A brand board showcases your organization’s brand in one impactful, visual package. We love searching for brand boards on Pinterest and getting inspired by all of the ways that organizations use visual branding and consistent messaging to help clients make sense of their purpose. Branding is equal parts design and content.

To make the most of your online potential, we strongly suggest that your organization create both a Brand Board for Design (which we explain in this post) and a Brand Board for Vision. At Untold Content, we call these Brand Design Boards and Brand Vision Boards.

In this post, we’ll discuss the five elements of a brand board for design, share an example, and provide a free downloadable brand board template you can use to kick-start your visual brand design.

As part of your brand journey, you should also check out our advice for creating a Brand Vision Board. And if you’re ready to take it to the next level, check out our content marketing services and book a content strategy session with our expert team!

The Purpose of a Brand Board

Internal teams use brand boards anytime they are designing a graphic, document, social media post, or template that speaks to your brand. Your collaborators and clients should be able to recognize your brand anytime they see one of your social media campaigns or documents. Here at Untold Content, we are careful to store our brand board in a shared internal drive so that all team members can pull it up when they need to make sure to use the exact brand colors or correct fonts. Even better: Create a high-quality printed version of your brand design and display it at the office.

The key take-away is that a brand board creates consistency across all branded assets. It is a one-page document that provides internal visual communication to help everyone understand the look, tone, and feel of your brand. If you need some inspiration for brand visuals then take a look at the best design campaigns of 2019. This will give you an impression of some big companies’ branding visuals and give you some ideas for your own company’s design campaigns. Once you have made some creative decisions then you can start your brand board.

The Five Elements of a Brand Board

Brand boards can contain many different things. The most important to include are any logos or brand marks, the color palette and the typography, because once they are in order then you have enough of a brand identity to start making marketing materials, such as business cards, leaflets, and booklets. Most brand boards include the following five elements:

Logo Design, Logo Variations, and Brand Marks

Featuring your logos in one location helps your staff and stakeholders know where to find the most up-to-date company logo. All approved variations of your logo should be featured. If there’s space on this one-page board, you can also include your brand marks, such as the branded full-text version of your company name or the look of your logo icon standing on its own.

Color Palette

These are the colors you will use throughout all organizational communications, from your marketing materials to your website. Include on your brand board the specific RGB or CMYK numbers for your colors so that all organizational stakeholders use the exact right colors.

Typography

Using consistent fonts helps create a clear memory of your brand among your clients and leads. Pick two fonts that pair well together and identify which will be the heading font and which will be for copy/paragraph text.

Brand Chemistry

This element is unique to our brand board and isn’t something that’s traditionally included. All content strategies should harken to your brand chemistry, which is sort of like the “character type” of your brand. Read more about how to identify your brand chemistry in our Content Strategy series.

Mood Board

This section of your brand board is for creative play. What images would you like to feature across your content marketing materials and communications? How can you capture your organization’s culture in a visual way? Post images that you want to feature on your website and other communications to inspire your company’s culture.

Brand Board Example

Take a look at our brand board example below, which showcases our brand color hex codes, typography, and mood board: