Where To Find Free Stock Images And How To Optimize Them

Every business needs a logo. But not all logos are created equal. 

Even if you have zero design skills, with today’s online tools, you can generate a free or low-cost logo for your business in seconds. That might be good enough when you first get started. But will it still cut it as your business expands? 

The honest answer? Probably not. When you let a low-cost, AI-assisted logo generator do the work for you, or even hire a freelancer to custom-design one, there’s a huge concept-shaped piece missing — your brand identity.

The thing is, in today’s competitive market, it’s getting harder and harder to differentiate one brand from another. That mountain outline and word mark combo might have looked like a steal when you handed over $99, but now you realize it looks like another company’s logo (think Toblerone, Coors, Paramount, Patagonia, Quicksilver, Evian, and more).

With a full brand identity, there’s a lot more going on behind the scenes, including mood boarding, sketching, research, and ideation — everything you need to ensure that your brand stands out from the competition and speaks to your target audience.

Every business has the same need — a logo that people remember.

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What’s a logo design?

A logo design is a symbol or mark that represents a company or organization. Ideally, it’s the first thing that comes to mind when someone thinks of a brand. A well-designed logo needs to be simple, memorable, and easily recognizable. It also needs to reflect the values and personality of a brand. 

When a logo is designed in isolation — and not as part of a complete brand identity — it doesn’t truly represent the brand’s values and personality. At the same time, from a practical perspective, cheaper templated logo designs usually only come in two file types .png and .jpeg. 

In reality, companies need multiple file types and versions to ensure consistency across every touchpoint. This gives them a logo that’s easily scalable, wherever it’s needed — from social media profiles to company t-shirts. 

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What is brand identity?

Brand identity covers all the visual and textual elements that work together to create a consistent and cohesive brand image. It includes logo design, colour palette, typography, imagery, and tone of voice. 

A strong brand identity aids recognition and helps differentiate a business in the minds of customers and stakeholders. Done right, it can establish trust, credibility, and loyalty, serving as a powerful means to build brand reputation and equity.

Successful brand identities should be consistent across all communication channels and touchpoints, reflecting the brand's values, personality, and positioning. A full brand pack from a design studio contains all the file formats and logo variations a company needs to achieve this.

Home design professionals are in a rapidly growing sector. To put that in context, the interior design industry alone is set to reach $255.4 billion USD by 2027. From home staging experts to architects, standing out in a competitive market is becoming increasingly challenging. Take Canada’s interior designers, for example. 73% are based in Ontario and British Columbia. That’s a high density market! 

With a sea of competitors in an ever-growing market, it’s even more important than ever to build a brand image that reflects professionalism and credibility. Whether you're an interior designer, home staging expert, architect — or even a property management broker — a beautiful, clean, and intuitive website, plus a consistent online presence are valuable assets for sharing your best and most recent work.

Your website is a window into your world. It’s the first place potential customers will go to see your work, and where they’ll search for home inspiration and ideas. If your website is outdated, hard to navigate or isn’t eye-catching, you’ll lose potential customers to the next competitor whose website ticks all the right boxes — and some. 

To stay ahead of the field, you need to build the best digital home for your home design business. 

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Dig Deep Foundations

Every building needs the right foundations, otherwise the structure will collapse. The same is true for your website. It’s deeply rooted in your brand image.   

As brand refresh experts, we know how to take your website to the next level. You need the right tools: messaging and minimalist design. Used correctly, these two things will create a remarkable user experience (UX) for both your existing audience and prospects. And you’ll have a standout online presence to be proud of.

Be honest. Is your current digital home a fixer upper? Maybe you’ve done some work on it yourself. Maybe you’ve had parts of it remodelled by a design professional. Maybe you’ve considered knocking it down and starting again. Does it feel like your home? Does it welcome many visitors? If not, it could be time for a complete renovation!

Pre-made website templates are great for getting started on your own, but they lack the custom design and messaging that uniquely speaks to your ideal customers. Differentiation separates your offering from the competition. A professionally designed website will reflect your brand personality, business values, and your unique approach or service. These things help you stand out in a crowded marketplace, and earn your audience’s trust. 

The bottom line is simple: customers want to do business with companies they trust. Even small things can undermine and negatively impact trust. When your brand image and website is outdated, it gives the user a negative perception of your offering. Building and designing a custom brand image helps shape your customers’ perceptions. This builds trust and, over time, advocacy. 

You might know competitors who offer the exact same service as you. They might have the same price point, they might even be in the same town, or the same province. Let’s say, for example, you’re one of over 24,000 interior designers in Canada. Differentiating your company from your competitors is essential because product and price are easily replicated.

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A Blueprint For Success

At Khula Design Studio, we’ve helped other businesses in a similar space as you to differentiate themselves and create a standout brand image. How do we do it? Here’s our blueprint for success:

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1. It starts with a proven concept or business. Maybe you’re an existing business that’s been running for a few years or more. Maybe you need a refresh, a positive change, or you’re ready for a complete transformation. Your business guides our design. 

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2. We then get to know who you are, what you do, and, how you service your existing customers. We discover what makes you unique by unpacking your entire business. This is surfaced through a brand script and storytelling, which goes on to inform the custom UX/UI web design phase of the project.

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3. The design phase then begins. We map out the pages and structure through UX wireframing, finding the right flow for your pages based on the user journey. This tells us what sections or content we want to show and how we want to show it to appeal to your users.

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4. With the structure mapped out, we infuse the brand identity and visual aspects of the brand to bring the website to life. This includes professional images, walkthrough videos, brand identity, colours, and fonts. We’re like an interior designer picking out textures, colours, fixtures and fittings to bring the home to life. We make it feel like a home instead of house.

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5. Once the design is in place, and we’re happy with the flow, construction begins. We build out the site in the all-in-one, no-code platform — Webflow. Our interior and home designers and architects love this tool because going forward, it gives them the power to easily update their work or project pages through Webflow's powerful content management system (CMS). Working in Webflow provides a future-ready website that can evolve and grow with any business.

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6. As we continue to build, we ensure that the foundations, walls, and structure of your new digital home meet industry best practices. This minimizes defects. Before going live, we do thorough QA and debugging, so there’s no chance of it coming crashing down after we hand over the keys. We also ensure your new digital home has all the right SEO fundamentals, so it gets picked up by search engines.  

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You’ve invested in your brand. It’s clearly doing something. But what? 

There’s no question that a strong brand has a measurable impact on business performance. But — without getting lost in a matrix of metrics — it can be difficult for solopreneurs, as well as small and growing businesses, to quantify their branding’s return on investment. 

Why? Because the impact is not always obviously or immediately measurable.

Add to this the fact that the cost of professional branding for a solopreneur or startup might be a sizable chunk of your capital, and there’s even more need for clarity. 

So what kind of return on investment can you reasonably expect to see from paying for quality, professional design, and branding? 

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What is branding ROI?

The ROI of brand building is — in very simple terms — a strong brand: one which gradually attracts more customers who will buy more often, at a higher price.    

One major component of brand success, and therefore branding ROI, is brand awareness. Brand awareness is a way of measuring how well people remember and retell their experiences of your business: 

There are a variety of ways to measure it:

• Surveying your target audience
• Using Google Trends data
• Tracking website traffic
• Monitoring your social media following

Whether earned through your website, meetings, social media — or any other brand touchpoints — strong brand ROI results in improved reputation, increased traffic, sales conversions, and ultimately business growth. 

With effective branding and a compelling brand story, the ultimate measure of branding ROI is a premium price product or service which generates higher profitability. In effect, it elevates the perceived market value of a product or service. 

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A Long Term Investment

There are many ways to evaluate the effectiveness of the ROI of your branding. From organic search volume to customer acquisition rates, your measure of success depends on your business and its industry.

While you may see gains now from repeated short-term marketing activities, the ROI of branding ultimately relates to long-term investment that incrementally drives stronger sales growth — not a fleeting uplift. 

Short-term marketing initiatives may result in a spike in sales, whereas the real branding ROI is a cumulative, ever-increasing rise in brand awareness levels. 

You only have to view Interbrand’s yearly report on the Best Global Brands to see the power of strong brands, and how they consistently outperform competitors. It’s that long term investment in brand-building that creates longevity, and a robustness that ensures the business endures bad times, as well as good.