3 Free Online Tools to Help You Find a Brand's Assets From Their Website
You can discover a brand’s official fonts and colors, as well as their website’s content management system (CMS) and more, using free tools online. Here’s how!
A great marketing department will do what it can to ensure brand compliance across the company. Part of successful brand management is monitoring a business’s brand assets. Are employees using the correct colors, logos, typefaces, etc.? Everything must be cohesive and consistent in order to measurably build brand awareness in your market. But what happens if employees don’t have a “great marketing department” to share those assets? How would you find them on your own?
While we clearly don’t have that problem as employees at Elevate My Brand, the agency itself from time to time runs into this issue with clients. Sometimes we start to work with startups or small companies and realize that the business doesn’t have a brand book. (Yikes!) So where do we go without that guidance?
Well, sometimes we visit the company’s online headquarters: its website. Many of a company’s brand assets can be accessed from its website with only the use of a few free tools.
Where do I find a brand’s ___?
Usually, your website acts as the source of truth about your visual brand. Even if your company does not have an official brand book—psst, we can help with that—you probably set some brand standards out of necessity when you launched your website. Not only is a website one of the first pieces of branded content a company creates, but it also serves as a central source of truth. Sharing a social post? Link to the website. Sending a sale email? Link to the website. Mailing a promo postcard? Yep, link to the website.
Since a website is a business’s hub, it’s the best place to go to get a good sense of its messaging and visual brand. However, unless you’re a graphics or marketing genius, you’re not going to immediately know what font the site uses, for instance. Fortunately, there are free tools to help you.
Use WhatFontIs.com for fonts.
Discover what typeface a brand uses by taking a screenshot of the text and uploading it to WhatFontIs.com. Make sure the text has a high contrast against its background, and ensure the text is as crisp in quality as possible. If a large header isn’t available, zoom in on the body copy as much as you can. You’ll need at least eight unique letters or so. The site will take you through a process of separating and identifying specific letters in the screenshot, and then it will show you what the font is in your screenshot. It’s not always perfect, and sometimes if the font is obscure WhatFontIs may not know it, but the tool works at least 90% of the time for me.
Use Google Chrome Dev tools for colors.
Find the exact hex codes for the colors on a site using Google Chrome’s Developer tools. You don’t need to be a website developer in order to make this work, so don’t worry. First, open Google Chrome and go to the website from which you want to extract the brand colors. Once you’re there, click the three dots in the top-right corner of your browser, hover over More Tools and select Developer Tools. You can also accomplish this by right-clicking on the site and choosing Inspect. Once you see the website code on the right-hand side of the screen, make sure Elements is selected at the top. Now, you can see a ton of technical information about the site. In the bottom section called Styles, there’s a search box labeled Filter. Simply type in a pound sign or hashtag and you’ll be able to see a lot of color elements that look like this: #2c1d53 or #50b7bc.
Three notes:
- If you don’t understand hex codes but you do understand RGB or CYMK, use RapidTables or HexToRGB to convert them.
- You can also use services such as Color Combos to find the colors quicker, but in my experience, it isn’t as accurate as Google’s Developer Tools.
- It's important to use the correct color rather than guessing and getting it close. Even the smallest detail factors into brand recognition. Check out the Coca-Cola logo and see if you can figure out which one is correct and which one is incorrect. You may surprise yourself!*
Use WhatCMS.org for management systems.
A content management system (CMS) is a software that allows you to build and/or edit a website without being a developer. Common CMS are Squarespace, Shopify and WordPress. While a CMS isn’t exactly a branded “asset,” it is important to know which system a company uses in case you need to log in or update the site. The way to find the CMS is simple: paste the website’s URL into the search bar on WhatCMS.org. Not only will this service use the site’s HTML structure to tell you which CMS it uses, but it can also tell you other data such as the site’s web server and its linked social media profiles.
What if I need more support?
These three tools are incredible, but they’re no substitute for a marketing agency. You may be able to find the fonts and colors on your own to use in company documents, but branding takes strategy and constant omni-channel management. If you’re looking for an award-winning, woman-owned agency, you’re in the right place. Contact us for a free consultation, and let’s see how we can elevate your brand today!
Cody H. Owens, Account Executive
Elevate My Brand
*The logo on the left is correct.