Now to make your newly selected name LOOK gorgeous! Don’t panic if you don’t have any visual arts skills, because guess what, I have none either! But I do have a fancy trick up my sleeve called Canva. Canva is a free website full of templates and amazing graphics for logos, business cards, social media posts, and more. In fact, I made my account and my logo for Joy from scratch, for free!
Some special features of Canva include:
- Use one of countless free customizable templates and graphics! You can change the text, colors, pictures, format, and anything you can dream up to make it your own
- You can start with a blank slate
- Invite friends, family or colleagues to collaborate with you on designs
- Have your graphics printed
- Share your graphics to social media platforms
- The ability to upgrade to a personalized branding kit
- You can purchase individual graphics (instead of upgrading your whole account) for mere cents if there is one specific premium design you love
Frankly though, it’s easy and quickest to use a free template you like, make it your own, and if you are working on a MAC, just download it and drop it onto your desktop. Now you can drag and drop that into anything, or airdrop it to an iPhone to include it in your social media efforts.
Consider your color palette:
The colors you use are important for branding. For Joy From Scratch, you’ll notice little pops of purple throughout the site, because purple is the color of my parent organization. Now, even though I’m NOT the parent organization, I just donate the money I raise to it, people can associate my initiative, Operation Joy, with the Children’s Cancer Association thanks to BRANDING! For example, this is the CCA Logo that MY logo was inspired by:
If you don’t have a parent organization, you operate fully independently of anything else, consider colors you might associate with your cause or the message you want to convey. For example, pink is often used to represent Breast Cancer Awareness, or purple is sometimes used for Alzheimer’s awareness, the same way red is often seen as the color of organizations focused on heart disease. But the color for your brand doesn’t have to be associated with pre-existing ideas. You could just use a color to connote something, like yellow or orange for hope or happiness! Or maybe you’re all about keeping the ocean clean, then you could consider any shade of blue and/ or green! Maybe the color you pick just looks good and is your favorite. There’s no right or wrong way to decide, but just make sure the color scheme is cohesive with your cause and message.
Consider design elements:
When selecting your graphics on canva, also try to keep the imagery aligned with your cause or what skill you’re monetizing. For example, my Operation Joy logo has a cupcake on it, since my original fundraiser was a socially distant bake sale. It also has a bursting heart, which is a spin off of the CCA logo itself! This way I’ve associated myself with my parent organization via the imagery AND the purple color. Here’s the logo so you can check it out for yourself:
So not only have I branded my logo, but I’ve also branded my PRODUCT! Check out what the cupcakes I sold looked like:
Cohesive, right!?
So to recap, the things to consider when building a well branded logo are the connotation of COLORS, the IMAGERY, any association with an ORGANIZATION, and a connection to your PRODUCT or method of FUNDRAISING.
Once you’ve settled on a logo, move next to PATH #2, STEP #6: Fundraising: How to Actually Make Money
Joy From Scratch! 