9 Brand Elements Design Your Brand Mush Have

Hello, this article is about the 9 elements you need for a brand design. So branding and personal branding is a really complicated subject and I’m going to talk about a very small piece of it. Today I’m going to talk about 9 design elements that you need to build a personal brand.

Brand design is a lot more than a logo. Logos are really important everybody has a logo, even a plumber has a logo. Logos are just a very small piece of it. There are ten zillion logos in the world so if you design a logo that’s great but you’ve got a lot more work to do.

The brand design elements I’m going to talk about today are part of a brand ecosystem so your brand ecosystem, the visual aspect of your brand is going to show up in a lot of places and they’re places like your website, email, print, broadcast, eCommerce, social media, video or digital marketing. There are a million places where your brand is going to show up and you want to make sure that your brand shows up in a very consistent way.

So now let’s dive into it, what are the 9 elements of a brand design ecosystem.

1. Logo

So you want to have a logo and it should be simple and it should probably have one or two colors in it.  Very few logos have more than three colors, so keep it simple.

2. Fonts

You want to choose a font or two fonts for your brand. Generally, the main font, and this could be the font that actually appears in your brand identity or logo and a secondary font.

Fonts have personalities so there are serif fonts and sans serif fonts. The font says a lot about your brand so be very thoughtful and very careful when you pick the fonts that are going to be associated in a very consistent way with your brand.

3. Color Palette

Color has incredible psychological power. Colors mean things.

So, you want to develop a color palette for your brand. A lot of brand color palettes have maybe 3 to 4 or 5 may be in them so you want to develop a brand color palette that speaks a lot about the psychology and the strategy behind what it is that you do and what it is that you offer.

Color is going to speak to your consumer or customer’s avatar so you don’t want to think about just the color that you personally like but what is the color that your client is going to respond to what are they going to like. Think about it in terms of your end customer or consumers.

4. Pattern and Texture

A lot of people forget about pattern and texture but this is a fundamental design element that can be leveraged to be able to recognize you and your brand when people come across you, like the Louis Vuitton pattern that happens on all of their bags or the brushed metal that Apple uses.

These are very recognizable textures and patterns that they use consistently to great effect to help people recognize their brands.

5. Photography and Animation

There are millions of photography styles out there in picking one style and using it consistently across all of your brands can really help solidify how your brand is recognized when people come across it in your brand ecosystem and across all of your brand elements.

So think about developing or picking a photography style.

6. Illustration and Iconography

Just like photography, there are a million illustration and iconography styles out there and by choosing one that goes along with your brand and sings with your logo and your visual elements you’re in the color palette, etc and using that really consistently can be a way to establish a vocabulary for your brand that becomes really recognizable.

7. Sound

This is one that very rare people kind of think about a lot of time but sound is a way that you can brand yourself think about Intel and their Intel Inside sound. Whenever you hear that you think Intel Inside until you use sound as a branding element.

8. Layout

Using a particular type of layout or style of layout consistently across all of your brand elements is another great way to establish a strong brand vocabulary that people are going to be able to recognize.

9. Tone of Voice

Another thing that people don’t think about a lot is the tone of voice. In the copy on your site or in the copy of your tweets or your writing.

Another thing that people don’t think about a lot is the tone of voice. In the copy on your site or in the copy of your tweets or your writing.

What is your brand voice? 

What does your brand sound like? 

Is it formal, jokey, informal, funny, or serious?

What is the voice of your brand? 

Think about the tone of voice of your brand.

Brand Guidelines

Once you have all these elements together, what you want to do is pull them together in one place you want to see how they work and look and feel together.

The other really important aspect of developing a brand guidelines document is that whenever you work with a service provider whether that’s a website developer or blog writer, you want to be able to give them your brand guidelines because that’s going to show them exactly what your brand looks and feels like.

So, they are not going to develop some sort of creative work for you, that’s kind of really off base and doesn’t look and feel like your brand. Once you have developed all these brand elements you want to pull them all together into brand guidelines and it can be a single page.

Some large corporation’s brand guidelines are 150 pages long but you can keep it simple here’s a one-page template of brand guidelines.

There’s a place for your logo, color palette, fonts, icons, pattern and texture, illustrations, layout design, motion graphics, tone of voice, and photography. It puts them entirely on one page so you can see them all on one page to make sure that they look and feel great together.

3 Branding Examples:

1. Jason Resnick

2. Chris Ducker

3. Seth Godin

So when you think about these 9 elements of brand design, go back and look ask yourself these 6 questions.

What Elements are you missing?

Where is it inconsistent?

What does your brand design communicate?

Is the aesthetic of your brand elevated?

Generic? Boring? Anonymous?

Is it a brand ecosystem?

Look at your brand and evaluate what it’s doing for you.

I hope you enjoyed this article on 9 elements of a great brand design and subscribe to my newsletter. I share resources, insights, inspirations.

Resources

Recommended Books to help you build your brand and creative practice:

1. Book on Design Thinking: “Change By Design”, Tim Brown
2. On Creative Inspiration: “Imagine”, Jonah Lehrer
3. On the Freelance Economy: “Free Agent Nation” by Daniel Pink
4. My fav Design Career book: “Orbiting the Giant Hairball” by Gordon MacKenzie 
5. On inspiration: “Rules of the Red Rubber Ball: Find and Sustain Your Life’s Work” by Kevin Carroll
6. The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding, Al Ries + Laura Ries