We already talked about how important it is for personal and corporate brands to connect with their target audience here. Now how do brands actually make that connection?

Brands use color, typography, and brand personality together to tell a clear story that makes an emotional connection with your audience.

Color Psychology

Have you ever stood in front of a wall of paint chips trying to decide your new living room color? Even if you’re frozen between Dutch White and Eggshell, you probably automatically threw out a lot of colors based on how you want people to feel in the room. A living room covered in neon orange would give off a completely different vibe than one in beige.

Your audience will subconsciously associate colors with feelings or personality traits. As the designer, you have to make sure that those associations align with the brand’s personality so that your audience is getting a clear message. If you’re going for fun and personable, you might not want to cover everything in black.

There are no hard rules about this, but you can find guides like the one below to get you started.

Here are some great places you can go to develop your color palette.

1. Coolers
2. Adobe Color Wheel
3. Paletton
4. Design Seeds
5. Flat UI Color Picker

 

Typography

Choosing your fonts seems easy on the surface, but it can really tap into some big emotions. Remember the Papyrus SNL bit?

 

Real quick: Serif fonts have little caps on the ends of their letters. These are usually associated with things like books, newspapers, and tradition. Sans-serifs don’t have these caps and have a more modern feel.

You can go really deep into the deeper meanings of each font and how they pair with each other, but a guide like this is good enough.

Here are some resources for finding great fonts:

1. Google Webfonts
2. Typegenius
3. Fontpair
4. Typewolf
5. WhatTheFont

 

Brand Personality

A brand’s personality is the public face it presents to the world and how people relate and connect with it. You can describe a brand’s personality like how you would describe a person’s.

So Pixar would be fun and imaginative…

And Jeep would be rugged and outdoorsy.

What we learned:

A brand personality is how that brand is perceived in the world. Fonts and colors support the personality to develop a strong clear message of what the brand is about. Clear messages are more likely to make a strong emotional connection with the target audience. Which means loyal customers, yay!