How your brand visually shows up in the world is very important. For most of your customers and clients, the first experience they’ll likely have with your business online is your logo, social accounts, or your website. Even in the non-digital space, your packaging, brick and mortar store signage, or color schemes used at your location will be associated with your brand by your target audience.

The best approach to ensure your visual branding aligns with what you provide, who you (and your team) are, and how your brand provides a unique experience is to apply five must-have components.

What are those five components? We’re glad you asked!

There are many components that make up your visual branding, and they all play equally important parts in positioning your brand. Let’s take a look at each of them!

First off, everyone’s favorite branding focus: The logo

When working to get your branding just right, there is a lot of emphasis on the logo design. And that is not without merit!

Logos provide important first impressions, and can tell your target audience a lot about your brand’s ethos, mission, and offerings before they read a single word of copy about your business.

These days, it is important to have multiple variations of your logo that cover your bases in order to work well across all of your customers’ touch points — whether it is the ten-foot-wide sign above your door, the cover of your client proposals, or your teeny-tiny Instagram profile image.

For VVITCH clients, we typically design one or two primary logos that can be used in most applications, along with a series of submarks — i.e. less formal logo-like graphics, to provide a more flexible brand expression when needed.

Which leads us into our next topic…

Brand Avatar for Diana Ascarrunz Photography

Let’s chat avatars and favicons.

Avatars and favicons are submarks with specific purposes. An avatar is typically what you’ll use for your brand’s profile or account image on any social platform.

And a favicon is a small icon that appears next to your business’ website name in a browser tab!

Both are small, yet highly visible, and impactful places to leave your brand’s mark. Unfortunately, many brands treat them as an afterthought due to their smaller scale. At VVITCH, we make sure that our clients do not make that mistake!

Next up: What about colors?

While your audience might connect with your brand logo more logically, your brand’s color palette is typically what your audience will connect with emotionally.

We all have such strong subconscious reactions to color, so it is important to be highly intentional in choosing colors that convey the right mood for your brand.

For most of the clients at VVITCH, we like to provide a flexible color palette — with two to three primary brand colors, and four to seven supporting colors. This allows them to lean into different facets of their brand, depending on the application they intend for the colors.

Here is a great example: say you have a spa (i.e. a service-based business) and you’re trying to achieve a brand presence that feels warm and welcoming, yet elevated and high-end. In this example, we would create a palette for you that mixes deep and elegant greens with warm neutrals.

We can go a step further — maybe you also want your business cards to really drive home that high-end feel so that you give a strong impression when handing them out. In that instance, you could lean into applying the deep greens in your business card design.

But maybe you also want folks to feel calm and welcomed from the moment they walk towards your spa storefront. In that case, you could lean into applying your warm neutrals in your spa signage design.

To have this kind of flexibility makes it easy to create intentional experiences for your customers every time they interact with your brand.

However, strong branding is not possible without font and type — no matter how great your color choices.

Can’t forget about typography!

As business owners, we all tend to understand the importance of the fonts chosen for use in a brand logo — but an often-overlooked element of branding are supporting brand fonts.

Take your business website, for example. Sure, your audience will see your logo in the header — but, what about the rest of the site? As users read through your business site, the fonts you use for your headers, subheaders, callout quotes, and body copy will be crucial players in crafting your brand’s presence.

From a designer’s perspective, we spend just as much time curating your supporting font palette as we do any other asset for your brand. This is because, though it sounds dramatic, it truly can make or break your brand positioning.

At a minimum, designers should provide you with header, subheader, accent, and body font selections (and sometimes more for folks who need to mix up their graphics more often!). This allows your brand to appear intentional, professional, and engaging across all of your marketing platforms.

And finally: there’s something about iconography

You know how Nike has the swoosh, and Starbucks has the mermaid symbol, and Apple has the.. well.. apple (who took a bite out of it)? Those illustrations are what designers call iconography!

Iconography can add personality, meaning, and nuance to a brand’s visual presence — not only because of what it depicts, but also because of how the style of illustration is presented to its viewing audience: you.

Sometimes the style can be even more important than the subject of a brand’s iconography! For example, a loose and sketched feeling illustration is going to give an entirely different emotional response than a solid minimalist icon.

When appropriate at VVITCH, we love adding illustrated touches and meaningful iconography to our clients’ brands!

Let’s Recap

The five must-have components for your visual branding consist of logo design, avatars and favicons, colors, typography, and iconography.

There you have it! Feels simple enough right?

These are the primary components of your visual brand identity. If there’s anything here that you have not considered or been intentional with in your own branding, it may be time to take another look to see what story those elements are telling about you.

Need help with your visual branding? Get in touch with VVITCH. We offer branding and design services — inclusive of all of the five must-have components shared in this blog.

Need help? Hire us!

Our team will research solutions for you, develop a set of functional requirements, bring our best and brightest designer onboard to develop mockups, and much more. You don’t have to be the business owner, marketer, accountant, and developer all at once when you work with us.

We’ll also have our SEO team optimize your site’s metadata and our project manager always helps our website design and build clients with very clear video instructions on how to make updates and edits on your own once your project is complete. At VVITCH we absolutely hate gatekeeping.

Ready to see how we can work magic over your website design and build?

Meet the Authors

Jen Siomacco - Founder and UX Designer

Jen has worked in technology, marketing, education, and publishing since graduating with an architecture degree from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. While working as a user experience (UX) designer and product manager in the corporate world, Jen traveled the world conducting user research and interviewing customers to ensure their company’s products and services were well-designed, accessible, and a delight to use.

Carly Teigeler - Branding, Web, & Graphic Designer

Carly (she/her) has been working in branding & web design for five years. After spending several years studying both architectural design and dance, Carly took her critical design eye, passion for choreographing experiences, and ability to learn quickly on her feet, and dove headfirst into the world of marketing strategy for small businesses. Having now taken a step back to focus solely on the visual side of marketing, Carly loves using her skills to create brand presences that are as passion-driven and unique as the people behind them.

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