Having a good brand guide is like having Chefs Plate for your business, it takes away the stress of choice and I don’t know about you but I am way more confident cooking risotto with instructions vs winging it. Creating solid brand guidelines now saves you tons of time and stress in the future.
Chef’s Plate lowers the stress of “what’s for dinner”?
It’s 4:00pm on a Wednesday. The kids are home from school and decompressing from their day. Your partner will be home in 90mins or so and that oh-so-familiar-anxiety-inducing question pops into your brain- what’s for dinner?
Lucky for you, you open the fridge and there is a row of neat little Chef’s Plate bags. You grab a bag, the recipe card and in no time, dinner is ready. If you are like me, you sat down a few weeks ago and picked out all of your meals to be delivered weekly for the next month and then they just show up- amazing.
The planning you’ve done allows your brain to go into auto-pilot and then it’s winner-winner chicken dinner.
A branding guide outlines all the right ingredients & the recipe
No matter if you have your brand professionally created or are DIYing it, you should make decisions about your colours/fonts/shapes/style and write them down. You’ll want to make a match between colours/fonts/style and the feelings you want your customers to feel about your company. You are creating constraints about what can and cannot be used. Officially these are called ‘brand guidelines’ but they really are an ingredient list and recipe for everything that will be created about your company.
After you’ve written it all down, anytime you are ready to create something- you’ll know exactly where to start. You have all of the right ingredients (colours/fonts/shapes/style) and the recipe (headline fonts, accent colours etc). No matter if its a social post or signage, you can use the same ingredients and same recipe. Instead of cooking from scratch each time, you’ll be (as my grandmother used to say) ‘cooking with gas’.
You’ll have the confidence to stop holding back
My husband and I have been Chef’s Plate customers for years now. We’ve been on a nice routine where the box shows up on Tuesdays, just when we’re too busy with work and life mid week to want to think about dinner. We’ve learned how to cook familiar things in different ways (broiling broccoli is a must try!) and we’ve even branched out to try things we’d never heard of (the Dal is one of our winter favorites!).
Having a good set of branding guidelines and a brand that makes sense takes away decision fatigue and gives you confidence. It allows you to stop holding back on social or from creating signage or business cards or product labels that you need to move your business forward. It can be hard to set aside the time and budget to get it done right but when you do, your confidence will soar.
Done like dinner
It’s 7:00pm on a Tuesday. You’re sitting in front of Canva trying to create a few new social posts for next month. Lucky for you, you know exactly what you are doing. You pick out a few templates that match your logo shape, apply your colours, change the text to your fonts, and pick out a photo that matches your style- boom- you’re done.
You’re happy, you created this yourself and you are confident that it is communicating exactly what you want. Time for a post dinner glass of wine.
Download my free branding guide template and DM me for a Chef’s Plate free code for new subscribers, I have many.
