Branding

To look more professional and to be easily established as a brand and an identity I am going to be creating a branding style and an identity in my work; not just in my photography or retouching work but within my website style and business cards and any other promotional elements I create such as flyers or leaflets and brochures.

I am going to keep my branding simple and use only two or three colours consistently throughout my blog, website design, business cards, flyers, email headers and all of my social media pages (if possible). In doing this it means my branding will be easily remembered and when somebody sees my work on my pages they will recognise it instantly as something that is mine.

In the retouching world the Photoshop colour scheme is something that is easily recognisable, the use of grey working backgrounds also runs into other software such as Capture One and Lightroom; because of this recognisable colour scheme I am going to be using grey in my branding, I am deciding between keeping my branding monochrome or adding a small amount of colour into the branding. I cannot decide if this would be helpful in making it stand out or whether it would be distracting to the images.

Starting to experiment with branding designs on my website I tried out some monochrome designs, I like these as it gives my website a sleek professional look and the three colours work well together. I might stick with this branding as adding colour would be difficult as getting the colour correct could be difficult, every colour had connotations and I would not know what to use in order to give the impression of a professional, creative, friendly branding.  

In order to use this I have looked into the psychology of colours and what they mean in relation to branding.

Choosing a colour was taken away from me because after being hired by GC Photo-Grafics I decided to use their branding and colour scheme as then I am more related to their branding and I can blend into their business seamlessly. The companies branding scheme is black, white and red; I have also kept the grey colour in some of my promotional items.

This is from a study done on the psychology of colour in brands:

 

One predominate colour preference is blue between both genders with women also preferring the colour purple. This will be an influence when I am looking at choosing colours for my logo design and website accent colour.  I think I am going to try experimenting with purple as in my experience it is mostly women who have been looking at my photography and wanting to hire me; especially for the family photographs.

This is an example from the same study that shows the types of colours that men and women prefer, this will also be an influence in choosing my colour as I am going to look at choosing a nice pastel purple for my branding.

This is an example from another study done on how people perceive colours and what they have been found to represent in brands.

A study was conducted on the world’s top 100 brands; it shows what colours they are using the most (red and blue) with the least used colour being yellow. Black and white are in the middle of the scale.

These analyses show the representing of the colours and what brands they are popular for and which the are rarely used for; Photography is not used in this branding scheme but I still feel that this is relevant to me because of the analysis. I have only included these colours because these are the only colours I am contemplating using.