How to Make a Brand Kit (2024)

Get your branding into shape with this guide on what you need in your brand kit, plus tips on creating assets for your new look.

In this article, you’ll learn more about how to brand your business with the help of a brand kit. We’ll go over what you’ll need to include in your logo kit and brand kit, brand mood board examples, as well as useful brand templates to help you get started.

Plus, we’ll show you how to pull your brand assets together into a useful brand design app, such as Shutterstock Create, and walk through a step-by-step process for brand building using your new brand kit.

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Read on to find out why it’s well worth the time to create a brand kit, as well as a step-by-step tutorial for creating a professional brand kit that you can start using for your marketing designs straightaway!

What Are Brand Assets?

When we think of a business’ brand identity, we often immediately think of the business’ logo. However, the process of how to brand your business extends to more than simply designing a logo alone.

While a logo is often the most recognizable element of a brand, the business will usually employ a brand marketing strategy that makes use of a much wider range of brand assets.

• FREE Clip Art Pack to Design Your OwnLogo

These brand assets will include the main usable elements of the brand identity, such as the logo, brand colors, and brand fonts, as well as additional brand assets such as graphics, illustrations, photographic styles, and icons.

Some large businesses need a significant number of brand assets generated to create sub-identities for one-off campaigns, product launches, or sister brands, for example.

In this case, and even if your pool of brand assets is relatively small, organizing your brand assets into a single brand kit is really useful, especially when you want to apply your branding to designs, or share the brand identity with employees, colleagues, or contractors.

Brand assets might include usable image files for logos, icons, graphics, and more.

What Is a Brand Kit?

A brand kit includes all of your brand assets, such as logo, icons and brand colors, in one pulled-together bundle. A key part of brand identity development is being able to collate your brand assets into a usable brand kit, which can be stored on a shared company filing system or on an online brand design app, such as Shutterstock Create.

By creating a brand kit, you’ll be able to use your brand identity on brand marketing designs with much more efficiency and effectiveness.

In other words, everyone who uses your brand identity to create designs will be on the same page, working with a clearly defined and shared set of brand assets.

As assets are updated or archived, the brand kit can be accordingly updated, without the risk of individuals using redundant assets.

What Should Be Included in a Brand Kit?

A brand kit can be as small or large as your business requires. For creating personal brand templates, a more concise brand kit will suffice. This may include your logo, brand fonts, and brand colors.

For larger businesses, a more comprehensive brand kit might be needed, which can include a core folder of logo files, as well as sub-folders that include supporting brand assets, ranging from brand color palettes to social media templates.

For guidance, a well-rounded brand kit should include:

1. A copy of the brand guidelines or brand handbook, which details how all of the assets listed below should be used in designs and marketing communications.
2. A logo kit folder, consisting of the brand logo in usable formats, such as vector EPS and PNG files, and variations for different backgrounds, such as white, black, and color versions. Variations of the logo that include the brand name or the logo icon alone, if applicable, should also be included, as well as specially-created logo versions for use as app icons and website favicons.
3. A folder of brand color swatches in RGB, HEX, and CMYK formats. This can be included as Shutterstock Create swatches, or as an ASE (Adobe Swatch Exchange) file for using in Adobe apps.
4. A folder of brand fonts, which includes both OTF (or TTF) and web-friendly (WOFF) versions of logo fonts, headline fonts, and body fonts.
5. An icon folder, including icons for use on websites and apps. These should be included in EPS, PNG, and SVG format.
6. A folder of brand graphics and/or illustrations in a range of file formats for use across both print and online media. Vector EPS versions of these should be included for creating large-scale designs, such as posters, ads, or signage.
7. A folder of approved brand photography, which may include staff portraits, product images, and approved stock photography.
8. A folder of brand presentation templates and video content, such as logo reveals, slide transitions, and pitch decks.
9. A folder of templates for print, online, and social media. This folder may include items such as report templates, business card templates, letterheads, Instagram story templates, and website banner templates.

Of course, your brand kit doesn’t need to include more brand assets than you will actually use, so be mindful of keeping your brand kit trimmed down to the essentials.

By doing this, you will ensure that your key brand assets are easily found, and can be used straightaway to create impactful brand designs.

A folder of brand photography can be included in your brand kit, which consists of approved images that can be used for creating branded marketing designs. License these images via Inna Skaldutska, Civil, and New Africa.

How to Build and Use a Brand Kit Using Shutterstock Create

Now that we know what a brand kit is, and how brand kits can be useful for putting brand strategies into action, let’s look at how to build and use a brand kit.

Here, we’ll be using online app Shutterstock Create to upload and organize our brand assets, and demonstrate how we can use these assets to create brand templates.

1. How to Upload Your Brand Assets to Shutterstock Create

Shutterstock Create is an online design app you can use to store brand assets, discover useful extras for your designs, and design marketing templates for print and online. It’s a great one-stop app for organizing and using your brand assets.

So, let’s dive straight in.

Step 1

First of all, you’ll need to prepare your brand assets for uploading to your brand kit. The best software to use for preparing logos, icons, and graphics is a vector design app.

Save these in both vector format, such as EPS, and as transparent-background PNG files, ready for applying to designs such as social media templates.

To create the brand identity here for fictional business Olive Organic Co., I’ve used a logo clip art pack. You can easily create your own unique logo designs using this FREE logo clip art bundle, which includes lots of hand-drawn frames, borders, and stamps.

• FREE Clip Art Pack to Design Your OwnLogo

You should also create brand assets that include photography, illustrations, fonts, and color swatches, which will really help to flesh out your branding.

Once you have all of your brand assets prepared, we can upload and organize them in Shutterstock Create, creating a shareable brand kit in the process.

Prepare your brand assets using vector software.

Step 2

Go to Shutterstock Create and click on the Catalog icon in the left-hand menu.

In the Your catalog area that opens, click on the top-right red New button.

Let’s start by creating a folder for the brand photography. Name the collection, and choose whether you’d like the collection to be private or shared with others in your business. Then click Create.

Then click the red Browse images button to search for stock photography to add to your collection. You can also add your own photography to the collection, and we’ll look at that in just a moment.

Search for images that fit with the look of your brand identity. In this case, I’m looking for olive branch photos that have a clean, rustic style that I can use as frames for social media designs.

When you find an image you like, click on Save above the image to add it to the collection.

Step 3

To add your own images to the collection, click on the red New button at the top-right of thecollection window. Click Upload, and from here you can find and upload your own photos to the collection.

Step 4

Let’s create a second collection for our brand kit, this time a folder of logo files.

Create a new collection, give it a suitable name, and click Create.

Click New > Upload to add your logo images to the collection. PNG images with transparent backgrounds are really useful for creating designs for social media and websites.

Step 5

For the Olive Organic Co. brand kit, I’m also going to create a third collection for brand graphics and illustrations. I create the new collection, as before, name it, and hit Create.

Bring in your PNG graphics by going to New > Upload.

Now, when you click on Catalog, you will be able to see all of the collections you have created. These will be the folders in your brand kit.

2. How to Create Brand Templates for Your Brand Kit

Step 1

With your brand kit folders created, we can start using the brand assets to create designs that you can use as brand templates.

And, you guessed it, we can save these templates as part of our brand kit to come back to later. Super handy!

Return to the Shutterstock Create homepage and choose a canvas option from the blank canvas selection. In this example, we’ll create an Instagram Post, so I’ll select this blank canvas option.

Step 2

We’ll want to start using our brand colors in the designs, and there’s a really simple way of bringing these quickly into Shutterstock Create.

Simply take a screenshot of your brand color swatches, as in the example below, and go to Images > Upload to drop this onto the canvas.

Shutterstock Create will instantly pick up the colors from the image, and save these as Photo Colors in the Color panel.

Now, move the color swatch image off the canvas, but keep it on the pasteboard.

Step 3

In the Images panel, click on All > next to the Collections heading.

Click on the brand photography collection, and select an image from the collection to drop onto the canvas.

Here, I’ve chosen this olive branch photo.

Now open the logo collection, and click to drop one of the logo images onto the canvas.

Step 4

To help the logo type pop against the background, I can select the photo and click on Edit image in the top control panel.

I add a Warm filter and click Apply.

From the Advanced options, I click on Fade & Blend and bring the Fade level up to around 30%.

Now, go to Shapes and choose a square from the Outline shape options. I adjust the color of this to the brand pink swatch, and expand it to create a frame effect.

Step 5

When you’ve finished working on your design, give the template a name at top-left.

Then return to the Catalog window before clicking New > Collection.

Name the collection as a folder of brand templates, and hit Create.

Return to the Catalog window, and locate your newly saved Instagram post template. Then, click on the menu tab at the bottom-right of the template icon, and click Save.

Choose to add this to the brand template collection, and click Save.

3. How to Organize Your Brand Kit

Now you have created a range of collections, and designed brand templates to create future designs, you can share your brand kit with others in your organization. To do this, simply click the Share icon at the top-right of a collection to invite others to view or edit the folder.

You may also want to make some adjustments to the content of your brand kit as time goes on, such as duplicating or removing assets.

Step 1

To make a copy of an asset, such as a brand template, click on the template’s menu bar and choose Duplicate.

Step 2

To remove an asset, click the Remove option from the same menu bar.

Step 3

You can also organize the look of your brand kit folders by adjusting the cover image of each collection. From the menu bar of your selected image, click Set as cover.

4. How to Publish Your Brand Designs

You can easily download your finished brand designs, or publish them directly to your business’ social media account, from Shutterstock Create.

Step 1

In the brand templates collection, click on a design to open a preview window. Click on Edit.

With the design open, click on the red Download button to download a copy of the design to your computer. Alternatively, click on Publish to post the design to your Instagram or Facebook account.

Conclusion: Your Brand Kit in Action

In this article, we’ve looked at why creating a brand kit can be incredibly useful for brand building and brand marketing.

As well as helping you and your colleagues get organized, a brand kit also allows you to take control of your branding with more confidence, applying your brand identity to designs more efficiently and easily.

Discover more brand kit examples and brand mood board examples, and find out why a flat logo should be top of your list when building a brand marketing strategy.

Click on the button below for more brand kit info and inspiration. . . .