How to Choose a Look & Feel for your New Business

Starting something new is a chance to build what you have been envisioning and pining for, possibly even for years. But it’s also a chance to set off on a rambling course of overcomplicated and arbitrary decision making that wastes a lot of energy. If you’re working with a team, this impact will be multiplied as you try to give everyone a chance to speak their minds even while knowing that you can only choose one thing in the end. Democracy is not the answer. The design process is the answer.

Establishing a look and feel for your company might seem like an easy thing to do when you first start. There’s so many free and cheap resources at your disposal nowadays. But accessibility to design assets isn’t the problem you need to solve. What you’re trying to solve with creating a look and feel for your company is to get more business. That is the only problem to solve in business when it really comes down to it. Your look and feel is intended to attract people who believe what you believe so you can rally together.

Throughout the course of designing your look and feel, you will encounter thousands of decisions like “What do we name our company?” “What should our URL be?” “What colors and fonts should we use?” And on and on.

Today we’ll talk about a few of these things, and identify some of the hidden benefits of getting your look and feel right the first time.

What is a Company’s “Look & Feel”

First things first. When we say “look & feel” we’re really talking about visual identity design. This includes your colors, fonts, and general aesthetic that is used in any marketing collateral or products you make. It can also extend into physical spaces, sounds (music or sound effects), animations, video, and even smells (think fresh baked bread or the aggressive Abercrombie & Fitch cologne fog hovering throughout their store).

The Common Mistake to Avoid When Choosing your Look & Feel

Your business’s design is not about expressing yourself. Art is for self-expression. Design is a tool for business. It is intended to get you and your audience from point A to point B. It gets people through your virtual or physical door and invites them to stay for a long time by making them feel at home.

If you think of design as a tool to build your company instead of seeing your look and feel as primarily an art project, you will already have a leg up against your competitors because many businesses fail to fully leverage this tool from the very beginning and miss out on its advantages. Not you—you’re too smart for that.

How to Design your Look & Feel

1. Design with the end in mind. What do you want the outcome of your look and feel to be? What kind of people do you want to cater to? What other companies do they trust or enjoy? What do you want to be known for?
2. You don’t have to start from scratch. Instead of digging into your logo design straight away and reciting some unhelpful drivel that ultimately ends with the phrase, “I’ll know it when I see it,” start with a list of words. Describe how you want to be perceived as a company by the people you want to buy from you. Narrow down your list to only 3–5 adjectives.
   You can’t be everything, so you need to limit your list to 3–5 words that can co-exist together without contradicting each other. You can’t be sleek, high-brow, friendly, down-to-earth and rebellious all at once. That’s confusing. People won’t know what to do with you. They need a way to quickly identify if you’re interesting to them and then put you in a mental category they have some familiarity with and can easily remember. When in doubt, be memorable.
3. Put together some mood boards. Think of these as a collection of curated images that exhibit a certain theme. Mood boards aren’t just for teenage girls and moms on Pinterest. Tech bros can use them too. So can restauranteurs, business coaches, and really, anyone who’s making anything. Mood boards are the fastest way to make your intangible ideas into a tangible one. If you’re working with a team, mood boards are what help you all know what you mean when you say you want “a clean, minimalist vibe.” You can actually point to images of what you’re describing, which helps everyone get on the same page. (Also, a bit of a side note—everyone seems to want “clean, minimalist vibes” these days. Try to be a little more adventurous. Your look and feel should help you stand out, not blend in.) If you’re feeling ambitious and want the best results, make three different mood boards that all have different vibes you might be interested in pursuing. Pinterest is a great, free, sharable tool to make mood boards lickety-split.
4. Narrow down your choices. Once you’ve studied these images and determined what it is that actually creates the effect you’re after, put the best images together on one board. Seeing these 8–10 images together should do a good job of honing in on that ideal look & feel.
5. Get context. You have competitors. Who are they? What are they? You want to look different from them. Gather images of their website, collateral, logos and social media presence and compare them to your new curated mood board. Do your mood board images stand out, or do they look an awful lot like your competitors’ images? Look at colors, fonts, names, photos, illustrations, icons and marks. Be sure that the look you’ve assembled won’t position your company as a copycat or wannabe brand.
6. Find and test fonts. The internet has no shortage of resources about fonts and color palettes. You can easily test out free fonts on Google Fonts, or any number of alternative font libraries, like FontSpring and FontSquirrel. Free fonts tend to have their flaws, but if you’re dead set on “free,” I recommend using Google Fonts because they are readily available in many other products you may use later on, and they actually give you good ideas about how to pair fonts to create a more polished look and feel. You can test out the way a font looks with your business name by typing it into the box at the top of the page and using the filters to find fonts that work for you. Look at your mood boards for inspiration. Are most of the images using fonts that have serifs—little feet on the ends of every letter? Or, do they have a clean sans serif (no feet) look to them? Click on the fonts that match the look you want, and then scroll to the bottom of your selected font’s page to see what Google recommends you pair it with.
7. Choose your color palette. Colors are tricky. They won’t look the same on all of your devices, or your customers’ devices, because every screen will be calibrated a little differently. You also need to know how to print colors that will match how they look on screen. And, if you’re ordering swag or signage, you will also need to find professional blends for the colors that match your colors. Added to the complexity is choosing colors that will match each other and provide enough visual contrast throughout your materials. An easy way to go about this is to search for color palettes that evoke a certain feel. You can find some selection on Pinterest as a starting point by searching for “color palette” and some words to describe the vibe you want to create, or the type of business you’re in. Alternatively, you can upload an image of a brand from your mood board and go to https://hexcolor.co/image-to-colors and let them extract 5 colors for you. This could give you a good starting point.

Once you’ve established which fonts and colors you’d like to use, stick with them. Use the same ones for everything you create. Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Canva, Pages, MailChimp…all these tools that you probably already use to promote your business—they all have spaces for you to plug in your fonts and colors so you can use this as a theme without having to style your content every time you sit down to create content.

Not only will you be able to create a consistent look and feel for your viewers so they recognize you amidst the clutter of everyday life, you will also be able to save oodles of time by automating your look and feel.

To skip a lot of this work, take my brand personality quiz at bit.ly/LeanPersonalityQuiz and download the guide that corresponds to your results. Inside, you’ll find brand examples to help you hone your messaging, as well as font and color suggestions to create your look and feel.