New year. Clean slate. Loud internet.
Word of the year, vision boards, goal setting, reflection prompts… If January *already* has you feeling behind & scattered, you’re NOT alone.
And whenever I start feeling out of control, I look at my circus & my monkeys.
In this episode, I’m walking you through 3 simple, practical ways to reset your brand without a full-on rebrand.
“Spring cleaning” belongs in the Spring, so think of this as an opportunity to clear the clutter, and make your brand feel usable again right now, as it is.
Because when your brand is easier to use and lighter to show up with, you feel prouder to share it & visibility stops feeling like such a heavy lift.
Think of it as brand maintenance:
Less “new year, new you”, more “same you, but with fewer tabs open”.
If you're already starting the year feeling behind, scattered, uninspired, or like you should have more clarity than you do right now, I want to kick things off by saying upfront: you're not too late.
In fact, you could never be too late.
This whole idea of being too late tends to show up every January. And even though we can recognise this pattern from a logical point of view, it's really hard to break from it.
But here I am to tell you that there's no prize for starting on January 1st. There's no gold star for having everything figured out by week one.
In fact, I'd argue no one really does.
So if you haven't nailed your word of the year yet, don't stress. You can do that at any point in the year (and honestly, most people end up changing their word halfway through anyway).
Even though this is my first episode of 2026 coming out in the first week of January, I wanted to give you a structure and system you can use whenever your brand starts feeling too heavy to use. So you can clear the clutter first, then walk into 2026 (or whatever season you're in) without the overwhelm or noise that kept you stuck and moving slower than you wanted before.
Instead of a "new year, new brand" moment, these are simple, practical tasks designed to help you declutter your brand, regain momentum, and make it easier to show up.
I know this feels like a boring admin task, but hear me out. You want to actually USE the assets you already have, and not get sucked by shiny object syndrome.
This can live wherever makes sense for you: a folder on your computer, in Google Drive, inside of Canva… The location just needs to work for your way of doing things, but it's the structure that matters.
Start with a Master Folder (or just call it the name of your brand). Inside, you're going to have six folders:
Inside the Imagery folder, have a subfolder per brand shoot that you've done (name it something memorable so you know which is which). One for your favourite headshots. One for edited B-roll. Another folder for those more off-the-cuff, casual phone shots.
Inside the Marketing folder, you're going to have at least 3 different folders: Newsletter, Freebies, and one per launch or offer so you can store all the launch-specific or offer-specific brand assets. If you have a podcast, you'll likely need to add a podcast folder too.
Then just drag everything brand-related into the closest matching folder. It doesn't have to be perfect, but just having a system that allows you to quickly put together those designs means you won't find yourself scrolling for stuff (which takes a load of time in and of itself) and have those assets scattered all over your phone and computer.
Designing things for your brand (whether that's a new carousel or a new sales page) is going to take half the time and a lot less mental energy. Remember: messy but contained is a lot better than scattered everywhere.
If you're doing this in Canva, you can use your brand kit and allocate the assets to their proper places. Most of the folders are already in the brand kit. You'll just need to manually create folders for your imagery. Also, upload as many assets as you can in SVG format (not JPEG, not PNG). This means you won't need a million colour variants saved of the same logo. Canva will let you recolour them with your brand colours, just as they allow you to do with any of their own elements!
If you're doing this in Google Drive, you can access it from both your computer and your phone, which makes collaborations easier too. When you book a guest podcast or a collab of some sort, you can just share your headshots folder instead of scrambling around to find that particular photo you're looking for.
The goal here is just to make sure your website quietly signals that your business is active, current, and thriving. We're not doing a major overhaul here.
My goal here is to make creating and sharing content for you feel lighter and faster. That means supporting the content you actually show up for, not the content you think you should be posting.
Removing this friction in what's most likely your most regular marketing task means showing up stops feeling like a chore and starts feeling doable, even on those low-energy days.
Look at your social media (perhaps pick your main platform) and ask yourself:
Based on your answers to these questions, you just need to create the templates to support that. And pay attention to how you actually want to be putting out this content.
If a monthly recap post is meant to feel casual and off-the-cuff and low-effort to create, then you need to create the templates to accommodate that. If you want varied slides for that carousel, then you'll want the template to have plenty of options inside so that when you go to create this post, you already have every single option laid out there for you.
There's no point in having a testimonial graphic if you never post testimonials, or buying template packs that don't support the type of content you're wanting to create in the first place.
When it comes to stories, casual, more off-the-cuff feel stories perform better than overly designed ones. I'm sure you've noticed this before, mostly because we've learned as consumers to interpret those more designed stories as moments we're being sold to.
But that doesn't mean your stories can't be creative and recognisable and on brand.
To make this easier for you, create a folder on your phone and upload like a mini version of your brand kit to it. This makes creating those frames and stories easier and faster. I recommend including:
That's it. Three ways to reset your brand ahead of 2026:
With any of these three tasks, we could go a lot more in depth, but my goal here was just to give you the momentum and the habit of keeping your brand up to par and maintaining it on a regular basis.
You can do one of these tasks a day in your first week back at work in January, or you can save them all for that business date you should already have booked in your calendar.
The point here isn't "new year, new brand" energy. I wanted to go through the 3 main areas of your branding — your overall brand assets, your website, and your social media — and make your brand easier to use and get you excited and re-inspired about the assets that you already have, so that you're then more likely to share them and actually feel proud doing it.
Rebrands are great (don't get me wrong, it's literally what I do day in, day out), but it's this kind of maintenance work that keeps brand momentum going, even after big reveals and flashy announcements and launch periods.
Even doing one of these tasks will make a massive difference. And if this episode helped, I'd love for you to lemme know which task you're starting with!
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Over the last 5 years as a Brand & Marketing Designer, I’ve helped freaks like us design their unconventional brands so they can step onto the main stage & own their weird. Because if you wanted to be, look or sound like everyone else, you wouldn’t be where you are today. Now it’s your turn.
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