The Key To Brand Consistency

Hopefully by now you’ve made a website for your band/artistry as suggested in an earlier article. If you haven’t checked that out yet, go back and take a look! In this article, we’ll take a look into how to create a recognizable, simple, and consistent theme/brand.

If it was the first time you’ve created a website, chances are it doesn’t look that great absolutely no offense!!). No worries! Everyone starts somewhere; you probably don’t want to see the first stages of my website 😂.

Through making many drafts of my website over the years, learning through trial and error, and scavenging for research, here’s a few key things I found to have in your website, facebook page, merch, and more.

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Color Palette

The number one problem of why your website probably doesn’t look that good is there is no color palette. Every large brand sticks to a few colors to become and stay recognizable. It makes for a much cleaner and intuitive look, and creates a mood for your audience that represents who you are as a brand!

Try to choose 2-3 colors to stick to that portray a certain mood. Fretless Studios for example, chose black, blue, and white/grey. For the most part, it’s pretty dark to give it a bold and sleek look. These colors chosen are usually used for things that are modern or futuristic. That is the sort of direction I’d like to take with Fretless Studios; leave all of the old processes behind and find new and more innovative ways to do things.

The color black portrays luxury and glamour, white shows cleanliness, and blue represents knowledge, security, and trust. The blue lends itself well to the name “Fretless” because if you don’t fret, you’re trusting and secure in knowledgeable hands.

Try to look up some colors and the moods they portray that you would like your brand to be about! The big thing here is consistency; so the more connections you can make within your brand, the better and easier it will be to stay on brand.

Font Palette

This one is super important on your website and merch. You may not have control over it on other websites, but definitely have a font palette wherever you can. Just like colors, you’ll want to stay consistent with fonts. It helps with determining what kind of paragraph it is, say like a description or quote.

You can make your website more intuitive by making the fonts for buttons a specific font that only shows up when there is a button to press. Definitely stick to a few fonts and font sizes just like in your color palette, because it will make your website more consistent, clean, and intuitive!

Generally you’ll want a header font, title font, and a paragraph font to keep things neat and tidy. The header font can be super eye catching, the title font can be a little less eye catching but still enough to catch the attention of someone reading under the header. You’ll want to choose a title font so it’s easy for the reader to skim through and find what they’re looking for, and the paragraph font just needs to be easily readable!

Make those font sizes appropriate for what they are so the page is easy to locate whatever you need to find. Sort of like an upside down pyramid; have the top of the page (header) the biggest, middle (title) a tad smaller, and the bottom (paragraph) the smallest but still easily readable.

For Artists

I’d say for artists (bands, musicians) branding isn’t as important for themselves as it is for their album or single. Mind you, you still need to be recognizable and consistent with how you show yourselves, but your albums and singles need to have their own branding while also supporting the overall/encompassing brand that is the artist.

As the young kids would say these days, make your big release (album, single, ep, etc) “a whole mood”! So while the colors and fonts may be the same, try your best to create its own unique theme and mood for it. Something that makes it stand out and be memorable for years to come. The tricky part is supporting your overall branding, while also making it unique enough to be set apart from the other releases you have and will have.

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With these things set in place, your brand will look 10x better and more professional. For my website, I didn’t have these tips at the beginning and everything was a mess. Once I understood how branding works, and the power of simplicity and consistency, suddenly everything just fell into place (for someone without the academic/professional background :) ). I’m hoping it can do the same for you! It’s definitely more fun this way, especially trying to make an album with an overall theme. Let me know how it goes and I’d love to see before/afters on your websites!

Take care!

-Michael