Whether you're a marketing team looking to refresh your brand, or you just want to put some structure around your branding, consider this the little check-list of things you'll need.

Color is key in not only identifying your brand, but evoking emotion from it. Here is a simple guide to putting together a color palette with contrasting companion and accent colours.

Another exercise that can help is looking at the palette of your competitors. When I starting building the brand for Voltari, I took all our competitor's sites and printed them, filling the wall in order of color. When I saw a pattern emerging (way too many blues, lots of greens, some dark greys and blacks) I knew I needed something else that would ensure our company stood out.

Everyone needs an official corporate font, and it doesn't need to be expensive. You can find a wide variety for free on the web, including Font Squirrel. 

Just like a logo, you don't want to change up a font too often. So take your time choosing the right one. Look for something that has a companion family (similar style of fonts that can be used together). Bonus if there's a web version of the font, which will save you on costly licensing web font packages.

When choosing a font, keep in mind that that font will need to be shared within your company. So if you purchase a font, ensure you obtain the proper licenses. If it's a free font, just point people to the website or host it on your corporate intranet.

Keeping your icons organized can be a hassle. I use Iconjar to keep them tidy and in one place. You can easily add keywords and export the packages, making them easy to share and searchable by anyone on your marketing team.

Sometimes a PNG just doesn't cut it. To keep icons sharp and beautiful on your website, you can host the images as SVGs (or use pre-made packages) on Fontastic or Fort Awesome (from the makers of Font Awesome who recently purchased Symbolset).

In order to maintain brand relevance, it's a good idea to put together a style guide. This will serves as a connection between your marketing team, products, clients, and the beloved logo that identifies you.

It covers topics from logo usage to corporate colors, to which fonts to use and what imagery to avoid.

Don't have a style guide? No worries — I got you covered! You can download a template of my own style guide to get you started.

Now that you have your collection of branded items, how do you keep it all together to maintain a strong brand?

You can use an app like Lingo that lets your marketing team collect and organize all your assets, including different files types (PNG vs SVG, TIFF vs EPS). You can easily search and create sharable kits.

By having one central base, it ensures everyone is always using the same, most current assets.

Another alternative is to put together a simple wiki on your intranet, or create a password-protected site. Your team will know to go there to get assets, and anyone else in the company will know it houses all brand assets that are commonly needed (like a PNG version of the logo for a sales event) and pitch decks.

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