Your logo is taken care of, your fonts and colors are good to go.

Next up: graphics.

Something as simple as an icon or a border can make your brand distinct and memorable. Much of branding is considering and accounting for the small details.

But before you create fun brand assets like icons, patterns, and borders, you need to consider the overall style of your graphics.

This post is part of Elle & Company’s 4-week Brand Challenge. Click here to see more details, sign up, and access the free workbook.

DAY 15 ACTION STEP

Determine the style of your graphics

Are they going to be minimal? Detailed? Geometric? Hand-drawn?

What style would make the most sense for your brand based on your keywords, mission statement, logo, and font choices?

Skype’s brand style guide is one of my all-time favorites because they do a fantastic job of outlining their graphic style.

Take a look:

“The Skype logo is constructed from a series of circles, and following that lead, our clouds are to be constructed with the same process.

“Circles maketh the cloud. Use circles, any placement and shape, but make sure it looks…cloudish.

“Circles good, ellipses bad. Don’t use an ellipse to construct a cloud, we like them round and circular, just like our logo.

“Our illustrations are all about visualizing the richness of conversation. So once you have your basic cloud shape you can incorporate some illustrations to the cloud.”

Skype outlines their graphic style and creates parameters around the types of graphics they’ll use throughout their brand.

This creates consistency and cohesion, so even if you don’t see the Skype logo, you’ll recognize the Skype graphic style.

The same should be true for your brand. Take some time to determine the style of your graphics.

You don’t have to go into as much detail as Skype did, but having a graphic style in mind will be super helpful for you as you create borders, patterns, and icons next week.

I left space for you to define your graphic style and sketch ideas on page 18 of your workbook.

The more you create new graphics, the more you’ll hone in on your brand’s graphic style.

But it’s good to account for all the work you’ve done up until this point and consider how your graphic style can match your tone and terminology, logo, color palette, etc. It should make sense in light of everything you’ve created so far.

And it will make some of next week’s action steps much easier...See you in Week 4!