Why These Digital Products Sell Like Crazy on Etsy

0:00 What do these best selling digital products on Etsy have in common? According to listing view, this wedding stationery bundle is only seven months old and has made 260 sales for a total revenue of $14,000. This 11 month old social media tablet listing has made 362 sales for over $5,000 in revenue, and this Airbnb digital welcome book has made over $13,000 in revenue from 939 sales in months. What do they share? A solid visual identity. They feel cohesive. The colors make sense together and the fonts don't feel random. Everything just looks intentional. And that's what we're going to talk about today.

0:45 I'm going to show you how to think more like. 30. I'm going to show you how to think a bit more like a professional graphic designer, and create that same level of polish using something called a brand board. Hi, I'm J. I've been selling on Etsy for almost two years now, both digital products and print on demand, and I also have a bit of a background in graphic design. Well, ten years to be exact. But I want to make one thing clear upfront. You don't need to be a graphic designer to succeed on Etsy. In fact, a lot of successful sellers start with almost zero design experience. That said, if you do have an understanding of design, you have an advantage

1:31 because you stop guessing what works and start making intentional decisions. And that is our goal for today. Now, before we get into making a brand board, let's just clarify some things real quick. What is a visual identity? Well, quite literally, these are the things that you can see, like your colors, your fonts and your images. But branding is something entirely different and comprises more than that. It includes the things that you don't see in a literal sense, like your customer service, your history, your values, and even the way you treat people who work for your company and on Etsy, your products or your digital products or print on demand products, can have their own visual identity separate from your shops branding.

2:17 So one product can feel like it's more soft and feminine, and then another can feel more minimal and corporate. And then there's maybe another one that's more bold and playful. They all serve different people and they don't need to look all the same. What matters is that each one feels cohesive on its own. So what is a brand board for? Well, at its core, it's basically a visual reference where you can define your colors, fonts, and images all in one place so that your design feels more consistent. But honestly, that definition doesn't really capture why this is so important, especially in the context of selling on Etsy. Because on Etsy, you're not just designing things

3:04 to look nice, you're actually competing in a marketplace where people are scrolling fast and making split second decisions, and they're judging your products based almost entirely on how it looks. And this is where most beginners get stuck. They'll may be open up Canva, start designing by picking a random color, and maybe switch it halfway, and then try a font, and then another font that feels like it looks good to them. And then add some graphics here and there. And by the end of everything, sure, maybe technically they have a template that works, but it might not feel cohesive and it feels a bit off, and your customers can actually feel that too. Even if they can't explain why. So a brand board would fix that.

3:51 It forces you to make these decisions once and upfront so that when you're actually designing your product, you're not guessing anymore. You're just executed, and the result is that your product starts to feel more intentional, more polished, and even more expensive, which you can actually charge more for. And here's another way that you can use this that I think is even more powerful. You can use brand boards to deconstruct best selling products, not copy them, but to study them. So instead of looking at a bestseller and thinking, okay, I'll just copy this, you get to zoom out and break it down and start noticing some patterns. And a lot of these products actually follow very specific design rules, but they're just packaged differently.

4:38 That's the difference between copying and understanding. Copying might keep you stuck, but understanding actually lets you create your own products that still feel like they belong in that same level of quality. So the goal of a brand board is a do box you in creatively, but to give you a system so that whatever you actually create looks like it belongs together and competes with the products that are already doing well on Etsy. Now, with that out of the way, let's build a brand board with the help of Kittle, which has become one of the most important, non-negotiable tools that I use whenever I'm designing digital products and print on demand products. So there are five different parts to a brand board. Well, there could be more, but let's just stick to five for now.

5:25 And the first one is of course, your logo. Now this one is pretty simple. If you're creating a brand board for your shop, then yes, you could put your logo in your brand board. But if you're selling digital products, especially templates and those specifically for businesses, you don't actually need to put one. This is because people would, of course, one customize their product and make it their own. So if you put your shops logo in the template, that would be kind of weird. And it might actually even lower the value of the digital product. So most of the time you can either just leave it out or use a placeholder like an empty square, for example.

6:13 So in our brand board, I'm just going to type in here a placeholder, my logo, and let's just center that. Pretty simple. Let's move on to the next part which is your colors. Colors do a lot of heavy lifting in your design. They set the tone immediately, and even before someone reads anything or knows what your product is specifically, they already have a feeling about your product based on the colors alone. And you've probably heard about color psychology like blue is for peace. Red is for love, and green is for nature and health. Knowing that stuff can help you choose colors. But honestly, what matters

6:59 more than that is actually how your colors work together. And a simple structure for choosing your colors is first. You can choose 1 to 3 main colors, and this would serve as the main personality of your design. And then you can choose 2 to 3 neutrals. Now this would be your black, white, maybe even beige or navy blue. And this would balance out the design and give it more breathing room. Now in our brand board I'm just going to create some circles for our colors. These three will be our main colors and these three will be our neutrals.

7:45 So one strategy for choosing colors is going a bit into color theory. And we do this by going into the color wheel. Now first we have our complementary colors. And these are colors that are opposite to each other. So for example we have and a blue we have verbal and yellow and red and green. And then we have our analogous colors which are 2 to 4 colors side by side. So for example that's the red, orange and lighter orange or the green, turquoise and blue. Those are considered your analogous color scheme. And then we have monochrome which is just one color but different shades.

8:33 So let's go for example with the thread we have the bright red, the parcel red and somewhat pink shade of red that is monochrome. For today, let's just stick with a monochromatic color palette and I'm going to go with a lime green. I'm going to have this main lime green, and then a darker shade of that and a lighter shade of that. Then for our neutrals, let's stick with the basics. Just white, black and maybe a gray. Now, if you're feeling stuck with choosing colors, there's actually a simple hack that I like to do.

9:19 I actually just like to go to Google and search for something like a spring color palette. And I like using images that look like this where we have a reference image, and then it's sort of fixed colors from that image to give us a palette that is a super easy way to not overthink color selection. You can just look for these types of images and then copy that into your brand board. But for now we're just going to stick with our monochromatic green. I'm just going to label this main colors. And our neutrals.

10:05 Now for the next section we move on to the parts and fonts can completely change how your design would feel like. You could use the exact same colors as another product, but if you change the font, the whole vibe can completely shift. A good way to structure this is just to choose 2 to 3 fonts with clear roles. First, you have your heading or your primary font. Then you have your body or secondary font, and then you have your accent. Now your heading would be the personality of the design, and it would be the most eye catching fund of your design. And this would be used for stuff like your titles, your main bullet points.

10:52 So for our heading, I'm just going to choose a bold sensory. If Kittle has a lot of fonts here that you could choose, and you don't have to overthink it because they are curated. So for our heading, I'm just going to go with Proxima Nova in bold. And then you have your body font, which would be your workhorse. And it needs to be easy to read because this would take up the bulk of your copy in the design. And by copy I mean your boxes of text, like for example, in a newspaper, right? You have your headline and then you have the article itself. The body font is what you use for the actual content of the article. You should use a sensory or Acer font for this.

11:42 For our body, I'm going to use the same Proxima Nova, but in regular. Let's actually label that Nova Regular and Proxima Nova Bold. And then you have your accent font, which would add a bit more character to your design. And this should just take up small amounts of space, usually on Etsy. One of the most popular fonts for accent fonts is the Brittany font. So it's this girly cursive font. But if you want to stand out, there's a whole world out there that isn't just the Britney font. Okay? You could use italics, for example, as accent funds for an accent font, I wanted to do something cursive, so let's try to look for something like that.

12:30 Let's look for something that's more handwritten, but also cursive. I want to go with this one. It is called Hilbert. All right. That will serve as our accent. And again just stick to 2 to 3 fonts. If you go beyond that, things can start to feel a bit more messy unless you really know what you're doing. Usually when a design has four or more fonts, it's more of the artistic types of graphic design products, like posters. So yes, just stick to 2 to 3 fonts. But even the most professional graphic designers, they can get away

13:17 with just one font family. And by that I mean like for example, the Helvetica font, they could just use the bold version, the regular version and the light version, and that would make up the whole font structure for their design. Next we have your imagery and graphics, and I'm grouping these together because the principle is kind of the same, whether you're using photos or graphics in your design. The key here is consistency. Now when it comes to photos, you have to ask like what's the color tone? Is it more warm, cool, muted, or vibrant? What is the lighting like? Is it more dark and mysterious, or is it like bright and happy? And what is the overall mood of the photo?

14:04 I have some examples here of these family and engagement shoots. Now as you can see, this set here has more browns and sepia tones to them. And this image here is more saturated and bright. So if you would put this in this group of photos, it doesn't really belong. And that's what I mean by having visual consistency. Because if you mix in this sort of image in your design, it would actually make it look more cheap. And the same goes for graphics like are they doodle style or are they more clean and vector like? Do they have thick outlines or thin lines, or do they even have lines at all?

14:51 These are all stuff that matters, for we have Bachelorette graphics here. This one is more of a doodle style, and this one is more of the blocky vector style. So as much as possible, use just one style for your entire product. And I know that sometimes finding matching graphics can be kind of tricky. You have to look through all these stop photos or stop graphics to make them match. But fortunately for Kittle, you can actually just generate these types of graphics within your artboard without having to go through hundreds and hundreds of graphics. Having consistency in your images and graphics

15:36 is actually the easiest way to make your product look more premium. So just pick one style and commit to that. For our brand board, I'm going to go here to illustrations and I'm gonna add some masks. And these would act as placeholders for our images. And then now here on photos. I'm going to select the photos that I would want to use for this band board. Im just going to drag it here and make it fit the mask.

16:35 Just to show you an example of visual consistency. I'm going to choose the vector style of graphic. So we have clean lines here. Also, the corners are rounded. And I'm just going to place a few to show what it looks like for graphics to be sort of uniform. And for our imagery, I chose these photos with more neutral color grading and low contrast. Now finally, we have our last section, which are the textures and patterns. This is more of a bonus layer, but it adds a lot of character

17:20 to your design and it can make it feel more trendy. For example, on Etsy right now was huge. Our stripes, checkers and the grunge texture. So you can incorporate these to keep up with the times, but you don't want your textures to be fighting with your main content. They should actually just support the design and not overpower it. For this brand board, I'm going to go with checkers. And there we have a super simple, super quick brand board that we made in about ten minutes. And if you actually notice, this is based on one of the products that I showed a while ago, it is actually based on the social media template bundle. And this is what I've been talking about, how to reference bestsellers on Etsy

18:09 and how to deconstruct them because we've learned a lot of things from this template. First of all, you have the colors, right? So the color here, the main color is a lime green. And while green usually represents health and nature. This one was paired with a more bold and blocky font, which changed the vibe entirely to something more energetic and eccentric and modern, and maybe even techy. And with this accent font of this marker kind of handwritten font, it breaks apart the monotony and makes it more fun. Then we have the images with a neutral color grading. Even the clothing is subdued and neutral, but the people

18:55 give off this girlboss kind of vibe. But it's not too girly that it would alienate maybe a male audience who might be interested in this type of template as well. And then we have the checkers pattern, which are really trendy to let us know that this brand is up with the times. All in all, we have a visual identity that is energetic, edgy, maybe for a business that is in the tech or consultancy space and there is a specific audience for it, but it's not super niche down that it alienates too many people. And that is why and how it has become a best selling product. And that's basically your brand board.

19:42 Once you have this, designing becomes so much easier because you don't have to start from scratch every time. You don't have to keep on guessing. And most importantly, your products feel more consistent and intentional, which makes it look more valuable. So if you have a product that's doing well, you can actually use this brand board to expand into other products without losing that same look and feel. For example, let's take this visual identity that we just referenced and apply it to one of Gerald's templates. Kittle has so many templates that you can use for almost every purpose, whether that's creating a shop banner, listing infographics, media kits, and so much more. By the way, I made this brand board with these notes

20:28 as a terrible template that you can use, and it's free. It's on Kittle and you don't need a paid account to access it. But if you do end up liking your experience on Kittle and want to explore more of its features like generating images, generating videos, vectorized images, removing backgrounds and all that fun stuff, you can use my code white for 25% of your first Kittle subscription, whether that's a monthly subscription or a yearly subscription. So yeah, if you found this video helpful, please give this video a like. It helps the algorithm push this video to more people who might like it or learn from it. And please subscribe if you haven't yet. I'm trying to be more intentional with the videos that I want to create moving forward,

21:14 and I've noticed that there aren't that many advanced graphic design strategies paired with the context of selling on Etsy, so I feel like I want to do more of that, so please leave a comment below if you're interested in seeing that kind of stuff. Anyway, thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video.