Building a Brand Kit: Standardising Your Visuals & Voice Across All Platforms

Think of a big brand like Coca-Cola or Apple. You know their colours, their logo and even the “feel” of their messaging without a second thought. That’s because they have a consistent brand identity.

For a micro-business, creating this kind of consistency is just as important. A well-defined brand kit is your secret weapon for ensuring your business looks, sounds and feels the same everywhere your audience finds you.

Essentially, a brand kit is a master document that contains all the key elements of your brand’s identity. This includes your logo variations, a defined colour palette, chosen fonts and a clear guide for your brand’s tone of voice.

Having this on hand saves you time and ensures that every social media post, blog article and website page reflects your business perfectly.

The Foundations: Creating Your Brand Kit

Before we look at how technology can help, it’s crucial to first create the core elements of your brand kit yourself. These foundations should come directly from you and your business’s unique essence.

Logo and its Variations: This is the most recognisable part of your brand. You need to have a main logo but also think about having smaller, simplified versions for use as a favicon on your website or as a social media profile icon. Make sure you have your logo in different formats and colours (e.g., black and white) for use on different backgrounds.

Colour Palette: Your brand’s colours set the mood and tone. You’ll want to choose a primary colour and a couple of secondary colours that work well together. Once you have them, make sure you have the specific colour codes (like hex codes) so they are always exactly the same, whether you’re using them on your website or in a printed flyer.

Typography: The fonts you use speak volumes about your brand’s personality. Select a font for your headings and another for your body text. These fonts should be easy to read and consistent across all of your materials.

Tone of Voice Guidelines: This is how your brand “speaks”—whether it’s professional, friendly, witty, or empathetic. To define this, write a few sentences about your brand’s personality and list some words and phrases to use, as well as some to avoid. This guide will help you stay consistent in all your written communication.

Using AI as Your Branding Assistant

Once you have the core, human-led elements of your brand kit defined, AI can become a fantastic assistant to help you maintain consistency and save time. It should be used as a tool to support your brand, not to create it from scratch.

Refining Your Brand’s Voice

AI is brilliant at taking a piece of text and rewriting it in a specific style you’ve defined. For example, if you feed it a few examples of your writing, it can help you generate new copy that sounds similar. This can be a huge time-saver for drafting social media posts, email newsletters, or even website copy.

However, you should never use AI-generated text without a thorough review. Think of the process as human-AI-human: you provide the initial thought, the AI helps to shape it and then you, the expert on your brand, give it the final polish to ensure it’s authentic, accurate and truly sounds like you.

AI can be an assistant for consistency but it should never replace your unique voice.

Other Practical Uses for AI

Beyond helping with your tone of voice, AI can assist with the day-to-day management of your brand kit. For example, it can be used to brainstorm content ideas that are aligned with your brand’s existing keywords and topics.

Some tools can also take your finished copy and automatically resize and optimise it for different platforms, ensuring your visual branding remains consistent across a website, an Instagram story and a LinkedIn post.

Certain AI-powered tools can even help to create templates for social media, email signatures, or presentations, using your brand’s colours and fonts to ensure a professional and cohesive look every time. This kind of automation removes a lot of the tedious manual work.

A Cautionary Note on AI for Brand Visuals

While AI is a helpful tool for text, it’s a different story when it comes to your brand’s core visuals. At this stage, relying on AI to generate your logo or other key visual assets can lead to more problems than it solves, as AI-generated visuals can often lack the unique quality, precision and deeper meaning that a human designer can bring.

More importantly, they can be inconsistent and unpredictable, which is the exact opposite of what you’re trying to achieve with a brand kit. Your logo and visual identity are too important to be left to a tool that can’t understand your business’s true essence.

AI Can Be a Helpful Assistant for Your Business Brand Kit

By creating and using a brand kit, you’re not just making your business look professional; you’re building a recognisable identity that helps you stand out, build trust and connect with your ideal clients. It’s a simple, powerful tool for consistent and confident branding. With the right approach, AI can be a helpful assistant to ensure your brand’s voice and visuals are always on point.