One of the beautiful things about Version 3 of CoachAccountable is that you now get White Labeling for free.

What’s white labeling? It’s your way to make your CoachAccountable coaching management system look more like your own site, for you and your clients: your color scheme, your logo, your name.

If you haven’t yet set up your account to be white labeled as your own, you’ll find the place to do so in Settings >> System >> Branding.

One of the places to customize is with your company’s logo. Most logos as designed are best suited to be mounted on a white background, which makes sense: it’s the sort of thing of having it on the top of branded stationary or in the signature of an email.

CoachAccountable V3 goes for a more minimalist and flat look: the top bar is a vibrant, solid color, with white icons and other features placed on it for a nice contrast and clean aesthetic:

Kinda sharp, right? Ooh, but to make it more your own! Let’s see how it’s done…

It’s likely that you’ve got a logo, but unlikely that it’s done in this style: a white shape that nicely mattes onto a solid background color.  Recently I noticed that CA customer Rebecca Licalsi (of Licalsi Coaching) had such a logo set to show in the header like that.  Here’s what it looks like:

Made to be matted on white!

Looks sharp, right?  It helps that we have it matted on white.  When we set this logo to be the White Logo (and pick a nice purple to go with it) within CA we get this:

The white rectangle dropped into this boldly colored area looks a little… abrupt.

As you can see this isn’t ideal: plopping a big white rectangle into the middle of this space kinda breaks with the surrounding aesthetic.  A better, more congruent logo would be one that follows the lead of the other elements in this space: a crisp, white shape that mattes nicely on our vibrant background color.

So let’s make one of those!  No need to hire your designer to make you a whole new logo, from the one you already have you can transform it into a white version with just a few steps.

Using Rebecca’s logo as an example, let’s show you how this is done in Photoshop (and if you don’t have Photoshop, you can either use another photo editing software or just email us for assistance):

Making a White Logo in Photoshop

Our first step is to clear out the white background (which causes that abrupt white rectangle) and make it instead transparent (so that it will sit nicely on top of any matting color you choose).  To do this, first choose white as your main active chosen color, and then go to Select >> Color Range…

Select all the white in the image with the Color Range selection tool.

Because you’ve got white as your chosen color, the default Select option “Sampled colors” will select all the white in your image.  Fuzziness 85 seems to reliably get the right amount around the edges, but you can adjust that up or down to more or less aggressively pick the white and near white pixels:

The white parts in the selection preview image are what we’re selecting (and ultimately removing).

Once you’ve selected all the white pixels, clear them away by using the eraser, leaving you with a nice transparent background:

A big fat eraser makes this easier.

Now that the background is cleared out, let’s make our coaching company logo shape be as tightly cropped as possible (because there’s no need to keep those pixels on all the edges which were providing padding).  Do this by selecting all (Ctrl-A), copying (Ctrl-C), making a new image (Ctrl-N), and pasting what you selected into that new image (Ctrl-V).  This will have the effect of shedding off all rows and columns that were completely empty, giving you the tightest possible crop without losing anything of the image.

Now the real magic: to turn our colored shape into a flat, white only shape.  Do this by right clicking on the one layer of the image and selecting “Blending options…”:

Blending options are so cool.

Here we just pick “Color overlay” and be certain that white (#FFFFFF) is the color we are over laying:

Click okay and we’re done!

And there we have it:

Not much to look at now, but…

A crisp white shape, layered on a fully transparent background.  It’s hard to read against that white and grey checkerboard, but our vibrant background color choice will give much more favorable contrast.  Save it as a PNG file and it’ll be ready to set as your White Logo.

If you don’t use Photoshop, you can use several free web-based photo editors with a similar process.

And that’s all there is to it.  We started here:

and we end here:

The end result is a branded system that looks sharper and much more consistent with the more modern, flat design of the new CoachAccountable coaching management system.  Not bad for 2 minutes of work.

If this process looks at all intimidating, no worries!  Because here’s the deal: I’m all for you to feel completely at home within your CA account, and I want CA to make your coaching look as clean and professional as possible, to both you and your clients.

As such we’ll be happy to do it for you.  Just send your logo in whatever format you’ve got it (preferably high quality, high res, but we’ll roll with what ever!) to support@coachaccountable.com and we’ll cook up (and put into place) a white logo for you.

A big thanks to Rebecca for letting us share this process using her logo!

Want to join Rebecca in a place where we look out for opportunities to help you make your coaching business look and run even better? Try CoachAccountable today.