The grand finale of our rebrand anniversary series is here, with the third ring of my Three Ring Confidence framework: Development. And THIS is where all the work, effort, energy and time you’ve put into this massive project actually starts working for you & bringing the results you crave (instead of just a shiny Google Drive folder).
In this episode, we’re unpacking how I brought my rebrand from Eva Couto Design to Flying Colours Creative® to life, touchpoint by touchpoint. From having fun with Instagram (yes, it’s possible) to website rollercoasters, I’m telling you everything that worked, what needed tweaking along the way, and why implementation is where every rebrand hangs. If you’re sitting on a rebrand (or dreaming of one), this is your sign to stop planning and start doing — because a brand isn’t something you have, it’s something you use.
A brand isn't something to have. It's something to use.
And this final ring, where we apply all that work to the real-life assets your brand exists in, is where the success of any rebrand actually hangs. It's also the one most people overlook.
Because design is exciting. That's where all the visible changes happen, but it's not the final step. All that time and effort you put into your rebrand won't do you any good if it just sits in a Google Drive folder labeled "final brand assets."
The real transformation happens when you start using it. When you test it in the real world, share it with your audience, and let it become part of your business.
And when things go from theory to reality, when you go public with your rebrand and start being perceived with this new identity, that's when it gets real.
Because the same brand that made you scream "Oh my God, yes, this is it!" when you first saw it in private can feel a little scary to show off in the open. If you've ever rebranded (or even just pivoted your content strategy or shared a new video format), you know what I'm talking about. It's this weird whiplash of emotions that hits you as soon as you're on that public-facing stage: Wait, is this too much? Will people get it? Did I just ruin my credibility with circus fonts?
So yeah, as someone who literally does this for a living and has now lived through it all as well, I can confirm: rebranding is the emotional equivalent of a roller coaster. But only when you actually start implementing that rebrand and showing it off in public to people beyond yourself and your designer.
Only then do you learn very quickly what works, what doesn't, and what needs to adapt. Because even if you've just gone through a rebrand, things will need to change anyway. It's not like you can get anything completely right on the first go. And it's only as you start using it that you'll realise how you're using it, and whether something needs to change or not.
So in today's episode, I'm walking you through exactly how I brought my new brand to life, touchpoint by touchpoint. What changed, what I might do differently now, and all the little nooks and crannies in between. Trust me, there are a lot more things you need to apply your brand to than you realise.
Let's kick things off with the very first touchpoint I tackled after finalising my visuals. It might surprise you, but I chose Instagram, and for good reason.
Instagram felt like the most low-friction playground for any rebrand. There are so many different features within this one platform, so many different variables and things that needed changing: text, design, sound, emojis, longer form, shorter form. If anything wasn't going to work, it wouldn't work on Instagram. So if I'm going to test everything out, I might as well start here.
Plus, it's low stakes in the sense that nothing really stays forever. It has a shelf life. If something doesn't work? It's fine. It's not permanent, or at least it didn't feel permanent to me.
Starting with the most permanent changes, I updated my Instagram bio. At the time (you won't see them now, but you're free to go to my profile anyway), I updated my pinned posts to be an "about me," a "how we can work together," and a post about the rebrand itself — basically announcing that I'd changed names. Because with all that change, I changed my profile picture, my handle, my username. And I wanted my current audience to know about the change, not just be surprised by it.
I also deleted all my old highlights because I wanted to do them again. Have I done them all? Not yet. But we'll get to that… this is a work in progress!
What Instagram allowed me to do was use social media as this playground to test things first before committing to bigger things like the website, which was going to take a lot of effort and changes to get to where I wanted it. I used it to test this new voice, new visuals, a new rhythm. I didn't exactly have a new personality or tone of voice, but there were tweaks made to incorporate more of this brand theme I now had.
From the simplest things — changing the profile picture, changing my saved emoji reactions on DMs — to the most complex ones like posting a carousel. All the templates I had before needed to be redone.
And actually, this is something I still do: whenever I have a new change I want to make to my brand, no matter how small or big, changing a social media post template is the easiest way to check whether my brand design actually works in the real world. Because if the font sizes are too small, if the colour contrast doesn't work, if the language isn't readable or clear enough for someone who doesn't know my brand from before — this is where you can test it. It's such a confined space that you'll know right away whether things need changing.
What I'd recommend: start your implementation where your audience already is, because whenever you make that change — perhaps even changing your brand name — those people will be your most loyal fans to support you through it.
Start where it feels lowest stakes for you in terms of format and build confidence in that place before going full send on the website.
I didn't implement it all at the same time and launch everything on the same day. I did it by stages: launched the rebrand design first and the name change first. Then social media. Then the website. Things just added on top of each other instead of being this massive change all at once.
If you want, you can do a massive launch — but you don't need to. You can start by just being consistent with this new identity, even with small shifts that signal something is changing and something new is coming.
After social media, I went to my newsletter. That was the second touchpoint.
Obviously, I needed a new header, footer design, and newsletter template — especially because now everything followed this theme. Before, my newsletter was called "The Rebel's Corner," and now it's called "Uncaged." And I actually continue to update it. Even this week, I added a new section to my newsletter that just adds a little bit more fun.
I also came up with a structure for the newsletter itself that allowed me to be more consistent with it. My newsletter is famously where I struggle the most with consistency. So I really wanted this to prompt and make it easier for me to be consistent.
And that's the whole point of getting a rebrand! Making things easier for you so you can keep marketing your business, marketing your offers in a way that builds upon what's been done before.
Now, after social media and newsletter — and I should say not really after, but the launch was after, though it was all getting done at the same time (which wasn't ideal, but yeah) — came the website.
At least to me, it's the highest stakes platform that any business and any brand has. So you want to get it right. Because anytime you have to redo something at this scale, it's going to be a project. I'm not talking about when you add new pages or a new portfolio piece or blog post or episode — those things should be and are easy to do in my website and my clients' websites. That's why we use Webflow (a story for another episode).
But I'm talking about changing things on a structural level. Then there's a lot more to check and double-check and triple-check: broken links, is the formatting and layout consistent across the board, is the spacing between paragraphs and titles and margins right, does everything look okay, have I missed something?
With my website specifically, I went for a full copyright and restructuring of the website itself. I already had my website on Webflow, so I didn't change platforms, just redesigned the whole thing. I did the design myself, outsourced the copy, and did the development in-house with the developer I always partner with for all my clients.
I really wanted my own website to be the shop window for my business and to most accurately reflect the change, the brand theme, and these bolder visuals, bolder personality I now wanted to put out to the world. It was my opportunity to show off my own web design skills and really play with different things — like including my brand icons I designed, fully fleshing out my patterns and playing with the imagery.
It was a really big but also really fun side of the rebrand. It's such an exciting moment when you press publish on something you've worked on for so long that your eyes kind of start to cross whenever you open that website file.
And to this day, I cannot tell you how simultaneously proud I am of this website design and development, but also how excited it makes me to keep building it, keep improving it, keep changing it.
Even right now, I'm working on the new sales page for The Extravaganza. And although it's proving to be a project (because I'm a perfectionist and this is just how things go), it's exciting to see how all these new ideas come from having a brand theme and a constraint that makes me more creative.
Those were my main goals with my website and my brand.
After the website was done and I had this huge sigh of relief that this huge project was out of my hands, I then focused on a new mammoth project. Because what? Making things easy for myself? Never heard of her!!!
So I launched this podcast!
I can't really say the podcast got rebranded because it just didn't exist before, but it came to life. And I have to give a huge shoutout and thank you to Adrienne Cruz, who was my podcast manager and podcast editor for the first 25 episodes of this podcast. With her offer, Sunny Side Launch, she guided me step by step through bringing this podcast to life. Without her, this just wouldn't exist.
The birth of this podcast meant I had to create a whole load of new assets — namely the podcast cover, which was a really fun project that I kind of rescued my hand lettering skills for. Thinking about the podcast almost as an offer under the umbrella of my overall Flying Colours Creative brand was really fun. It was almost like offer branding for the podcast.
I had to do the cover art, come up with the naming conventions for the episodes — and all of these decisions were made easier because of the brand strategy and the very first ring of direction that we did first and talked about in the first episode of this mini-series. Otherwise, all these decisions, each one of them, could have sent me on a huge spiral trying to make the "right" decision without having that intentionality and direction behind it to help me make the right decision.
And I can say this podcast has been a lot of fun, and I wouldn't stop it for the world.
You might think that's it. Social media, newsletter, website, podcast. What else can there be?
My answer to that: everything else. The backend. The smaller stuff.
From the email signature that had to be redesigned and relinked, to all the client-facing presentation slides for The Extravaganza — all those templates had to be redone. It's all the Notion portals that are also client-facing. It's setting up the branding kits properly in Canva and Flodesk to make my life easier in the long run. Tweaking the email templates, making sure I didn't have any outdated language, adding the circus emojis here and there for a little flair and personality.
All those little things take time. And I'm not even going to go into what it was like changing emails from hello@evacoutodesign.com to hello@flyingcolourscreative.com — that whole thing took years off my life and I don't wish it on anybody.
But it keeps showing me (because I keep finding places where my profile picture isn't updated or where I'm still using my old email) that your brand doesn't stop at the front-facing stuff. It needs to live equally as consistently in the backend too. Because that's where the client experience is built.
If you're doing all this rebrand for the marketing, for what's on the outside, but then you don't do it for what's on the inside — your client is going to be wowed whenever they come in contact with your brand, and after they actually book you and pay for your service, what? They're not going to have the same experience? That's not really fair.
If your internal tools don't match that external message, guaranteed there's going to be a disconnect. Things are going to look outdated and mismatched.
You need to make things look and feel cohesive behind the scenes too. That's where you build trust. That's where you deliver this seamless experience at every single touchpoint. That's then going to replicate results back to the marketing side — because those clients who have that really good on-brand perfect experience are going to recommend you, refer you to people who want that same experience and who now know your brand to be synonymous with having a killer brand experience.
And there you have it, troupe.
All this to say: a brand is not a thing you have, but it's a tool you use.
If there's one thing you take from this episode, let it be that sentence.
Because if I hadn't implemented it and applied it to all these touchpoints we just went through — social media, newsletter, website, podcast, backend deliverables — then no one would be able to even see the brand I worked so hard on, let alone recognise it across all these different platforms.
And then I wouldn't see the results from all this hard work: building recognition, trust, and consistency over time, along with having a lot more fun, I must say.
Although a rebrand might feel like just some exciting, pretty new assets, it actually goes much deeper than the visuals. And when done right, it will help you make business decisions faster because you're not getting sidetracked by shiny object syndrome. You get to show up when motivation is low because you have all the assets ready to go anyway. And it's a lot easier to stay consistent — visually and in motivation — across the platforms you're showing up on.
I hope this three-part mini-series helped you get a glimpse of how everything works. Remember: even when you do a massive change and overhaul it all like I did, feeling confident in your new branding with this new look comes from application and trying things out.
Nothing is ever a finished product, but it can be a tool to build momentum and growth if you use it right and if you use it consistently.
That's why I built The Extravaganza the way that I did.
Because I realised getting just the branding wouldn't actually change anything in your business unless you applied it. And it's bridging that gap that takes the most time and the most effort — especially when you're not a designer and you have other things to do, like run said business.
So by calling the website and all the rest of the stuff as "stuff," as collateral, as add-ons like I was, I was actually sending the wrong message that those pieces were optional extras instead of essential tools. Clients would naturally put those things off until they felt ready enough or like they had the time.
We can't stop at direction or brand strategy. We can't stop at design or visual identity. We have to move all the way to development with hands-on implementation baked in so you're not left wondering, "Okay, but now what?"
And you have everything ready from day one to use your brand and put on a sold-out show.
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✦ THE EXTRAVAGANZA: 12-week, all-inclusive brand transformation that gives you all the visuals, website and marketing assets it takes to succeed with Flying Colours
✦ Katie Pannell, Naming Expert
✦ Ceels Lockley, Offer Strategy Coach
✦ João Nogueira, Website Developer
✦ Adrienne Cruz, Podcast Manager
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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