DOWNLOAD YOUR FREE BRAND BOARD TEMPLATE

What exactly is a brand board template and why do you need one for your business? A brand board is an at-a-glance guide for all the visual elements of your brand. It’s a final collection of your logos, fonts, color palette, icons, pattern, mood board inspiration, and more!

A brand board is a perfect solution for showcasing your brand in a cohesive, organized way, and also gives important insight into the overall look and feel of your brand.

This can be helpful, for example, if you’re working with another creative and they need quick insight into the style of your brand, or maybe you’re working with another designer down the line on something like a PDF guide or putting together a course. You’ll be able to quickly and easily send over your brand board containing all the necessary visual info regarding your brand for them to follow. Even further, brand boards are also useful when you go to make your first hire! You can easily send your employee or VA your brand board for them to reference whenever needed.

What’s Included

So, what’s all included in a brand board? This can vary slightly from brand to brand, but here are the main elements I always include in my brand boards:

1. Primary logo.
2. Logo variation — this is a secondary logo that features some variance like shape, color, texture, background.
3. Submark — this is typically a smaller, more condensed version of your main logo to be used in places like profile pictures, website footers, favicons (the tiny graphics on your web page tabs), etc.
4. Color palette (usually 4-6 colors).
5. Font selections.
6. Icons, brand pattern, graphic elements.
7. Mood board featuring your brand’s inspiration imagery.

You’ll see that almost every brand board includes the above elements, but I also like to include things like a business card mockup, Facebook/Etsy shop banner, Instagram Highlights, etc. if applicable.

How To Use

Included in this post is a free Illustrator template that you can use to customize to your own business! Use the step-by-step guide below to customize the template to your own brand!

1. Download the brand board Illustrator template from the links found on this page.
2. If you would like to download the original font used in the template, you can download it for free here.
3. Open in Adobe Illustrator. (If you don’t have Illustrator, you can try it out free for 7 days. Here’s the link.)
4. Start by adding your own branding elements to the board, starting with your primary logo, logo variation, and submark.
5. Next, add your own brand colors to the color palette squares labeled “color” by double-clicking on the fill color swatch to the left.
6. Add your color number values below the squares. (You can find the values by double-clicking the colors to view the hex, RGB, and CMYK values.)
7. Tip: Use Coolors or Adobe Color to help choose your color palette, plus find their values so you can reference them from your brand board.
8. Next, add your font selections. I also like to include links to where they can be downloaded or purchased as well.
9. Add your icons, pattern, and graphic elements.
10. Edit the mood board — copy and paste your imagery into the template and one by one resize your images making them just slightly bigger than the image box you want to place them into. Once you have resized them, send your images to the back of the image boxes.
11. Once you have done this, select an image plus the box on top of it, right-click and select “make clipping mask.” Here’s a helpful article from Adobe on how clipping masks work.
12. To edit the image within the clipping mask, double click into the box and scale your image to size using the Scale tool.
13. To export your brand board, go to file > export > export for screens > update the file name of the artboard to what you would like it to be called and select where you would like it to be exported to.

DOWNLOAD YOUR FREE BRAND BOARD TEMPLATE

Now you have your very own customized brand board for your business that you can refer back to over and over again!

If you have any questions on how to use this template or would like to talk further about branding in general, please don’t hesitate to reach out through my contact form, or at hello@ashleyferreiradesign.com