Episode 015: Organize Your Branding

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Last week’s challenge: Be the Boss of Your Email

Email, it sucks and has been destroying peoples’ productivity for decades! But with Nat’s challenge, I get a handle on my emails. For me, the first day was pretty rough, it’s hard to break old habits and I still don’t have all my bad habits licked.

With Natalie, she observed

I committed to checking email three times a day: once in the morning, once after lunch, and once at the end of the day.

Tips for telling your inbox who’s the boss

1. Close your email client or browser tab when you’re not using email.
2. Turn off notifications for your client, browser, and mobile device. There’s likely no need for you to be instantly notified of emails.
3. Limit your email checking to three times or less a day and make it a part of your daily routine to check at only those times. Or use your mobile devices priority notification settings (Android users).
4. Don’t look at emails if you have no intention of answering your emails.
5. Focus on being process oriented with emails.
   1. If an email takes only a few minutes to take care of handle it right away; if it takes longer than a few minutes, make it a to-do to handle later.

This week’s challenge: Organize Your Branding and Get Your Ass(ets) together.

Natalie and I have had a lot of issues with clients not having necessary branding assets that we require for the design phase of projects. It happens time and time again.

The business owner doesn’t know where the logos are; the graphic designer who created the assets moved to Mars and can’t be reached for comment, or they have a picture of an image of their logo. Sometimes, the business owner has several versions of the logo but none of them are right or current. It happens a lot. All of it!

So this week, your challenge is to get your assets in order. That is, get your brand assets in order. What does that mean and why is it important?

Your brand assets may consist of any piece of collateral (business cards, flyers, image logos etc.) where it displays your business’s brand logos.

• Get your business cards together
• Get any hard brand asset such as flyers or catalogs
• Locate any digital image assets like jpeg files, png, illustrator etc.

Take the above assets and put them in a central place that is easy for you to recall. Google Drive, iCloud, or Dropbox work well. And when you’re ready to share these assets with your team or with a new designer you can simply provide a link to them to whoever needs them.

A Blast from the Past

Another unexpected benefit to all this work is that you get to travel back in time and see how your branding used to look. And let me tell you, Nat and I FUCKING LOVED IT!!!

Back in the day, when Natalie used to peddle e-cigs and mountains of kombucha, her former business partner came up with the logo ideas below. That first mark on the upper left? Yeah, that definitely looks like if Pikachu took another route and started wearing diapers and suffering the consequences of absolute zero sleep for ten years.

How about that upper-right-hand logo treatment? Y’all didn’t know Natalie was a tattoo artist did you? Well, she was and she got this tattooed on her right shoulder blade. Ask her about it some time!

My own business branding has undergone several changes over the years. Here are but a few of them below.

Show Notes:

• 01:45 — Alex demands that Natalie love him as he is! She capitulates and relented. But also they talk about last week’s challenge, Being the Boss of Your Email.
• 19:10 — Natalie and Alex finally get it together and start talking about next week’s challenge, gathering your logos and branding assets.

As always, don’t forget to leave us that gushy 5-star review on iTunes and what not. And remember, kids, keep it simple and most importantly Keep it Doable!

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash