Define the goals of your design

- [Instructor] Have you ever been so eager to get started with a design that you don't think twice about how it should support your brand strategy? Well, we let the excitement or the rush to complete the graphic take over us, and it becomes the leader of our content. And at times, we get so excited that we want to tell our story in one tiny graphic because we don't want people to miss out, and it becomes incredibly overwhelming because we don't have that intention. But when we start by defining what type of content we need to support our brand, we'll be more intentional about our design's purpose, and later we avoid time sucking content blocks trying to reinvent the wheel because we didn't define it from the beginning, and we feel that we need to recreate it every single time because we're not gaining excitement from our brand and people aren't really connecting with our content. When I build brands for clients, we'll make a list of what type of content that they will be using for their brand in our strategy session, and this helps us focus on the value over pretty graphics. So what we typically do is we define values. We define a list of what type of templates they need to support their essential content. These could be general brand awareness, sales announcements, product information. You can also have quotes, testimonials, video covers. These all vary depending on your brand needs, but it gives you an idea of what you can list so that you can create branded templates using this idea. Once you define the goals of your content, and design, you can get strategic about how you incorporate your color psychology for your brand content. Anytime I post content about one of my LinkedIn Learning courses, I use branded templates with a specific blue hue to raise a trust value, and leadership association. Now these are very intentional, and they look cohesive so that way as I am posting content about my courses, people know that this content is reflecting my course content, and not the type of branding work that I generally do. When you are strategic, and align your graphics to specific brand goals, you don't just speed up your content creation, you build equity with brand consistency.