[SAM]:
Marketing a Practice podcast is part of the Practice of the Practice podcast network, a network of podcasts seeking to help you market and grow your business and yourself. To hear other podcasts like Beta Male Revolution, Empowered and Unapologetic, Imperfect Thriving, or Faith in Practice, go to practiceofthepractice.com/network.

Welcome to the Marketing a Practice podcast with me, Sam Carvalho, where you will discover everything you need to know about marketing and branding your business. To find out more about how I can help you brand your business, visit www.practiceofthepractice.com/branding. And if you’d like to see some examples of my design work, be sure to follow me on Instagram @samanthacarvalhodesign.

Hi there. Thanks so much for taking the time to be with me today on the Marketing a Practice podcast. I know that, on any given day, there are most likely many things vying for your attention, so I appreciate you taking the time to come and spend with me.

So today, I’m going to be going over some basic terminology around branding and design. I do realize that this is Episode 15 of the Marketing a Practice podcast. And this is probably something I should have addressed in the beginning. And I do apologize if you have heard any terms that you weren’t sure what they mean, or if anything has been confusing to you up until this point. But I do hope that you did enjoy the interview episodes that I did, and they will definitely be more of those coming up. But rather late than never; I thought I would address it now. And I’m definitely not going to go too in-depth because obviously that’s what you have a designer for. They need to know the in-depth, ins and outs of branding terminology. But I do think it’s still good for you to just have an understanding, a basic understanding, of some of the basic terms that center branding and design. So, without further ado, let’s get started.

So, I came across something when preparing for this episode that I myself was unaware of or didn’t really make the connection. I’m not sure how many of you know where the term brand actually originated from. So, it originally referred to livestock owners who would mark their herd with a distinctive symbol for clear identification. And I thought this was quite interesting and quite a novel way to look at branding. You could almost view all your print marketing material or all your digital marketing material as your livestock and you are marking it in a way that shows other people that that belongs to you and your company. So, I thought that was quite a great way to look at branding.

But now obviously the term ‘brand’ refers to how a target market distinguishes one company and its values from a similar company. So, bearing in mind that your branding is what’s going to distinguish you from other private practices. As you are… I’m sure you’re aware, there are definitely other private practices operating within your area, and you want your branding to stick out and you want it to portray your brand personality and what you have to offer, which is obviously going to be different to what the other private practice has to offer. So, that’s brand, the term ‘brand’.

But then when it comes to ‘branding’, this is then the process of discovering and communicating the overall image of your firm. And this is why I think branding, doing it at the beginning of your practice, or as early on as possible, is so important because it’s so much more than just creating a logo or just creating the visual identity of your brand. It’s also your brand personality. It’s your vision, it’s your mission. It literally encompasses who you are as a brand and what you want to achieve, and who you want to be talking to and who you want to be servicing. So, it’s a really important process to do early on. So, sticking with brand and branding, there are a few terms around branding specifically that I’d like to discuss with you, that I think is important for you to know.

The other one is ‘brand identity’. So, this is your business name, your logo, your tagline, your business card, products and services, dress code, etc. So, these are all the things… So, as we said, branding is the process of discovering and communicating the overall image of your firm. Your brand identity is basically then what you land on. So, that’s what then gets communicated through your logo, through your dress code, through the interior design of your office, through the way your receptionist addresses your clients. So, your brand identity kind of permeates into all of those things.

Your ‘brand assets’, then, include the fonts, colors, and resources that must work together in order to forge the distinctive appearance of your brand. So, your brand assets are basically everything that makes up your brand identity.

And finally, the last bit of terminology to do with branding is your ‘brand style guide’. Now, if you’ve been listening to this podcast up until now, you would have heard me speak quite often about the brand style guide, as I feel it’s something that a lot of companies forego, but it’s something that is actually so essential and really makes a difference to your overall branding. And so, your brand style guide is a comprehensive document affirming the principles of your brand and providing guidance for understanding its legacy, vision, mission, personality, and attributes. So, your brand style guide will usually include, first and foremost, your logo and the colors thinking behind your logo, what makes up your logo, the font of your logo. Also, what not to do with your logo, so how not to portray it and how to correctly portray it. But then, over and above that, it will also include your vision, your mission; it might include a mood board, which kind of communicates your personality, and how you want to be positioned and what you want to communicate through your branding. So, it really is quite a comprehensive document that includes all the thinking that you’ve put into your brand identity, as well as your… any important brand assets. So that should you, in the future, choose to make use of a different designer, all of that gets sent to them, and they are able to maintain your brand consistency. And that’s also really important. But it’s also there for you to refer back to, to remember your ‘Why?’ and to remember, you know, the core values of your business. So that’s a really important document that I wouldn’t overlook.

Then moving on to some other terminology that I thought you would enjoy or that would be relevant to you knowing: the ‘rule of thirds’. So, I’m not sure how many of you are aware of this, but basically, when it comes to any kind of design, so whether you’re creating a social post in Canva, or a blog image… For those of you who don’t know, canva.com is a great free tool that I encourage you to use if you are still in the bootleg stage of private practice, where you can’t really afford a designer. Canva has a number of pre-designed templates for social posts, for blog feature images, for print marketing, for just tons of things. And you can basically just go in there and you can choose your own images and put in your own content and even play around with elements and create your own designs. So, it’s a really great tool. But the rule of thirds is something that’s really good to keep in mind with that because what we designers try to avoid is placing things in the middle. And I know that for someone who isn’t a designer or who isn’t a creative, you tend to kind of want to do that. But it’s actually not visually pleasing and people prefer to actually look at things that are broken up into thirds. So, the rule of thirds basically goes like this: if you can imagine putting a three by three grid on top of whatever you’re designing, and then ensuring that the focal point of your image aligns with one of the intersecting points on that grid. So, if you can imagine a three by three grid, you’ve got your, let’s say, line right on the left. And let’s say you align the focal point of your image with the line on the left and then your middle horizontal line. So that means that the focal point of your image will be in the middle horizontally, but it will be aligned to the left side. And then you kind of have your white space, or the rest of the background towards the right. So that is definitely more visually appealing than having it at the center.

So then moving on to fonts: ‘typography’ is another term that I thought you should know about. This is the visual component of the written word. So basically, your logo will usually include typography. Your feature image, you could even say, includes typography. So, typography is basically whenever you’ve used words in a visual design. So, whether it be a billboard, for example, or as I said, a social post, anything like that includes typography. So, a little bit around fonts and typography: So, a ‘typeface’ is another term that is often confused with the term ‘font’. So, the difference between the two is that a typeface is actually the collective name of a family of related fonts. So your font will, for example, be Times New Roman, while you typeface will be the variations of Times New Roman that exist, for example, your regular Times New Roman, or your bold Times New Roman, or your italic Times New Roman. So that’s the difference between ‘font’ and ‘typeface’.

And then I thought I would go into the very basic categories of fonts that you get. So obviously, this gets quite involved, but in a nutshell: you either get ‘Serif’, ‘San Serif’ or ‘Script’. So, Serif is if you think of more the traditional, olden day, corporate kind of fonts. So those are the fonts that have the extra little strokes or curves at the end of the letters. So, if you imagine your T, you’ve got a little stroke at the bottom of your T and on either side of the horizontal line of your T. So that is a Serif font. A Sans Serif font, ‘sans’ literally meaning ‘without’, is basically your fonts that doesn’t include any of those extra strokes. Those are more your modern-day, more minimalistic type of fonts. And then you’ve got your script, which is based on handwriting. So that’s usually your cursive font, your very curvy, flowy sort of fonts. So those are the three main kind of font groupings that you get. So that’s helpful to know, because if your designers asking you what sort of fonts do you prefer, you can then say you prefer Sans Serif, or you prefer Script. And that’s what they can then use in your designs.

So then moving away from the font and typography aspect of things, but still kind of sticking within the content realm, we’ve got ‘lorem ipsum’. So, I’m not sure how many of you have come across this before. But usually, if you’re working with a designer on something; specifically, like a flyer for print marketing, then if you haven’t yet provided your designer with all of the necessary content for the design, they may include a paragraph of lorem ipsum. So, this is a bit of dummy text that is used within the design industry. I actually think it’s Latin, but it’s basically placeholder text that has more or less the average distribution of letters, which make it look readable, as opposed to just saying ‘add content here’ or ‘add content there’ within the design. So this is something that your designer will maybe use if you haven’t yet provided the content just to show what it would look like in the overall design or how the layout of the text would be organized.

So then moving on to logos. So, within your logo, you will usually have your ‘logo mark’ and your ‘logotype’. So, your logotype is the name of your company that’s designed in a visually unique way for use by that company. So, again, that’s kind of typography within your logo. Most of the time when people are referring to a logo, this is actually what they’re referring to. Whereas your logo mark is the illustration that goes along with your logo. So, most times these two will stay together, you will be representing your logo mark and your logotype as your full logo on all of your branding material. But there are instances where you might only use your logo mark, or you might only use your logotype. So, for example, on social media images that you’re designing, you might just use your logo mark in the bottom right corner to avoid having to use your whole logo. And because, you know, social media images aren’t always big in size, you might struggle to actually read the logotype. So, for example, when I’m designing for Practice of the Practice, a lot of times I’ll only make use of the chair on my designs, and that’s then the logo mark of the Practice of the Practice logo.

Then the next term is ‘resolution’. So, you’ll often hear from your designer that, again, if you’re designing print marketing material, that if you’re wanting to include images or if you have a headshot that you want included, they will request a ‘high resolution’ image. And you might be like, what are you even saying? What does high resolution mean? So, the resolution has to do with the quality of the image. And as a rule of thumb, the higher the resolution, the higher the quality, so a high-resolution image will be clear and crisp, whereas a low-resolution image will often appear pixelated or blurry. So, you really want to make sure that when you’re taking headshots, or when you are taking photos or downloading images, that they are of a high resolution, and that the quality is good. A lot of times people will include low-resolution images on their website, and these really don’t look great; they’re pixelated and they’re blurry, and it takes away the credibility of your website.

The next term is ‘whitespace’. So again, you probably would have heard me speak about this quite often: as somebody who loves minimalistic design, I try to include a lot of whitespace into my designs. Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean the space is white. This whitespace refers to negative space. So, it’s any area of design within… or it’s any area within your design that does not include content or imagery. So, a lot of the time, designers will use whitespace strategically to draw focus to something specifically, a call to action or something like that. So, it can be really great, but it can also be… if it’s not used with a purpose, then it just looks weird. So, you really want to use whitespace with a purpose and with strategy in mind.

Then the last two terms that I want to touch on before I kind of get to some design formats that I think will be valuable for you to know as well is ‘raster versus vector’. So, this is getting quite in depth. And you don’t need to know too much about this except that a ‘vector’ image is made up of layers and allows you to scale it. So, this is important when it comes to a logo, for example, as you want to be able to scale your logo to any size. That means making it big enough to make a sign out of it or making it small enough to print on a T-shirt, for example. So that’s a vector whereas a ‘raster’ is a flat image. So, this is, for example, a photograph is a raster image, and this is non-scalable. So, earlier when I was talking about resolution, if you have a photograph with a low resolution and you try to scale it, it’s then going to become pixelated or blurry. So, you just need to know offhand the basics of those two things. It might come in handy when chatting with a designer.

Then moving on to ‘design format’. So, I’ve basically covered the terminology now that you might come across when dealing with branding or design. These are just basic terms, as I said; it doesn’t really go into the nitty-gritty of it. But the other thing I thought would be relevant was to discuss some design formats. So, these are the files that you might receive, for example, when you’ve asked someone to design a logo for you. So, there are six different types of formats that I thought you should know about. The first three are pretty much only to do with designers. So, you probably won’t even be able to open them on your computer because you won’t have the necessary software. But it’s still important that you receive these files from your designer for you to send on to printers or to other designers in the future.

So, the first is an ‘AI’ file. This is an Adobe Illustrator file, and it’s created in layers, so it’s a vector file, which is what I was talking about just now. And this is one of the most preferred formats by printers, promotional product companies, [unclear] screeners, banner and sign companies, and the like. So you do, however, need the program, Adobe Illustrator in order to open this file, which can be confusing because obviously you’ll try clicking on it, and you’ll be told you aren’t able to open it. But don’t worry, just keep that file and if you are wanting to print your logo, or if you’re wanting to have it scaled into a banner or anything like that, or if you’re wanting to send it to another designer, then you can send them that AI file.

‘EPS’ is similar to AI in that it’s also a file that consists of layers; it’s also a vector file that consists of layers. But what’s nice about the EPS is it can be opened in a variety of applications. And it can also be scaled in size and keep its quality. So, that’s another good file that you want to keep to send to printers and/or other designers.

Then your ‘PSD’ file is your Photoshop file. So that’s also something that you’ll only be able to open if you have Photoshop, but this is usually a raster file. So, this usually contains graphics and photos that have been edited in Photoshop. So, it’s a bit different. Whereas you’ll normally have your logo design in Illustrator, if you’re editing photos, like headshots and things like that, then you may have a PSD file included.

Then the next three are more formats that you might actually engage with and that you’ll be able to open on your computer. So, the first is a ‘PDF’. This stands for Portable Document Format. And this is a universal file that preserves or embeds the fonts, images, layout, and graphics of any document. So that’s also great for other designers or printers in that they can open this file in Adobe Illustrator, for example, and all the necessary elements will still be in layers and will still be editable. But for you, as the customer, you are also able to open a PDF in Adobe Reader which you usually have on your computer. So, you can then open it and you can view it, and it’s also usually in a high-quality format.

A ‘JPEG’ file is a compressed image file that does not support a transparent background. So, if you receive your logo in a JPEG file, it will usually have a white background and you can’t really get rid of this. So, if you then try and load that JPEG onto your Canva design, for example, it will come with a white background. But what’s nice about a JPEG file is it comes in a variety of qualities. So you can choose high quality, medium quality or low quality and if it’s low quality, then it means it’s a smaller file… a smaller file size, which often comes in handy when uploading it to websites or things like that.

‘PNG’ file, however, is my favorite to deal with and it’s the most versatile, especially when it comes to digital. So, PNG does not include a background. But something that’s important to remember is: if you’re opening a PNG file on your computer, or especially on your phone sometimes, it will look as though it includes a background but that’s just the background of the application in which you’re opening the image on. So, it might look like it includes a black background or a gray background. It just depends on what you’ve set the background of your application to be, or what the default setting is. But actually, a PNG file does not include a background. And this is really nice for logos, because it means that, as I mentioned earlier, if you’re designing a Canva design, you can then literally just upload your PNG logo onto that design and it won’t come with a background, it’ll just be your logo. PNG is usually high quality as well. And what’s nice about PNG is it can be high quality, but still a low file size, which is great for uploading to websites and things like that.

So, guys, that’s it. I hope you’ve managed to stick with me through all of this. If you are needing to be reminded of what some of these terms mean, or if you just want to have something to refer back to, you’re welcome to check out the show notes of this episode. It will include all the definitions and all the meanings, but I really hope this has been helpful. And thanks again for joining me today and I will see you in the next episode.

Thanks for listening to the Marketing a Practice podcast. If you need help with branding your business, whether it be a new logo, rebrand, or you simply want to have a print file designed, head on over to www.practiceofthepractice.com/branding. And if you’d like to see some examples of my design work, be sure to follow me on Instagram @samanthacarvalhodesign.

Finally, please subscribe, rate, and review this podcast on iTunes if you like what you’ve heard. Talk to you soon.

This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher, or the guests, are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or any other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.