When you’re building a brand from the ground up, the tools you use can make all the difference. Whether you’re DIY-ing your first visual identity or refining a client’s branding direction, having reliable platforms for design, color, and creative inspiration makes the process smoother—and a lot more fun.

An Olympic sprinter and good friend of mine once told me, “Why change something that’s bringing you success?” That stuck with me. With so many new apps and platforms constantly popping up, it’s easy to get caught in a cycle of testing everything. But at some point, the real magic happens when you pick your favorites and focus on using them well.

At Digital Blue Hole, we’re big believers in working smarter—not harder. After plenty of trial and error, we’ve landed on a handful of tools that we keep coming back to. From building mood boards to choosing fonts and creating standout graphics, these platforms help us bring brands to life with intention and ease.

Here are five of our favorite tools for branding and design—the ones we swear by.

1. Canva – For Making Design Accessible (and Beautiful)

Let’s start with a classic. Canva is the ultimate tool for creating polished, professional-looking designs without needing advanced software or a background in graphic design. From Instagram posts to brand mood boards to logo creation, it’s our go-to for designing visuals.

One of Canva’s strongest features is how it supports brand consistency. You can upload your brand kit—logos, colors, fonts—and it automatically integrates them into your designs. Plus, it’s easy to create templates for reusable content, so your visuals look on-brand every time without reinventing the wheel.

Another huge win? The ability to export assets with a transparent background. This is crucial when working on logos, submarks, and other brand elements that need to be flexible across different mediums.

Whether we’re collaborating with clients who need editable assets or quickly mocking up ideas for ourselves, Canva is almost always the first tab we open.

2. Adobe Color Wheel – For Choosing the Perfect Color Palette

Adobe is a jack of all trades—they’ve got it all. When it comes to branding, color plays a huge role in how a brand feels, and Adobe Color Wheel is our favorite tool for exploring palettes and building color harmony.

You can create palettes based on rules like complementary, triadic, or monochromatic, or upload an image and pull inspiration straight from it. It’s especially helpful during the early stages of brand development, when you’re trying to create a cohesive look and feel that aligns with your brand’s energy.

We also love using it to double-check accessibility—making sure colors contrast well enough for readability. It’s a small step that makes a big impact. 

(We’re all about the little things.)

3. Behance – For Creative Inspiration and Portfolio Browsing

Whenever we need a dose of design inspiration or want to see what other creatives are doing in the industry, Behance is our go-to.

It’s a sea of design projects: from branding and typography to UI/UX. Scrolling through Behance can help spark ideas for color palettes, layout styles, and creative approaches to visual storytelling. It’s also a great place to stay up to date with current design trends and see how different designers tackle similar problems.

Even if you’re not a designer yourself, Behance can help you develop a more refined sense of what you like—and that’s incredibly helpful when collaborating with creatives or giving feedback on a project.

4. Pinterest – For Moodboarding and Visual Direction

Pinterest—like many of us—has worn many hats. It might seem like a place for recipes and DIY crafts (and it is), but it’s also an amazing visual tool for branding and design. It’s the first place we send clients—and ourselves—when building moodboards or brainstorming a new visual direction.

It’s easy to collect images that reflect the tone, style, and vibe of a brand—whether it’s fonts, color palettes, imagery, or even architecture that reflects a certain aesthetic. Pinterest helps translate abstract brand concepts into something tangible, which makes it a lot easier to move forward with confidence and clarity.

Pro tip: create separate boards for each brand or project, and add notes to pins to explain why you chose them. It helps you stay organized and intentional in the brainstorming phase.

5. Typewolf – For Finding Unique, High-Quality Fonts

Typography is one of the most underrated parts of branding. The right font can completely transform how your brand is perceived. That’s why we love Typewolf.

Typewolf showcases beautiful font pairings, type trends, and real-world examples of how fonts are used on websites and in branding. It’s great for discovering new typefaces you haven’t seen a million times already (hello, brand differentiation), and it gives helpful context around how to use them effectively.

If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed trying to pick a font or unsure how to combine two without clashing, Typewolf will be your new best friend.

Final Thoughts: Good Tools Make Great Design Easier

The tools you use won’t define your brand, but they’ll absolutely shape how easy (or hard) it is to bring that brand to life. Whether you’re DIY-ing your design or working with a creative team, having resources like these on hand keeps your workflow smooth and your vision clear.

Each of these tools brings something unique to the table—whether it’s accessibility, inspiration, organization, or refinement. And together, they support the creative process from early ideation to final execution.

Have a favorite design tool we didn’t mention? We’d love to hear about it. And if you’re ready to take your branding to the next level with a creative partner who gets it—let’s dive in.