5 design elements that your brand simply cannot do without
Brand identity is the umbrella term for the collection of elements that make up your brand. When it comes to developing a strong, lasting brand identity that will resonate with your audience, it needs to effectively communicate your brand’s values, personality, and intention. To do this, thoughtful design is crucial.
Let’s unpack 5 of the key design elements required to build a memorable brand identity that will have a meaningful impact on your target market for all the right reasons.
Logo
The importance of your brand’s logo cannot be overstated. Take your time with it and get it right from the beginning as it is the foundation of brand identity.
You might need your designer to include a few different versions for different colours backgrounds, a stacked logo that is more compact for when necessary and perhaps one with and without a tagline.
It’s useful to create a document that outlines your logo usage to ensure it always looks its best. This would provide guidelines for usage, such as not crowding the logo by determining a certain amount of space around it, not stretching the logo and when to use certain colourways.
Taglines
Your tagline is your miniature pitch and ideally, it will get the attention of your target audience.
When coming up with ideas for taglines, we take care to incorporate the benefits that your consumers could expect to experience when they opt in to your brand’s products.
Fonts
Fonts can say so much. The lines, curves and shapes can evoke a mood or a feeling and it’s vital that your font choices are aligned with your overall brand identity.
A brand should generally have two fonts and certainly no more than four fonts that are used in any collateral. Think of one of them as the headline font and one that is used for subheadings and longer bodies of text. In a branding document, include detail about the fonts that should be used, including sizes and whether they can be bold, underline or italic and when.
Colour palette
Colours are powerful and can evoke emotions and connections to your brand. You don’t need the whole rainbow to create an engaging brand – around four or five colours is plenty.
Your colour palette should reflect your logo and include a couple of neutral colours to keep everything balanced. Include specific colour codes (hexcode) in your branding document, taking care to cover various colour types such as RGB, Pantone and/or CMYK. This way, your brand colours will stay consistent across print and digital usage.
Images and icons
There are lots of times marketing material requires images or icons that can be reflective of your brand and offering. When choosing these design elements make sure you keep it consistent and on brand at all times.
This might mean creating guidelines for what style of stock photos your brand can use — for example, never have the people looking directly at the camera, or make all images greyscale. Similarly, icons should stick to a theme and work within your colour palette.
Build a recognisable brand
By investing time, energy and a budget into your brand from the get-go, you can create a brand that makes an authentic and meaningful connection with your target audience.
The choices you make about your visual identity and the design elements that will reflect your brand can contribute to your success.
With considered decisions when building your brand, you can create something that is immediately recognisable and unforgettable. Take a look at some of the projects we’ve worked on that have done just that over here.
