Beyond brand basics: how to brand your creative business when you’ve got the logo, colours, & fonts down

When it comes to designing your brand identity, the holy trifecta and the things people mainly think of, are logos, colours, and typography. These things are important, yes, and make up a huge part of your visual identity. But there are a whole lot of other elements that go into creating a complete brand identity that elevate your brand, bring it all together, and take it to the next level. Forgetting about these could be a big mistake if you’re wanting to design a truly unforgettable brand identity.

If you’re ready to stand out and show off your amazing work with a wow-worthy brand, let’s talk about the brand elements that go beyond the basics!

Patterns

If you want to expand your brand and give yourself some more flexibility while still keeping things consistent, patterns are a super useful tool. These are repeatable designs that are unique to your brand and can be used as backgrounds and overlays, or on packaging, signage, your website and more. Patterns can be either one seamless design that can expand across any size graphic, or broken into separate elements that you can place individually.

Illustrations

As well as photography, illustrations are a great way to communicate ideas and show off your brand. These can be abstract or realistic decorations or drawings in your brand colours and a unique style to you that can be used to illustrate different concepts across your business. We use blobs and squiggle illustrations across our brand, and have recently created some 3D illustrations to use in The Ultimate Branding Checklist!

Icons

Icons are like mini illustrations. They’re small graphics that are used to represent ideas and are often used as bullet points. You can download a bunch of free icons in your style, or create your own custom ones to match your brand in a unique way. I use Noun Project to get my icons but you can find lots of packs online or create your own unique sets!

GIFs

If you spend any amount of time on the internet, you’ll have seen your fair share of GIFs. Whether on your website, on Instagram stories, or in your email newsletters, they’re fun ways to show off your brand and share your message. And you can create your own! You could create a GIF of your logo, your face, your products, or any taglines and sayings you use. Go wild! Just make sure, like with everything else, that you’re using your brand colours and fonts to make them happen.

Photography

As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, so it’s important to have some images in your brand identity. Brand photography is a suite of professional images that represent your business visually, and fit with your visual identity through their use of colours, tone, props, sets and more. These can include photos of you, your team, your products, your process, your space and other things that make your business unique. To make your business look its best, you’ll want a range of consistent, well-crafted photos that will keep your business looking tip-top across all of your marketing material over time.

When you're planning your next brand photoshoot, think about these types of photos:

• Individual
• Team
• Product
• Service
• Campaign
• Guidelines

Videography

Whether you’re creating regular YouTube content, one-off promotional videos or doing live-stream videos, you need to consider how these add to your brand. Video is becoming more and more prevalent, particularly on social media, so if you’re going to be making the most of this medium, you’ll need to make sure you stay on-brand while you do.

Some video elements you might want to think about are:

• Thumbnails
• Video guidelines
• Intro/outro
• Graphics
• Product videos
• Service videos
• Set

Motion

Motion helps to express messages and concepts that may be difficult to represent through text alone and brings elements to life through movement, so it’s no surprise that many brands are implementing animation and motion across their logos, websites, apps, videos, advertisements and more. Wherever you decide to add motion to your business, ensure that it’s done on-brand.

When it comes to motion, you could create:

• Animated logo
• Animated video
• Animated transitions
• Animated intro/outro
• User interactions

Sound

Sonic branding (aka the use of branded sound) can add a lot to your brand and the experience of your customers and clients. Brands that use music that is aligned with the brand identity are 96% more likely to be remembered by the consumer, than the brands that use ‘unfit’ music or no music at all.

Think about the catchy music that accompanies that ad that always plays, the sound that a notification from Snapchat or your email app makes, or the soundtrack to your favourite podcast. These pieces of audio all add to your experience and awareness of that brand and your brand can have that too!

Sonic branding includes things like:

• Intro/outro music
• Soundtracks
• Sound effects
• Physical sounds

Which of these will you add to your brand identity?

And when you’ve got your new brand, what’s next? Here are 8 steps to rocking your new identity!