Bootstrapping Brand Identity

You’ve decided to start a company and it’s time to start branding. Nice!
You’re broke and know nothing about design. Not so nice!

So how do you make a kick-ass company brand on a budget? Check out the resources below.

Logo — 99designs

99designs is a great resource to gain inspiration for logos. You can check some logos out here — you can even sort logos by industry so you have a better idea of what your competitors are doing.

99designs also has an awesome logo color generator that will help you choose a color for your logo that matches the personality of your brand.

Color Palette — Colormind

Colormind uses deep learning to create aesthetically pleasing color palettes. Colormind also shows you what your palette would look like on a demo landing page and allows you to generate color palettes based on photos.

Illustrations and Icons — Flaticon and Undraw

Icons: My go-to resource for iconography is Flaticon. You can find icons of just about anything in a variety of styles. Use of the icons requires attribution without a subscription but the subscription is worth the small price, in my opinion.

Illustrations: Undraw has a variety of open source material illustrations you can customize and use without attribution.

Typefaces — Typ.io

Typ.io shows you fonts that pair well together and samples of their use. You can also search for a particular font to get pairing suggestions.

Mockups — MockupWorld

MockupWorld offers a variety of free high-resolution mockups of iPhones, billboards, packaging, etc. Photoshop is required but for most mockups, all you need to do is paste your image into the specified layer — easy peasy.