Visual design has become an essential part of a hospitality brand’s success. A distinctive visual identity helps you to stand out from the crowd. So, what’s the next step after you’ve defined your brand’s core and strategy? After you put together a color palette and made your choices regarding fonts? A brand inspiration board!
Your overall visual look is very important. What kind of pictures and graphics do you want to post? How can you portray your property and products in a way that fits your story? That enhances the feeling your brand wants to communicate? A brand inspiration board is a dynamic board filled with pictures that represent the visual style you aim for.
The best tool out there to create such a board right now is Pinterest.com. This website is filled with tons of inspiration from around the web. No doubt you’ll be able to put together an inspiring board here.
Create your own board step-by-step
- Go to pinterest.com and create an account if you don’t have one yet
- Make a new board. Call it [brand name] inspiration board. You can make it ‘hidden’ if you don’t want the whole world to have access to it.
- Then head over to the search bar, which you will find at the top of the page. Type in keywords that fit your brand: use the words listed under ‘personality’ in your strategy and add elements that are relevant. For example: graphic, pattern, menu, restaurant, quote.
- Go wild! Pin visuals that you feel like rightly represent the way you want your brand to be portrayed on the internet. In the clip underneath you see me creating a board for a healthy restaurant. The personality words in this restaurant’s ‘The Core’ are: ambitious, balanced, healthy, honest, passionate.
- Sometimes the personality words might not lead to the exact results you’re looking for. Try to come up with some associations in that case. Balanced might make you think of nature: then use nature also as a keyword. Healthy might make you think of the color green, or ‘organic’: use those keywords. Et cetera.
Content alignment
Use this Pinterest board to stay inspired. Pin new ideas every now and then. A very important other way to use the board, is to share it with influencers and bloggers visiting your property. Show them your style. I’d recommend to share your strategy (The Core) and this Pinterest board with anyone who’s about to create visual content for your brand. This is the perfect way to align them to your brand’s style and story.
