Brand kits can help you have access to logos, brand colors, and more easily! A brand kit is part of Canva Pro, but for indie authors, Canva Pro isn’t always in the budget. Here’s one of my favorite Canva hacks as an indie author and former marketing professional to make your colors, fonts, and logos accessible.
P.S. I do highly recommend getting Canva Pro once it’s in the budget, it has so many great features! 🩷
Step One: Create your folder
You’ll want to create a folder to keep your design and logos in the same place. Open a new design (or do it from the home page) and click “Create Folder” and name it after your brand. Great! Let’s get to creating!
Step Two: Choose your branding
A good brand kit has your brand color palette, your fonts, and your logo and more. Keeping consistent design elements helps your audience connect with your brand and recognize you before they even realize it’s you. Some indie authors update their palettes for every book or series, and some stick with the same thing forever. Regardless of what you chose to do, keeping your elements on hand makes it quick and easy to get creating.
Create a design with your colors and fonts. I like to do it all on one page but you can create a page for each. I also include the hex codes for my colors so I have easy access to them in other programs.
Tips for choosing Fonts and Colors
Fonts
Choose easy to read, non embellished fonts for body text, and keep them sentence case when typing (meaning: not all caps!). This will make your posts easier on the eyes, more accessible, and less likely to be swiped or scrolled away from. Display fonts are fun and cool and should be used for major design elements, but not paragraphs.
Colors
Keeping your color palette accessible and with good contrast helps make your designs and content available to more users. Use tools like UseAllFive and Adobe’s Accessibility Checker to see if your brand color combos are accessible.
You can also use Adobe’s Color Wheel to find colors that work well with each other to make a cohesive palette with some pops of contrasting colors.
Step Three: Create a logo
Canva has lots of great logo design tools, or you can find someone to make you one for you on sites like Fivver. I recommend creating multiple colorways of your logo—your full color version, a black version, and a white version. That way you’ll have it available to use in any design. Additionally, you can do a full logo and a simplified logo. While I like to use my full “Laurel Holl” logo, my “LH” one comes in handy on smaller designs (like my website logo).
Download your logos as PNGs with transparent backgrounds to stick them on any design without annoying backgrounds and to use them repeatedly without accidentally moving elements on them. I recommend making them larger and then just resizing them as needed so you have clear logos no matter the size.
Step Four: Add your branding to your folder
Once you’re done with your brand elements by opening the folder and clicking “Add design”. Next add your logos by clicking the three dots and choosing “Upload files”.
You can also add more folders to this folder for things like your books, character art, covers, most used stock photos, etc.
Step Five: Use it in a design
Now open a new design. Add a second page, and in your folders tab on the side, find your Brand Kit and add it to the page. Now all your colors and fonts are accessible in the colors and fonts tab! When you’re done, simply delete the extra page. Now your indie author branding is available quickly and easily for all your designs.
When you’re done, simply delete the extra page. Now your indie author branding is available quickly and easily for all your designs.
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