How To Be Your Own Creative Director

Creative direction is about the visible and the invisible. It’s about what you can see, and what you can’t. It has to do with your brand identity – graphics, fonts, colors, and imagery – but it also includes utilizing your brand strategy – like your ideal audience, brand messaging, and brand personality – to bring your brand to life.

Did you know brand consistency is a foundational step in your overall brand strategy? It’s also a great step to master when you are acting as your own creative director. If you want to learn how, download the Brand Habits Stack to help you you.

What is a Creative Director?

I’ll just get right to it: a creative director knows the brand and implements it. That is the most simple and accurate way that I could put it.

It’s making decisions, setting the rules and expectations, sticking to them, and then implementing it across your brand.

Now, if you’re here, you’re probably like, “Okay, but how do I actually do that?”

And that’s what we’re going to talk about today: The how behind creative direction.

In a traditional setting, creative directors oversee the artistic direction and visual representation of a brand. Their main job is to bring ideas to life through campaigns and assets like graphics, video, and messaging. They follow and enforce brand guidelines, while using the brand’s strategy to inform their decisions.

That might sound like a very ‘corporate’ explanation, but I wanted to go over that first so we could talk about what that means practically for you in your small business.

Being your own creative director in the small business setting – as in, you’re a team of one or maybe a few – simply means that you have guidelines and a plan for all the creative elements of your brand, and you help yourself and others go forth and conquer that plan.

In this role, you’re likely in charge of both the brand strategy and the brand identity – and maybe you hire some of those aspects out, like hiring a brand designer or brand strategist – but ultimately you’re in charge of helping to form and enforce these things on a day-to-day basis.

For instance, if you’re putting together anything from a free guide to a product to sell, it will all need to be branded. Everything you put out there should use your brand’s logo, fonts, colors, messaging, and photography style.

Everything you make should also be informed by your brand’s strategy – such as your value proposition, keeping your ideal audience in mind, and utilizing your brand voice and personality.

Who decides what your brand guidelines are, what your strategy is, and where to get everything from? Well… you do.

The brand designer you’ve hired to create your brand identity can help, of course, but they’re not going to be around forever. Long after they’re gone, you’re still the one who will have to learn your brand and implement everything in a consistent and on-brand way.

That’s why finding what it means to be a creative director for your own brand is so important.

You don’t have to be perfect at it, and you definitely have permission to mess it up. The big thing here is that you’re continually learning, implementing, and improving as you go.

And by the way, these same things apply whether you’re a team of 1 or a team of 500 – It’s just that on a team of 500, there will likely be more specialized roles and actual humans to help the brand accomplish this, rather than hiring it out or figuring it out on your own.

Here are 6 steps, based on my own experience, to learn how to be your brand’s creative director.

Step #1: Get To Know Your Business

You might be well past this point, but just to start everything off where we need to, I had to mention this step first.

Let’s say you’re entirely new to this whole brand and business thing. You can’t learn to be your own creative director without first knowing your own brand.

If you haven’t already, here are a few things you’ll need to have down first:

  1. Your business name and what you’re going to sell
  2. Your brand strategy – which I talked about in the most recent episodes, but this typically includes things like:
    • Your brand value
    • Your ideal audience
    • Your brand personality
    • Your brand messaging
  3. And lastly, I haven’t gone too deep into this on the podcast yet, but just to note, it would also be a good idea to do some market and competitor research.

Before you zone out, hear me out: These things are NOT hard to figure out – but you do have to set aside the time to get it done.

Step #2: Learn Branding Basics

There are terms you need to know to be able to move forward, such as “style guide”, “brand guide”, “brand consistency”, and “branded graphics”.

It helps to have some of the lingo down, so that when you’re searching, learning, and making decisions, you know what is being said and done.

The really exciting part is that learning these concepts will set you up for success as you and your brand grow. Once you get the terms in your brain, you’ll be able to reference them at any time.

You’ll also be able to speak to your team (if you have one), and clearly communicate with your brand designer and any vendors you might hire.

Some terms I recommend you start with:

  • Brand identity
  • Brand messaging
  • Brand strategy
  • Tagline or slogan
  • Vector file
  • Trademark
  • Copyright
  • Brand mood board
  • Brand style guide
  • Brand typography
  • Brand color palette
  • Brand consistency
  • Branded graphics

I could go on but I’ll just stop there. Maybe you already know what these terms are, but in case you don’t, conduct a search and start learning.

Step #3: Find Your Ideal Audience & The Messaging That Speaks To Them

I know I’ve said this before and I’ll continue to say it:

Everything stems from your messaging, even design and visual direction. That’s why I encourage you to figure out your messaging before you ever hire a brand designer.

As much as we want you to believe we’re super magical, brand designers can’t design something out of nothing.

We need information and a path – in other words, some creative direction – to go off of.

Of course, a great designer can help you form some of these items – but that’s getting into brand strategy territory, not just brand identity.

Knowing your audience and crafting your messaging literally helps to connect all of the other dots.

If you can do some of this work yourself beforehand, you’ll be ahead of the game and SO glad you did.

If you need help identifying your ideal audience, head to episode #11 of my podcast, The Sweet Brand Show, for more on that, and grab the Brand Strategy Framework Template linked in the show notes.

If you want to craft your own brand tagline, head to episode #8 for 5 steps to making your own brand tagline.

Step #4: Gather Inspiration & Make A Mood Board

After you have a grasp of basic branding terms, and you’ve started on your messaging and ideal audience, you can then begin to think about a mood board for your brand.

BTW: “Mood board” is just a fancy word for “inspiration document”.

Everything you know about your brand up to now is going to inform what you choose to go on your mood board. Your brand strategy, messaging, ideal audience – all of it will play a part.

This is an important step in the creative process because:

#1: It gets everything out on paper (either digital or physical) so that you and everyone else can see what you envision for your brand.

#2: It helps you get your thoughts organized

#3: It’s what you need to do, because trust me, your future brand designer is going to want this information.

Side note: If you’re new to this, just hang in there and keep listening – this is where the fun really starts.

Making a mood board for your brand doesn’t need to be fancy, or complicated – you just need to get inspired and start taking notes.

For me, I do this with Pinterest boards and the notes app on my phone.

I’ve also been known to take screenshots or photos of things I like, and group them into an album or folder. You can store ideas on your desktop, phone, or your favorite cloud-based app. Whatever method you like to store ideas (like when you find recipes or a DIY project you want to try), use that for this step.

Begin to find images, graphics, words and ideas that speak to you, that make you think “I love that!” or “I want my brand to be like that!”

Save everything as you go.

Then, when you feel like you’ve gathered enough inspiration, drag and drop your most FAVORITE images – the ones you feel represent your brand best – into a document that you can easily access from anywhere (I like Google Docs and Google Drive).

This inspiration document is the start of your Mood Board.

Creating this yourself might sound like a tedious task or maybe even like something you shouldn’t be doing, however, this is the step that’s going to help you learn about your brand, what you do and do not want, and will ultimately help you in talking about your brand to your team, your vendors, your future brand designer, and your clients and customers.

Your Mood Board is what you’ll reference as you go on to choose and finalize creative elements for your brand.

If you want to learn more about Mood Boards and how I make them, I go into this process with a video tutorial and template inside The B.Y.B. Toolkit.

A quick side note here: Please keep in mind that you’re making a mood board for inspiration, not to copy anyone in any way. It’s not to use or show publicly, it’s just for you, to get the creativity flowing and help you with ideas.

Step #5: Get Your Brand Identity & Brand Guide Created

If you’re here reading this, I’m going to assume you’re not in it for the $50 cookie-cutter logo.

You’re going through the process of learning these concepts and even creating your own mood board, so I’m going to assume you’re in this for real and you want something legit.

Once you get to this step, you’re ready to hire a professional – and use your mood board to help them make a brand you love and your audience can’t forget!

But this is just one small piece to the bigger puzzle here. Your brand identity doesn’t all the sudden make you a creative director or expert of your brand.

Learning about your brand, making and sticking to decisions, and consistency of implementation is what will make you your brand’s creative director.

Have your brand identity made along with a brand guide or style guide, which will help you with the next step.

Step #6: Uphold Brand Consistency & Implementation Of The Brand

This is where the rubber meets the road and the actual work of it gets done – and where you really become your own creative director.

For everything that needs a creative touch, like your visuals, messaging, ads, website, products, services, etc., you’ll be involved.

You’ll use your brand identity, your brand style guide, and your brand strategy to help you make creative decisions for your brand.

You’ll know the brand, implement it, uphold it, and help others do the same.

Today’s Action Steps

Okay, that was a lot to go through, so here’s a recap of the 6 steps you can get going on today:

  1. Get to know your business
  2. Learn branding basics, and download the Brand Habits Stack to help you out.
  3. Find your ideal audience and messaging that speaks to them
  4. Gather inspiration and make a mood board
  5. Get your brand identity and brand guide created
  6. Uphold brand consistency and implementation of the brand

Being a creative director means learning about your brand, and knowing it from the inside out – and then giving yourself and others direction on how to uphold it. And the really fun and cool part about being a small business owner is that YOU get to decide! You just have to follow your own rules.

I’m a believer in learning by doing, so I encourage you to learn how to be your own creative director by trying it out.

Do it imperfectly, and make decisions – even without being 100% sure it’s the ‘right’ choice.

If you want to learn more about all the branding things, be sure to subscribe to my podcast, The Sweet Brand Show, for new episodes! Thank you for being here – now go out and make YOUR BRAND a sweet one!