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Brand and Be Seen: Jewelry Maker
Brand and Be Seen is a series of blog posts offering brand style guides for fictional brands to inspire you to create your own beautiful brand. Feel free to use the font combinations and color palettes as you wish. Happy branding!
About the Brand
Nora Luella creates custom heirloom jewelry. The kind of jewelry that mothers buy for their daughters to mark special occasions in their lives.
Nora wants her customers to know that she understands their desire to document and honor their connection with their daughters. She wants them to feel warmth radiating off her branding.
She’s infused her own personality into her branding. Her brand colors remind her of grandmother’s favorite bracelet and the texture she’s chosen reminds her of the leaves falling from her favorite childhood tree.
Details:
Logo: Great Vibes
Tagline: Josefin Sans
Colors: #f87f66, #ba3e34, #a49294, #b7d1ca, #fecfa5
Texture: Photoshop custom shape
Learn how to choose fonts and colors to best tell your brand story and build a website to match in The Brand Workshop or work one-on-one with Christie Halmick of Jewels Branch to brand your business and website.
Finding Images for Your Brand: 5 Free for Commercial Use Stock Image Sites
Free for Commercial Use Stock Image Sites
In earlier posts we talked about Creative Commons images and stock photography sites. Now we’re moving on to some additional resources for free photos you can use in commercial (for your business) projects.
Instead of using Creative Commons licensing, each of the sites below have their own licensing and usage rules. Licensing can even vary by photo within these sites, so always check the licenses and usage rights on each images you plan to use. Pay close attention to attribution requirements.
Pros and Cons of Using Free For Commercial Use Images
Pros of Using Free For Commercial Use Images
1) Free.
2) Lots of variety of images.
Cons of Using Free For Commercial Use Images
1) License restrictions can be prohibitive.
2) License sometime require attribution (which can clutter up designs).
3) Licenses sometimes require contacting photographer for permission (takes time).
4) Limited resolution and size.
5 Free for Commercial Use Stock Image Sites to Explore
Stock.xchng
Free Range Stock
Morgue File
Free Pixels
Photogen
Choosing just the right photos and illustrations can play a huge role in how your brand feels to your ideal clients, and how you feel about your brand. In future posts I’ll provide resources for public domain images and free illustration/icon sites.
Then, I’ll circle back and talk about how to select the best types and styles of images for your brand. If you need help figuring out what images would best fit your brand there’s a step-by-step discovery process in the Online Branding Basics course which is included in all subscriptions to Jewels Branch.
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Finding Images for Your Brand: Creative Commons
Creative Commons (CC) Licensed Images
Let’s take a closer look at how you can use free Creative Commons licensed images in your brand’s creative projects.
Creative Commons allows artists and photographers to choose how to license their work for public use. There are many variations of the CC license: from Attribution (which allows you to use their work for just about anything, as long as you give them credit) to Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND (which allows you to share their work, but not alter it or use it commercially, so you can’t use it in your business branding) and many more licenses in between.
You can read all about the different license types here:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
!!!! When you find a CC photo or image that you want to use always check to verify that it is in fact CC licensed. It should clearly say which license it grants. Then, you can follow the rules of that particular license. Pay close attention to attribution requirements and commercial vs. non-commercial use limitations. If your design is being created for your business blog it is a commercial project.
Pros and Cons of Using Creative Commons Images
Pros of using Creative Commons Images
1) Free.
2) Lots of variety of images.
Cons of using Creative Commons Images
1) License restrictions can be prohibitive for commercial use.
2) Limited resolution and size.
3) Adding attributions adds clutter to designs.
Search for Creative Commons images here:
Creative Commons
Flickr
Compfight (Has a WordPress plugin to make it easier to use images on your blog, too!)
Photo Pin
Pixel Perfect Digital free stock photos that are CC licensed
Choosing just the right photos and illustrations can play a huge role in how your brand feels to your ideal clients, and how you feel about your brand.
Last week I shared some resources for finding stock photos and illustrations. In future posts I’ll provided resources for free for commercial use sites, public domain images, and free illustration/icon sites.
Then, I’ll circle back and talk about how to select the best types and styles of images for your brand. If you need help figuring out what images would best fit your brand there’s a step-by-step discovery process in the Online Branding Basics course which is included in all subscriptions to Jewels Branch.