.  And the good news is that you don’t have to get bogged down in the technical details:

• Tinypng: Upload any WebP, JPEG, or PNG file (20 images, up to 5MB each) and this handy tool applies clever compression techniques to minimize the number of colours, without compromising on image quality. The result? Great looking images at a fraction of the original file size.

• Bulkresizephotos: Drop or choose batches of images, and this browser-based tool does the rest. There’s no upload involved, so images remain private, and you’re free to convert, crop, compress, watermark, and reduce the size – until they’re ready to go. 

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Visual Content From Khula

At Khula Design Studio, we’re serious about getting your visual content right, so from your website to your social channels, your customers get a consistent and cohesive experience of your brand at every touchpoint. 

Interested to find out how we can bring your brand identity to life, and build a website that showcases your brand in the best light? Get in touch with us for a chat about our range of brand and website services for solopreneurs and small businesses. 

Schedule a chat

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