Just like with that closet full of clothes, when you’re trying to create the visual elements of your business—colours, fonts, images, templates—it can feel like you’re drowning in choices and going around in circles unable to settle on a direction. 😵
Decision fatigue refers to the mental and emotional exhaustion that results from making too many decisions, especially in a short period. The more decisions you make, the more your brain’s ability to make quality decisions declines. This can lead to poor decision-making, avoidance of decision-making, or reliance on default choices.
Here’s what it looks like when you’re doing your own branding:
The Poor Decision Maker
You make random, quick choices just so you get your branding DONE. Do you really like it? No. Does it reflect you? No. But “Done is better than perfect”, right? While I do believe that saying is true, it’s also no way to approach something as important as shaping the way your business is perceived if you’re serious about what you do.
The Avoidant Decision Maker
This could be one of the most common ones I see.
It all feels too hard, so you simply take no action at all. Year after year, your branding or website sits half-done on your computer, hiding from the world. Every time you think about the fact that you’re still procrastinating it, you feel bad.
The Default Chooser
This speaks to me as either doing what you’ve always done (even if it was one of those poor decisions) or following industry trends just because it seems like what everyone’s doing and therefore the ‘safe’ route.
But what you’re forgetting is that the whole purpose of branding is differentiating your offering from others in the market, so following trends usually defeats the whole purpose of what we’re trying to do here!
If you can relate to any of these people, check out my top tips for simplifying the decision-making process so you actually get a brand and website out into the world and it’s aligned to who you are as a business and person:
1. Start with the Heart and Soul of Your Brand 💖
If you’re making visual branding choices based solely on what you perceive to look nice, then you may find yourself more overwhelmed.
Whether you LOVE so many styles and don’t know which to pick or NOTHING feels quite ‘you’, you’re likely to get lost in overwhelming land by approaching your branding styles this way.
Instead, I recommend you start by figuring out
- What am I really trying to say here?
- How do I want people to see my brand?
- What is my ideal client longing to feel?
- What aligns with my personal energy and the energy of my message?
Everything should be rooted back to a meaningful message.
Because whether you realise it or not, every colour, font, graphic and photo choice SAYS something about who you are as a business.
The question is, what is it saying?
For example, you want to put a butterfly in your logo because you like butterflies, but how is that shaping your brand’s perception?
👉 Is it shaping it the way you want?
👉 Is it calling in your aligned people?
👉 Is it making you look high calibre or is it cheapening your look?
👉 Is it making you look quirky or serious?
👉 Is it making you look friendly or sophisticated?
👉 Is it making you look bold or soft?
Rather than deciding you want a butterfly and trying to retrofit a meaning that makes sense to it, it’s usually better to start with the meaning and feeling you want to express and then open your mind up to the possibilities of how that could be expressed.
Having this clarity will make it so much easier to sift through branding style options and focus on what truly aligns with your essence.
2. Authenticity Over Trends
This ties into the first tip because when you start with what’s meaningful to you, you won’t get swayed by what everyone else is doing.
You scroll through Instagram or Pinterest and see brands with gorgeous designs, and you think, I want that too.
But just because you think it looks beautiful doesn’t necessarily mean it fits YOU.
Trends are fleeting. What’s “hot” today might not be tomorrow. But your brand’s authenticity? That’s timeless.
Instead of chasing the latest design trend, focus on what makes you, you.
What colours, styles, and images make you feel excited and aligned with your business’s mission?
What do you truly connect with? When you design with authenticity, it’s easier to attract the right people—those who resonate with your energy and what your brand stands for.
It’s like this: if your brand was a person, would it be trying to fit in with the crowd, or would it be confidently showing up as itself?
Keep your visuals true to you—that’s where the real power lies. This approach also ensures your branding styles stay timeless rather than trendy.
3. Permission to allow your branding to evolve
Here’s the thing, your brand is a living breathing entity of its own. It grows and evolves with you, by your side as you, as the founder, weave through the seasons of your life, learning and growing.
I think part of the overwhelm can come from needing your visual branding to be this ‘perfect’ thing that will carry you through ALL the seasons, pivots, twists and turns.
But the truth is, it probably won’t. And that’s ok. I branded a financial planner close to a decade ago who still has the same logo, colours and fonts.
As personal brands and creative, sensitive types, we’re usually more inclined to tweak our branding more than others. Authenticity, alignment, and self-expression are so important to us.
Perfectionism can be a big roadblock in the design process. It’s easy to get caught up in the idea that everything needs to be flawless.
But let’s face it: perfection doesn’t exist, and neither should the stress of trying to achieve it.
I’m not saying you should just chuck something up to get it done, but on the other end of the spectrum, you can get so obsessed with tweaking things to make it ‘right’ that it never sees the light of day.
Don’t get lost in the small details—focus on the big picture.
4. Start With Colour
Colour is usually the easiest visual branding element for my clients to play with. I think that’s because we deal with colour daily, whether that is through our clothes, how we decorate our homes or the many other ways colour shows up in our lives.
In comparison, most of my clients don’t really know much about fonts or graphics.
So start where you feel most comfortable and build out the “visual world” that your business plays in from there. A good way to imagine this concept of your brand’s “world” is the Barbie movie. That was literally like bringing a brand’s aesthetic to life.
Is your brand:
- light and airy?
- deep and moody?
- bright and fiery?
- earthy and muted?
These four core categories are a really good starting place.
While I believe your branding styles should be very nuanced and custom to you, having clarity on a broad, overarching style your brand can sit in helps narrow things down.
I build upon this concept of the FOUR brand energies (Airy, Earthy, Fiery and Watery) in my FREE mini-course Magnetic Brand Aesthetic.
If you’ve been overwhelmed by visual branding, this one is for you!
✹ In just 10 minutes you can narrow down your vision
✹ Swipe over 30 plug-and-play brand colour palettes and font ideas
✹ BEAUTIFUL PDF guide and accompanying video to support you
If you want your visual branding to express your energy and essence, while speaking to your ideal client’s longings and desires, this guide is calling your name.
Ready to magnetise aligned clients with ease? ↓
Download my Magnetic Brand Aesthetic guide to get started.
