The 3 Design Elements You Should Always Have for Brand Consistency

Starting a business requires creating captivating content, which luckily with tools such as Canva, can easily be accomplished without prior knowledge in the subject matter. Launched just eight years ago, Canva has become the go-to online design and publishing tool for content creators and business owners, largely because of its accessibility and ease of use.

During the BlogHer Creators Summit, Rebecca Flint, Senior Community Manager at Canva, shared some of her tips for creating captivating content and why it’s important. “Why does having brand consistency matter?,” Flint asked during the summit. “You want your audience to recognize and connect with your brand. You want to be able to stand out in their feed amongst your competition and you really want to build trust with your audience — and having that repetition helps you gain more sales.” But what exactly are the elements that you need to keep consistent when you’re designing? Well, according to Flint, that’s simple: brand visuals, brand tone and a well-designed call to action.

Brand visuals

Fortunately, Canva’s platform has everything a novice designer would need — thousands of templates, fonts, images, video and audio — making it extremely convenient with no need to use three different programs to bring all of your elements together. And it’s easy, too: All you need to do on Canva is decide what you want to create (i.e. a Facebook post, logo, brochure, website, flyer, etc). Canva also has templates in each category to help you get started as well. If you decide to go the template route, once you’ve decided on one you like, simply choose the styles panel over on the left and add your brand colors and your fonts. So within a couple of clicks, you’ve got a beautifully designed branded post, which you can share straight from Canva.

Brand tone

In order to land on the right tone for your content, dig into the personality of your company by asking yourself questions such as what is the mission of your brand? Or how do you want people to experience your product or service? By doing that, you can help maintain that consistency consumers look for in a brand. If you’re not sure about what tone suits your brand, Canva suggests writing some sample tweets, emails or messages. Give yourself some scenarios, for example: would it better suit your brand to say “We apologize for the inconvenience” or “Sorry about the mix-up, we’re on the case”? Have a look at brands you admire and see what might also suit your brand. You can also check out their sentence structure and tone, and swap and change elements until you get a voice that accurately reflects you.

Call to action

Design is in the details — meaning that something seeming so minor can actually make all the difference. An example? A call to action button. The design details of a CTA button can largely impact the way visitors interact with your site (the user experience, or UX) and the results of those interactions. A well-designed call-to-action button should help convert curious visitors into customers, donors, subscribers or account holders, according to Canva. We see CTA buttons all the time in emails, newsletters and social media, but in order to entice a reader to click, you have to make sure your design is effective. But how to do that?

First, you’ll want to make your CTA button visible — making it a decent size and an appropriate color that matches your color scheme. Next, you will want to make it clickable. This means considering the shape and playing around with shadows, highlights or other subtle effects that give the button a slightly 3D appearance. Lastly, you’ll want to keep in mind contrast and position. Avoid colors that are too similar to the button itself and also colors that are just hard to see when paired together. And in terms of positioning, placing your button in the area that visitors first see (this will usually be at or near the top of the page) and surrounding it with extra white space will help draw attention to it and give it visual prominence.

This article was created by BlogHer for Canva.