Your Visual Vocabulary is an essential tool in your business’s brand identity toolkit. It is made up of all of the graphics that supplement your logo, forming the graphic “face” of your business and anchoring your brand identity.

Think of your logo as the “superhero” of your brand, and the Visual Vocabulary elements as its “sidekicks”; in many design applications and finished materials, your logo won’t appear by itself. It will have the help of all of these Visual Vocabulary elements to accomplish its job of communicating and connecting with your target market.

Your Visual Vocabulary can include design elements such as:

o Font styles: You should have a small collection of typefaces, font weights, and styles that you use regularly in your materials. Consider fonts for both print and web use, and specify styles for headlines, subheads, and body copy in each case, at minimum. For each style, you should specify the font to use, the color it should be, and its paragraph alignment: whether it should be centered, left-aligned, or justified (where the text lines up with both sides of the column).

o Colors: Creating a color palette for your business can add flexibility to your materials and give you an easy resource to go to when choosing colors for illustrations, graphics, or any other part of your Visual Vocabulary. If you keep your colors consistent and limited, then you’ll develop a more focused palette that will be easier for your audience to associate with your business.

o Shapes: The shape that you use for your bullets, callout boxes, color-blocked areas, and even borders in your materials can create a strong visual component that will contribute to your memorability.

o Layout: The layout of a piece is how the different elements are laid out on the page. This covers elements like the number of columns and the placement of all of the other Visual Vocabulary elements.

o Backgrounds: Using background screens or shapes, or even a specially designed watermark, can give your materials an extra bit of flair. You can also develop a special background that will make your materials stand out.

o Photographs: Photos can add a lot of personality to your materials and really help you to make a connection with your target audience. You can purchase stock photography inexpensively these days; buy a few shots that are compelling and really match the rest of your Visual Vocabulary. Make sure that you buy the highest resolution and largest size that you’ll need for materials down the road.

o Special textual treatments: For very special text that you want to highlight, such as your tagline, marketing bullets, sidebars, or bullets that detail your specialties, consider specifying a special face, size, and color to use in all of your materials.

o Paper type: Printing your materials on a special type of paper can make them look even more interesting. Papers come in different colors, textures, and thicknesses that can contribute to your material’s uniqueness.

To create a Visual Vocabulary for your business, you should create a set of specifications for the types of design elements you will use in all of your marketing materials. Once you have laid out the set of “rules” for your Visual Vocabulary, use the same elements consistently throughout your materials. When trends change, or when your business grows or your materials become stale, you can simply change some or all of these elements to create a new, fresh look.

Specifying the qualities of these design elements and using them consistently throughout your marketing materials will have many benefits, including:

o Increasing your brand’s memorability: A Visual Vocabulary gives your marketing materials more designed visuals. Adding more visuals makes your materials, and your company, more memorable.

o Making your brand designs more flexible: A Visual Vocabulary can provide you with a set of visuals that are more loosely tied to your business than your logo, which means that you can exchange and recombine those visuals for different campaigns, service offerings, or products. You can also redesign your Visual Vocabulary elements during the lifecycle of your business, updating and refreshing your materials as necessary, while still backing them with a solid logo and brand identity base.

o Adding to the consistency of your marketing materials: When you use your Visual Vocabulary across all of your marketing materials, the repeated elements add to your visual consistency.

o Making your business’s materials stand out from the competition: Your Visual Vocabulary can add a lot of personality to your materials, differentiating them from your competition’s marketing pieces. It can also add visual information to your materials, to help tell your business’s story.

o Making a small business look larger: By expanding your brand design with more surrounding graphics, you’ll expand your designs and make your small business look like a bigger business.

A Visual Vocabulary provides a powerful key to your target market, helping it to better understand your business: what you offer and how you work. It also contributes to your business’s memorability.

Constructing the website

The techniques used in the construction of the physical site itself can add a professional touch to your work. This can be accomplished by the use of consistent elements throughout the site and the application of certain basic rules. Be sure to take these following elements into consideration when involved in website construction.

HTML coding

Whether you use a web-authoring program or do all the HTML coding by hand, there are some basic steps to constructing a well-designed website layout. These steps begin with the intelligent design of the individual webpages. Make your HTML coding easy to read by using indentations and comment tags. This will save you a lot of time when you need to edit your site.

Have a plan for your website

You should have the layout of your pages planned, the graphics and photographs ready to go, and the content determined. You know what order the pages will appear and how they will be linked…in other words, the navigation of your site. Make special note of the following :

One great way to find new bedroom design ideas is from bedroom design pictures in magazines and books as well as from one simple thing like a vase, painting or pillow.

You can get some great ideas from those designer bedrooms in the decorating magazines. Don’t be scared if the look you want really like seems a bit pricey, you can shop around to purchase similar items to those in the design for less cost. Purchase some magazines or design books and make note of all the bedrooms you like. Is there one that you can’t live without?

Decorating your bedroom to resemble a design that you see in a book or magazine is not that difficult. Simply write down all of the items in the photographs that you want to have in your room (drapes, bedding, accents, wall art, rugs etc…) then take the photograph with you while you shop and attempt to match them up. Remember, when shopping for things from a photo you need to pay attention to the scale of the pieces so that they look proportioned next to each other when you get them home.

If you are buying new furniture but are on a budget, try shopping at yard sales or thrift stores where you can take home some great buys on furniture that is almost like brand new. It may take time before you can purchase everything you need but you’ll produce a great designer look if you follow the picture thoroughly.

Or maybe you want to come up with your own unique design? If you know you need a new look but don’t know where to start then take a look around your bedroom as it is. What things do you still like about the way it looks? What are the things you don’t like? If there is some item that you still like such as maybe a wall hanging or vase, then use that to be the base of your design and design the bedroom around that item working with complimentary colors and matching furniture.

If you are formulating your bedroom design idea on an item that you already have then think about what other decor you need to make the whole room work. Curtains, wall art, bedding, rugs and accessories are more of the things you will be choosing. If possible bring the piece with you on shopping trips so you can be sure your selections compliment the item. You could redo an entire room based on a favorite pillow – simply buy accessories in a similar style and match your bedding, rugs, wall colors and wall art in style and color.

Another easier and less expensive method to come up with a bedroom design is to plan it around a coordinated bedding set. Not as much fun or as unique as bringing to life your own idea, but it can work. Some of these sets have matching accessories like pillow, curtains, lamps and at times furniture. You can redo a whole bedroom with a complimentary look in a pinch and in one stop at the store!