Building a strong brand identity isn’t just about having a pretty logo—it’s about creating a cohesive personality that resonates with your target audience and drives business growth. Just like people, brands have distinct personality traits that work together to create a memorable impression.
From your visual design choices to the tone of your messaging, each brand element plays a crucial role in how customers perceive and connect with your business. When these key aspects work in harmony, they create a strong brand identity that can differentiate you from competitors and build lasting relationships with your target audience.
Learn eight key branding elements to define your brand.
What are brand elements?
Brand elements are the specific tools and components companies use to build and express their personality in all customer-facing interactions. These elements work together to create your brand identity—the complete picture of how your business looks, sounds, and feels to your audience.
Brand elements are typically outlined in a brand’s style guide, which helps maintain consistency across all expressions of the brand. It ensures all team members use the same brand colors, fonts, and image styles when creating brand assets. With well-defined brand elements, anyone who reviews the style guide will have the knowledge they need to represent the brand. Over time, consistently using brand elements can help you establish a recognizable brand identity.
8 key brand elements
- Brand voice and tone
- Logo
- Color palette
- Photography style
- Graphic design style
- Typography
- Taglines
- Positioning
Here are eight key branding elements to consider when establishing your brand guidelines:
1. Brand voice and tone
Brand voice and tone define your business’s communication style and personality across all customer touch points. Brand voice is the consistent language and perspective your company uses in all public-facing communications, reflecting your brand values and attitudes. For example, a designer bridal-wear brand might have a brand voice that’s elegant, confident, and semi-formal. This brand voice helps create an aura of romance and sophistication and positions the label as a destination for understated luxury.
Brand tone can shift depending on the situation or audience while remaining faithful to your brand voice. Selecting an appropriate tone helps small businesses build rapport with customers. For example, a brand may use friendly, casual language to respond to light-hearted social media comments but adopt a more formal tone when addressing customer service complaints. On social media, informal language feels friendly and approachable. In customer service contexts, professional language makes customers feel confident they’re in capable hands.
A voice style guide, which usually lives within your brand style guide, describes your brand’s personality and explains how to express it, including when to shift tones. Tone guidelines encompass elements of communication like word choice, punctuation style, and sense of humor. While voice remains consistent, brands may take on different tones depending on the context.
2. Logo
A distinctive logo is an essential part of your brand’s visual identity and helps build brand recognition. Businesses often have several logo variations for different use cases. For example, your brand may have a large, detailed logo for applications like website headings and product packaging and a simplified version for your business card design or as a favicon, a tiny brand badge that appears on a webpage’s tab in a web browser. Include details in your brand guidelines about when and where to use different logo versions.
3. Color palette
Color is a powerful tool for emotional connection. Color psychology suggests that specific hues are connected to different emotions—selecting the right color scheme helps set the overall tone for your brand. For example, a cool-toned palette of soft greens and blues suggests a relaxed zen personality, while bright colors like hot pink and orange communicate a bold and playful personality. Selecting signature brand colors and using them consistently across platforms reinforces your brand identity and strengthens brand recognition.
Brand elements guidelines typically include hex codes, which represent color with alphanumeric values, to ensure accuracy across all use cases. For example, “dark blue” might describe your primary brand color, but the hex code #151A7B identifies the exact shade of your logo’s midnight blue.
4. Photography style
Image style is your brand’s photography and photo editing aesthetic. A photography style guide defines how your brand should look and feel in every photo.
On an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast, Alyse Borken, co-founder of modern mini-fridge company Rocco, describes photography as essential to representing the brand as she envisioned it. “The homes that we choose to photograph the fridge in are stylish and have a very specific, midcentury or postmodern aesthetic,” she says. By surrounding its products with pieces that share a similar aesthetic, the company reinforces its brand identity as a fashionable product for design-conscious consumers.
Photography style includes aesthetic guidelines for photo styling, prop usage, and social media filters for both product photography and lifestyle photography.
5. Graphic design style
Graphic design style is a brand element that refers to the shapes, icons, and illustrations used in your branding. Graphic elements can vary from bold, minimalist vector art to soft, hand-drawn illustrations. Treatments can be straightforward and utilitarian or whimsical. For example, a canning company could add a playful graphic design touch by using a small bean in place of a dot for bulleted lists on their website.
6. Typography
Typography is the artistic discipline of designing and arranging letters in a visually appealing way. Breaking it down further, a typeface is a family of related fonts (think: Arial, Helvetica, and Roboto), and a font is a specific style, size, or weight within that typeface (think: Roboto Extra Bold).
Brands typically select one or two typefaces and specify the fonts within those typefaces that they use more frequently. The best fonts for your website might include a bold, ornamental font to add personality to headlines and a simpler easy-to-read font for body text. Focus on legibility and simplicity in body text, so web visitors can easily read important details. Headings, which feature shorter text snippets, are larger and allow for more ornamentation. Specify the use cases for each font in your brand guidelines.
7. Taglines
Taglines are short, memorable phrases that often appear on website homepages or under logos to tell consumers about your brand’s purpose. Taglines also offer a way to inject personality into spaces with little room for explanation, like billboards and banner ads. In your brand guidelines, include the exact copy, font, and details about where and how to use taglines.
8. Positioning
Brand positioning expresses how your brand best solves a need for a specific audience. Your brand positioning strategy helps differentiate your product so that your brand stands apart from its competitors and can influence other branding elements. For example, if you position your product as an affordable alternative to high-priced competitors (price-based positioning), you could define a casual, conversational brand voice and a cheery color scheme to make your brand feel friendly and approachable.
Rocco positions itself as a stylish alternative to mainstream appliances (symbolic positioning). Alyse describes the existing refrigerator market as focusing on utility. By contrast, Rocco co-founder Sam George partnered with Italian industrial designers to create a mini-fridge with the aesthetic appeal of designer furniture, differentiating itself from the utility market and targeting customers who prioritize both design and functionality.
Real-world examples of brand elements
When brand elements work together, a clear personality emerges. Consider these examples from real Shopify merchants to see how color choices, fonts, and logo design help create brand identity:
Rocco
Rocco mini-fridges are all about sleek design and stylish celebrations. To communicate this brand personality, Rocco places its product alongside sleek midcentury modern furniture and iconic design pieces in its brand imagery. The brand adds a contemporary twist with high-contrast photos reminiscent of flash photography. Bold, sans-serif fonts and a rich color palette of mustard yellow, green, orange, and brown play up the midcentury aesthetic and create a cohesive visual identity.
Lisa Says Gah
Lisa Says Gah is a women’s clothing brand that aims to inspire joy, with a brand name that serves as a mission statement. It explains its significance on its About Us page, saying, “So, what is ‘Gah’ exactly? We like to think it can’t be bottled or contained. The opposite of ‘Ugh,’ it’s an unbridled outburst-ing of surprise and delight.”
Lisa Says Gah expresses its exuberant brand values with a bright color palette and fanciful script typography. The brand uses informal language in its copy to create a relaxed and playful feel. A whimsical graphic treatment adds an extra special touch to its website—small, bubbly yellow flowers trail from your cursor as you browse.
Glasvin
Glasvin is a homeware brand selling affordable handblown glass stemware. Their product walks the line between accessible and luxury—it’s selling a high-end product for an affordable price. Glasvin uses a simple color scheme, black-and-white photography, and a minimalist aesthetic to evoke classic elegance. The brand’s copy includes cheeky moments: “Blown to last, priced to break.” This messaging approach balances Glasvin’s artisanal production methods with relatable humor that appeals to consumers who want quality products at fair prices.
Servicify
Servicify is an appointment booking app built for Shopify and the winner of the Shopify App Challenge. Servicify works by adding appointment slots to products in a merchant’s store. Developer Tilo Mitra knew that winning the competition offered a unique opportunity for exposure. “I knew that as an app challenge winner, I would at some point be featured on the Shopify App Store homepage,” Tilo says. “So when I was featured, I changed the description and tagline of my app every two days. I wanted to track to see if changing those would change how many people were downloading the app, so I could optimize my listing—basically, a really simple A/B test. I knew I was going to get a lot of views, so I could get significant data faster. I ended up settling on a description that wasn’t the original one I wrote, based on the results.”
Originally, Tilo’s tagline read: “Let your customers book appointments for virtual events.” Through testing, he eventually settled on “Sell appointments & bookings for virtual or in-person events.”
“I found that using the word ‘sell’ was a more direct verb and led to more downloads,” Tilo explains. This perfectly demonstrates how the wording of something as simple as a tagline can dramatically impact results based on real-world engagement.
Brand elements FAQ
What are the 8 brand elements?
The eight core brand elements are brand voice and tone, logo, color palette, image style, graphic style, typography, taglines, and positioning. These are the key elements that make up the foundation of a brand’s identity.
What are the 4 Ps of branding?
The 4 Ps of marketing are product, price, place, and promotion. Professors Philip Kotler and E. Jerome McCarthy proposed this mix as a framework for marketing efforts and brand decision-making. According to this theory, marketers must address each of these key aspects to successfully promote a product.
How do I use brand elements?
Incorporate brand elements when creating external or internal branding materials. Establish a style guide outlining brand elements such as color scheme, fonts, and tone to ensure consistency. This consistency will help you build a cohesive, recognizable brand identity.
