0:03
Let's start by understanding what is a brand. A brand is a person's perception of your product, service, experience, or business. For you to attempt to guide people's perception of your brand, you create what's called a brand identity. These are all the visual elements of your brand, and this is where your photography matters the most. From social media posts to ads to printed materials and your website, photography is literally everywhere in a modern e-commerce business.
0:31
So how do you create your brand identity? I recommend starting with a mood board. This is a really simple way and fun way to help get some clarity around the visual brand message that you want to convey to your customers. Here's what you do. Step one, if you don't have one yet, create an account on Pinterest, Instagram, or Google Keep. You're just going to save photos that inspire you and help you define the look of your brand.
0:55
I'm going to create one on Pinterest today. And step two, carve out some time in your schedule to research and find images that you can add to your mood board. Let's look for some inspiration images together. We're going to look for inspiration and images for the Collections page for hats. So let's go to our website here. So this is going to be the theme that we're going to be using. It's the Shopify theme Brooklyn.
1:20
And here we have the header image. Let's scroll down and look at the Collections pages. So this is where-- we'll put the collection for hats in here. You can tell that it's got a picture of a guy right here, but we'll put something interesting for hats. But what do we put there? So this is where creating this mood board will be really helpful. So this is the inspiration mood board that we made for the whole company, in general.
1:46
And you can tell that the general mood is this smiley kind of happy feeling, lots of bright colors, and it just gives a general mood for the whole business. For the Collections page image, I'm just going to do a search for five-panel hats, and you can tell there's just lots and lots of options. And if I go into Google and do a search for five-panel hats, I'll find even more.
2:09
There's just tons and tons of images to choose from. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to find just a cool picture that I think might fit in that Collections page. So maybe this one fits our general style. It's got a smiley guy with a bright color background, so I'm just going to add that. Maybe this guy right here. And then maybe if I see one for a white background that I think has a good angle, maybe I'll just add that as well.
2:39
So I can add this one to Products on White. And you can notice there's just tons and tons of images to add to this mood board. Just add anything that looks interesting and we'll sort through it later. So once you have lots and lots of images to go through, you're good to go. Hopefully you'll start by seeing some patterns emerge with the colors and the mood. Creating your mood board is easy and fun, though you'd be surprised how many people don't do it or just don't think about it.
3:07
But this is just a really great place to start. Now that you have this board, you'll use it throughout the course as a guide for creating photos, hiring photographers, and building your website. Throughout this course, we'll use the term brand photos. We use this term as a general term to refer to more creative images that give your business a personality or a brand. We refer to social media images as brand images as well.
3:33
I separate this out from lifestyle photography because lifestyle photography is an industry term that typically refers to a photo shoot of a model in a location or environment. And you'll learn more about lifestyle photography in module 4. Now that you know how to create mood boards for your brand identity, let's head to the next lesson and understand the value of taking product shots on a white background.