If there’s one thing we could all use more of, it’s time to work on our business.
And let’s be honest, without a plan, creating on-brand graphics can be a total time suck.
That’s why we wanted to share some of our best time-saving tips for creating brandING and marketing graphics for your business.
These tips are all a part of our own workflow, to help with time management and consistency. We create dozens of designs each day for Haute Stock, so it was important for us to find effective design shortcuts to speed up content creation while keeping things fresh, stylish, and professional.
So scroll down for our tips on how to create consistent branding and marketing graphics for your business, in no time flat!
1/ Have your brand elements handy
Having your branding elements organized (such as your logos, watermarks, brand color palette, brand fonts, and on-brand imagery) all in one place will make it easy to create quick and consistent designs.
We use Canva for a lot of our designs, and with the paid version you can upload your logos, fonts, and color palettes so they’re always easily available while you’re designing. This is a really handy feature that we use every day!
We have also created folders in Canva for all of our Haute Stock collections so it’s easy to find the images we need for any design project. Just download images or entire collections from the Haute Stock library and upload them to Canva to make your workflow super efficient.
2/ Start with a template
There’s nothing worse than staring a blank page and not knowing where to start.
That’s why we love starting with a template and then tweaking as necessary to make it on-brand and relevant for the type of content we’re working on.
We figured Haute Stock members felt the same way, so we started creating our own templates and sharing them as monthly BONUSES for Haute Stock members!
Designing from scratch can be a long process, with many iterations and edits. Our original designs go through many tweaks and revisions to make them look good, professional and paired back with only the important details, while still being eye-catching.
Using a professionally designed template, like the ones you’ll find in the Haute Stock Membership, will save you HOURS of design time and take the guessing game out of what looks good.
The best part of Haute Stock’s templates is that they’re fully editable in Canva — so you can start off with the professionally designed layout, and simply incorporate your own brand colors, fonts, images and copy. Perfect!
3/ Re-size for all your online platforms
What if we told you that you could create ONE graphic and then re-size it for all the social media platforms and places you want to post it online?
Well, it’s true, you can! With Canva’s resize tool you can start with one design and then press a button and voila, with a few minor tweaks you’ll wind up with a handful of graphics optimized for other platforms.
This not only saves time, but it allows you to take full advantage of getting as much traction as you can from one graphic by posting it to multiple channels.
For example, you can start with one blog post graphic and then re-size it to post on Instagram Stories, your social media feed, on Pinterest, your newsletter and on Facebook ads.
You should get in the habit of taking all your blog post graphics (at a minimum) and turning them into posts for social media (we show you how to do that in more detail in this post).
4/ Re-use your customized templates
Staying consistent with posting, blogging, new product development, brand storytelling, visuals, etc. can feel overwhelming. We totally get it!
We want to help you banish that overwhelm and feel armed with the tools you need to post consistently, which ties into tip #4, re-use your customized templates.
Once you’ve landed on a design you like, keep using it!
We recommend taking one initial design, making a couple small variations to it so that you have 2-3 versions that are visually similar (for consistency + brand recognition) and using those each time you have new content to post.
This will save you so.much.time!!!
You won’t have to design something new for each post —you’ll just plug in your new copy, swap in a new photo, and off you go!
That’s what we’ve done here — our blog post covers all have the same layout, we just change the copy to match the new post and add a new photo.
You can do this for your various types of visual content that you post, so you end up with a blog post template, a square social media template, an Instagram stories template, a quote template, a testimonial template, and so on.
We hope you found these time-saving tips for designing brand graphics helpful!
These tips should help you create a workflow for designing graphics that saves time and makes it easy to create consistent designs in only a few steps.
We’re also here to help you free up even more valuable time to work on the things that really matter in your business.
How? Access to stunning stock photos for your website, blog and social posts certainly helps, but what if we could sweeten the deal with BONUS templates?
We’ve professionally designed these templates in Canva so that they’re easily customizable with your own brand colors, fonts, images and copy.
By using these Haute Stock templates you can have beautiful, on-brand graphics in MINUTES.
✓ Pin-worthy blog post graphics.
✓ Attention grabbing Instagram Stories graphics.
✓ Scroll-stopping social media graphics.
