Cabin Fever Podcast | Branding Guide
BRANDING & SOCIAL MEDIA FOR
‘CABIN FEVER’
It’s not particularly unusual for my professional background to come in handy in my personal life, but it is rare that I have a good reason to create a completely new brand for myself.
Luckily my old flatmate Fiona (from Bright Cactus) and I have given in to overwhelming market demand and started a podcast. The content of this revolutionary audio production isn’t particularly appropriate for our professional channels and the refined exterior we so smoothly project, but the branding sure is, so that’s what I’m going to explore.
The basic idea was to combine elements of our individual branding & aesthetics into something that would look at home on either of our feeds, but also retain a separate visual identity of its own.
Fiona’s content tends to consist of bright colours (as her business name might suggest) - primarily pinks and greens. My aesthetic, across both my professional channels and my personal ones, is more neutral and primarily incorporates different shades of blue and grey.
We are both fans of conveniently placed foliage so green could have been a potential crossover, but it didn’t feel right for the podcast so instead I started with a subdued shade of warm-toned pink and built from there. This pink is eye-catching enough to stand out in a lineup of other podcasts (essential), but muted enough that it didn’t feel forced (don’t want to get fatigued with our own branding).
Do I think a bit too much about these things? Yes. But it is literally my job, plus it turned out fab, so who’s to judge.
To complete the colour palette, I knew I wanted two contrasting but complimentary options to incorporate throughout our official collateral and more casually on socials, so I chose a deep navy as our darker shade (black and pink didn’t sit right will me after the MySpace days) and the rest unfolded pretty easily.
I defined which specific colour combos we’ll generally use - for instance the two pinks together and any blues together are a yes, but we wouldn’t likely put the light pink on the light blue for a main graphic, or use charcoal for a large area.
Font-wise we needed a sturdier option and an accent. Once I’d chosen those it was a matter of simply putting together a few logo options in photoshop and seeing what we liked.
In the end we have five different acceptable colour combos for our logos & formal branding (the two inversions of the original pink & navy with a similar tone a few shades lighter, and a lighter blue option if we’re feeling adventurous), two versions of the primary logo itself (with and without additional text) and a compact branding mark for use when a full logo would be too much.
Did I put together this entire pack in a single four hour sprint when I should have been sleeping? Perhaps.
Was it worth it? Without a doubt. Putting together a branding guide right at the start has made so many things run far more smoothly than they would have otherwise.
For our first mini-campaign to raise initial awareness and promote the podcast pre-launch we decided to play on the theme of the episode (International Breakups) and turn actual texts from our exes into memes. I’ll write more on the actual social/marketing side of things in a separate post, but having our branding so clearly defined made putting together these posts - and the rest of our content for the IG launch - stress-free and quick.
Deciding last minute that we wanted to create a companion playlist for the show, all I had to do was take the primary logo, change “podcast” to “playlist” and add a navy accent behind the substituted word to highlight the difference. Our grid is cohesive, everything looks professional and the first impression a new listener will get when coming across any of our content is a positive one. Not to toot my own horn, but A+ work.
I’m sure our branding will develop as the show goes on, but as a starting point and means of giving the podcast a clear identity in our own minds and those of our followers, mission accomplished.
Find Cabin Fever on instagram here, but as this is a business-related post and a very un-business-related podcast I will reiterate for all our sakes - listen at your own discretion.