5 Ways to Brand Your Small Business With Envato Elements

1.2 Branding Your Small Business

[NOISE] In this lesson, we'll explore Envato Elements and discuss how to strategically select a logo, font, a stationery set, a website template, and a presentation template. The goal is to represent your business as professionally as possible without spending a ton of time doing it. And also to use items that work well together. You can go ahead and head over to elements.envato.com and log in if you already have an account. For the sake of example, we're going to use the fictitious company name Splash for this course. And we'll say that Splash is a marketing agency. As you can see, there's quite a bit available here on Envato Elements. It's very helpful to have everything you need in one place. Let's take look around at the basic navigation. If you head over to the upper left hand corner, you'll see this BROWSE button, and if you hover your mouse over, you will see all the different sections. There's also a handy search bar next to that. And also, if you select All Items, the drop-down appears and you can search within a given section. Let's go ahead and search for a logo for our fictitious company. A logo is an important piece to your company's identity, and will set the tone for the rest of the branding items that you select. So let's pick out a logo design that works well with a modern and clean approach, and can fit in effortlessly with the other items. So let's head down to Graphic Templates, using the All Items drop-down menu at the top of the page, and then head over to the search bar. Because our fictious company has the name Splash, Lets look for a logo template that utilizes a water or drop graphic. In fact, let's go ahead and type in water drop logo directly into the search bar to see what comes up. You can hit the search icon, and you see we actually get quite a few results for water drop logo. And they have various styles that we could possibly use, all of them high quality. Also, take note of the filter section on the left. You can refine your search results by different categories, color spaces, even orientation. In searching your results, if you determine that you don't need to see these filters, you can simply click the Hide Filters button at the top. And later on, if you decide that you would like to utilize these filters, you can select Show Filters. Now, looking through these logos, let's select something that's clean, and modern, and that will more easily pair with other items that we end up working with. Right off the bat, this drop logo template catches my eye. Let's go ahead and select it and get more details. In here we have a preview of the logo. If you scroll down, it'll tell you the application supported, which in this case is Adobe Illustrator. And also the different file types that come with the downloadable package. They also give you information about the color space and more. On the left hand side, it highlights some features about this logo template. One of the main ones being that's 100% vector editable. And if you're logged into Envato Elements, you'll see additional previews of this logo. So if we go ahead and select one, it shows you on a different level scheme. You can use the arrows on the left or right to navigate through these previews, and you can also use the icons in the upper left-hand corner of the page. So as you see, this is a clean, stylish drop logo design that fits in many color schemes. To exit out of the preview mode, you can select the x in the upper right-hand corner. And then let's go ahead and download this logo. Now, in downloading this asset, you have a couple different options. If you have a definite project that you'd like to use it for, you would use the project use option. And it gives you a license to use the file for one specific project. And then you would give it a project name. Now, if you're not ultimately sure that you're going to end up using this logo template, you can select Trial Use. And this allows you to download the file and test out some ideas. Now, if you do need an ongoing license, do make sure you register it for project use later on. So under Trial Use, we'll select Download For Trial Use. At that point, it downloads it onto your computer in a zip file. Now that we've selected a logo, let's find a heading font to use for our stationery and our business cards and other items for our business. So using the All Items option at the top of the page, we're going to select it and then let's go into Fonts. Now, for this particular business, lets look for a font that is bold and round. So lets type in bold and round into the search bar. And we see quite a few options that again pop up. Now, we're looking for something that is clean and simple, and also comes in multiple weights, which will allow us to get more use of it on our business cards, our stationery and wherever else we want to use it. And right off the bat, the CornerOne type face catches my eye. So let's go ahead and select that one, and scrolling through the details, we see that it says right off the bat, it comes in two styles, bold and regular. And again, on the right-hand side it gives you more details about this font. And let's take a look at the preview images. So here we have our regular and our bold weights. It's a very clean font, it's not distracting, and it's professional. Moving on to the next preview item, it shows you a sentence, which is very helpful in determining if this is the font for you. We'll go ahead and exit out of this preview mode using the x in the upper right-hand corner. And let's go ahead and download this font. Again, we're gonna use it for trial use. Now that we have a logo and a heading font, let's find a website template to use for our business. We're going to head over to the All Items drop down and select Web Templates. Let's type in multi purpose, just to see what comes up. And here we have quite a few options. Notice how professional all of them are, and they're suitable for a wide range of businesses. Let's go ahead and select the Wander multi-purpose template on the right hand side here. We'll select one of the preview images. And looking through these, it gives you some examples of pages laid out with this web template. And as you can see, it's quite professional and modern. We'll exit out of the preview mode. Scrolling down, we'll get more details about this website template, including the fact that includes 100 plus fully responsive files, and you can build multi-page and one-page websites. And on the right-hand side, they list the different file types included with these website template package. We'll go ahead and select DOWNLOAD and use the trial use option. Now let's look for a stationery set, which should include at least a business card, letterhead, stationery and a folder design. It's very helpful to have all of these print assets ready to go. Let's head over to the All Items drop-down and select Graphic Templates. Now, we're looking for something minimal and modern. So let's go right ahead and type in minimal modern stationery into the search bar. And browsing through these results, let's select something that will be easy to edit and is also clean and versatile. And actually, in the very top row, right in the middle, we're gonna use the Mosai Minimal Stationery Corporate Identity template. We'll go ahead and select it. And if you scroll down, you'll see that it includes a business card, letterhead, an envelope, and a presentation folder design. And the application supported is Adobe Illustrator. And looking at the preview images on the right-hand side, we'll go ahead and select those, let's take a look at this template in action. As you can see it's clean, it's simple, we can replace the template colors with our company colors and logo, and here are the items laid out together. We'll go ahead and exit out of the preview mode and select DOWNLOAD and download it for trial use in this case. Now, in browsing Envato Elements, if you find an item that you definitely wanna use for your business, remember, make sure you download it for project use and give it a project name. Now, finally, let's choose a presentation template for PowerPoint. This will be handy to have if you'll need to make presentations for your business. So let's head up to the All Items drop-down and this time, let's select Presentation Templates. And we'll just type in clean to see what comes up. We're looking for something clean and modern. Also take note that if you use KeyNote instead of PowerPoint, you can refine your search by selecting the KeyNote option on the left-hand side. And let's go ahead and select Clean Presentation, the very first result. Right off the bat, you can see it includes 50 slides, free fonts, it's fully animated, and a 16:9 ratio. And utilizing the preview images on the right-hand side, let's go ahead and click those and take a look at what some of these slides look like. It is very clean and it will fit well with the various types of businesses. So we'll go ahead and exit out of the preview mode. And when you're done looking at all of the details we'll select DOWNLOAD. And we'll download it for trial use. After you've downloaded your items, you can always revisit those items by heading over to the upper right-hand corner of your account and selecting your account name, and then selecting MY DOWNLOADS. And here's a handy list of everything that you've downloaded. Once you've downloaded all of your items, make sure and save them to a safe location on your computer. From there, you can go ahead and customize them in your applications of choice. Using pre-built templates can really save you a lot of time while giving you a professional, polished look. Let's take a look at how the branding items we've chosen would work together for our fictitious company, Splash. As you can see, all of the items work together in a way that shows off how professional this company is, while also building customer trust. And that brings us to the end of this Coffee Break course. I hope you learned how effectively and quickly you can brand your own business using Envato Elements. Now go out and brand your business.