The primary difference between how teams currently view a brand board and how to properly use a brand board is in the way that designers and marketers communicate with each other about visual identities.
As an example, designers refer to brand boards, mood boards, and style guides as a single entity, whereas they should view them as separate instruments that serve different purposes.
The Difference Between Mood Boards and Brand Boards
A mood board is designed for exploratory purposes. It includes images, concepts, and textures to establish an overall impression. Initially, mood boards are very chaotic, containing a lot of content that has yet to be distilled into something "clean." The two primary goals for creating a mood board are to generate excitement for the project and to create a visual touchpoint that can be referenced later.
The primary goal of creating a brand board is to help designers and marketers lock in their design decisions and create a visual reference that can be used for current and future design projects. A brand board's purpose is to provide design team members with the exact information they need to create assets for both the immediate and long-term future. A brand board only contains finalized elements, so there is no room for exploration. On the other hand, a style guide is a much larger guide designed for regulatory compliance and managing tone of voice and legal usage.
For web developers to effectively execute the mood board transfer process, the mood board must also be separated from the actual development. The developers require detailed information on HEX code numbers, font weights, and measurements, as well as the physical dimensions and spacing within the mood board when it is initially handed off to them.
Failure to provide this important technical information on the initial mood board will cause an extensive number of revisions to occur due to the lack of visual consistency associated with the brand logo. To alleviate these problems, you need to ensure that you provide and consolidate all visual decisions on a single page in properly developed software.
Platforms for Creating Brand Boards
When analyzing quality brand board examples that are going to be utilised in the production process, you need to find the best tools to do the job. The operational parameters and requirements of different teams can often dictate what type of platform is most appropriate for that team and the result they want to achieve. Below are the top 6 platforms in use by businesses today to produce and host their production-grade brand boards.
1. Figma
Figma is the platform of choice for most of the new-age design handoff processes because it provides the ability to quickly create links between all assets and publish technical information about those assets in addition to live links. When a brand board is developed in Figma, it is an active digital asset, not a dead PDF file stored in an email folder. The developers will be able to pull CSS data directly from the design canvas in real time.
As such, most B2B SaaS companies rely on Figma to accurately document and preserve the exact typography combinations they need to maintain throughout the transition of a design to code, ensuring they never have to modify line height, letter spacing, or padding as they move from design to code.
2. Canva
Canva provides a service that is geared toward providing a quick service to meet a very specific and large operational need for the many individuals that serve marketing operations managers, small marketing agencies, and virtual assistants who perform daily social media marketing functions. The many attributes of Canva allow marketing operations managers to create rapidly and effectively from a pre-made library of thousands of templates.
However, the professional designers that create marketing content will often require a far more robust program than those that can produce quick marketing execution. A strong Canva brand board locks primary logos, brand colors, and submarks into the platform so that freelance creators do not accidentally use outdated identity files.
3. Milanote
Milanote is a highly visual project management tool that has grown to fill the void between an initial mood board and a final brand board.
Agencies often use Milanote as a way of presenting visual decisions to clients in an infinite-canvas format. This enables them to show how a technical colour palette will look next to actual applications (e.g., mockups of the new identity on a header of a mobile website) before the client has approved it.
4. Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Illustrator remains a must-have for branding when printed material is required (e.g., product packaging, billboards, and booths at trade shows). Digital-only tools, especially those that are web-based, typically fail when attempting to create large format prints.
Illustrator utilizes sophisticated techniques to achieve precise Pantone matching and complicated CMYK colour codes. Print vendors require this level of accuracy for the brand board exported from Adobe Illustrator to guarantee that physical products will match to the brand identity digitally without the risk of incurring costly printing errors.
5. Kittl
Kittl is quickly developing a reputation as a specialty design tool that is specifically tailored to highly stylized, illustration-heavy branded elements, with a major focus on e-commerce and retail merchandise as well as bold and unique consumer brands. Kittl's brand boards often emphasise custom typography combinations and complicated vector icons.
The ease of creating brand boards with Kittl, and having a well-established brand identity as a result of it, also enables independent founders and boutique agencies to create a striking visual footprint. At the same time, it enables them to keep all of their necessary core assets organised without incurring the costs of an enterprise-level design budget.
6. PicMonkey
PicMonkey is a user-friendly image editing tool that appeals to independent artists and small eCommerce websites. Although it doesn’t offer developers the advanced features available from Figma, PicMonkey does provide an excellent means of enhancing digital photos, as well as allowing for quick and easy branding and marketing.
The Minimum Viable Brand Board (MVBB)
The Minimum Viable Brand Board (MVBB) eliminates the need for lengthy, 50-page brand guidelines that only end up being wasted efforts. It also alleviates the burden of decision fatigue that comes with creating comprehensive brand guidelines.
The current way of doing things is to create a one-page cheat sheet that contains all of the information a creator, a developer, or a marketer needs to accomplish a job and nothing else. There is no added value in giving someone a long, boring guide to read in order to get important, essential information. When creating a brand board, it is crucial to provide a board that contains the essential sections.
A Logo and the Variants
One logo will not satisfy the needs of your business. A production-grade board should display the primary logo, a horizontal version of the logo for dense web pages, a stacked version for vertical use, a simple square-shaped social media icon, and a monochromatic version (black or white). A design that only shows the gradient-colored logo will not work for printing black-and-white invoices or stamps on physical products.
A Full Palette of Colors
Showing a blue square is not enough to meet a developer’s needs. Rather, a real brand board would identify five to eight colors that make up the brand's palette. For each color, precise technical information would be provided. Each color must have its HEX code for websites, RGB code for digital displays, and CMYK value for print as standard practice. If the company sells physical products, it must also provide its exact Pantone codes as well.
Typography Names and Font Weights
Font names and font weights are essential components of every brand's identity. As such, every brand board must have at least two or three sets of typography pairings. In addition, designers must specify the weights of each typeface to be used in specific applications.
For example, "Use Helvetica" is not an acceptable way to provide design instruction. "Use Helvetica Bold for H1 headings, and Helvetica Regular for body text" provides the designer with clear and precise guidance on how to achieve their design objectives, thus reducing the potential for mistakes.
Real-World Application Mockups
The primary problem with standard brand board examples is that they lack actual proof of application in the real world. While a color palette may look great in a circle against a white background, it may not work in a complex, multi-dimensional form such as a website. Therefore, brand boards should include a minimum of one or two examples of application mockups.
A simple mobile website header or social media tile can prove the effectiveness of a brand's color palette, typography, and logo when used together as intended.
To ensure consistent quality of a brand board:
Every HEX, RGB, and CMYK color code must be listed on the brand board.
Minimum logo size and minimum clear-space rules must be established.
Every typography name must be followed by the corresponding weight for use in headings and in the body of text.
Real-world examples of two application mockups must be provided.
Using Brand Boards for Artificial Intelligence
Branding in the age of artificial intelligence is rapidly changing. Brand boards are becoming less about serving the needs of human designers and are becoming more about providing brands with the ability to create their own brand identity with artificial intelligence.
The brand and visual reference sheets that some companies now utilize as artificial intelligence reference sheets and automation tools are now considered an integral part of the development process by content teams. Content teams using generative AI now generate daily collateral. If content teams do not have a firmly secured brand board, then their AI imagery prompts will generate arbitrary and unusable visuals, as well as extremely off-brand visuals.
Having an established visual reference board allows a marketer to provide very specific and unique colour identifiers (HEX codes), style rules, and lighting parameters into an AI-generated imagery prompt. This way, the end result for the machine will be imagery that is consistent and identifiable as part of the brand rather than generic art.
In addition to using AI-generated imagery, marketing teams are now leveraging no-code website development tools. In handing a digital project off to a no-code website builder, the brand board can be viewed as being the "token" to the no-code developer. The developer can take the core HEX codes and globally utilized typeface sizes directly from the board and input them into the development tool as parameters for the design system.
Without a clear one-page visual reference board, the process of setting up these global design tokens would likely take a substantial amount of time (i.e., hours) of guess work among the developer, marketing team, and other involved parties to agree on the correct parameters.
Conclusion: Lock Your Decisions
Endless searches on visual inspiration are a trap. Brands and companies spend an extreme amount of their time researching competitors and their designs when they should be locking down their identity and branding.
The brand board is not to be confused with a piece of art or artwork. The brand board is a working reference tool. It was developed to stop costly mistakes, improve employee training, and reduce unending revisions from outside vendors and freelancers. Reviewing accurate brand board examples will stop these costly mistakes and keep your marketing aligned.
Visual reference sheets that lack specified technical details are regarded as irrelevant. They should be used as technical references and not as design mood boards. Creating a one-page technical reference sheet with all the visual decisions clearly outlined will increase brand consistency across all aspects of the business.
Executive QA: Fixing Brand Handoff Bottlenecks
What effect does not providing a CMYK profile have on printed materials?
Failure to include CMYK color profiles on a brand board means that anything printed from the brand board will be of poor quality. RGB and HEX colors are digital, based on mixed light, permitting very bright and vivid colors. All printers utilize ink colors (cyan, magenta, yellow, K, or black).
The final printed product will typically look dull, muddy, and out of place if a commercial printer receives an RGB file and prints it without verifying and converting the RGB values to CMYK. Having CMYK color profiles locked into a formal brand board means that prior to spending any money on physical goods, the digital department and printer will be using the same specifications.
When is the best time for a team to shift from a brand board to a style guide?
A one-page brand board is the preferred tool for everyday execution, such as social media creation and basic website updates. Only once a company grows and scaling to a size where its brand voice, legal usage, and advanced marketing rules become significant risks is it necessary to move to a detailed and comprehensive style guide.
For example, if your company is worldwide and franchised, a style guide will dictate to all established franchises the specific guidelines regarding photography and tone of voice. However, if a freelance artist is building a landing page today for your company, a one-page brand board provides you with the faster, easier alternative to do it.
What is the most frequent mistake when transferring visual assets to freelancers?
The most common and costly mistake is to send a mood board to a freelancer instead of sending them a brand board. Any time a freelance designer receives a mood board that is comprised of inspirational photos without any of the technical spec information, they are left to guess.
They will guess fonts, derive color codes from photos, and scale logos appropriately. This makes it extremely difficult and time-consuming for the internal team to correct even minor visual errors. The best approach to correct this is to never provide inspiration; only provide technical specifications.
How do static brand boards coincide with dynamic AI prompting?
Generative AI needs to have specific constraints to produce valid corporate assets. A static brand board contains the exact text inputs required to manage AI production.
For instance, rather than requesting an AI tool to generate a "professional blue graphic," a marketer will refer to the brand board and issue the prompt "generate a flat vector illustration using HEX #1A73E8 with clean lines and minimalist styling." The role of the brand board changes from being a human-based reference tool to becoming the exact data source to input into a machine tool.