WHAT IS A SECONDARY STYLE ELEMENT?
The secondary style element is part of the brand design, the corporate identity design. It‘s a visual element, often derived from the a creative logo design, that runs through every communication point like a visual constant. It holds together the entire look and feel of a business. It‘s often the secondary style element which makes a brand stay in people‘s minds more than any creative logo design!
In this article, you can see some examples of secondary style elements from my daily business routine.
CUBILE MONITORING HEALTH
I created the brand design for my client cubile monitoring health in summer 2018. Here you see the creative logo design, it‘s gif-animated in digital applications:
The yellow horizontal line, which can be longer or shorter in different cases, serves as the secondary style element for this brand design. It‘s repeated in the app icon, the letterhead, envelopes, the business cards, the modular fair wall, the brochure and the website.
LITTLE LUXURY
Little Luxury is a fictitious food brand in the gourmet sector, but still at an affordable price. I created the brand design and packaging design back in 2012. The creative logo design looks like this:
The dot above the i of "Little" is a drop; this drop serves as the secondary style element further on. You can find the drop on the olive oil bottle neck‘s ribbon, as a subtle background pattern for the gourmet mustard and background pattern for the BBQ sauces. This elegant drop can be found on every single packaging to remind of Litte Luxury.
DR. GASSER-PUCK
For my client Dr. Gasser-Puck, I chose a greatly enlarged part of the logo symbol to be the secondary style element. The company logo design looks as follows:
The entire brand design shows greatly enlarged parts of the curvy logo symbol. In order to bring more oomph into the brand design, the secondary style element is placed differently here and there. For example, there are three different versions of letterhead backsides and two different versions of business cards.
BAD UND HEIZUNG
In autumn 2018, I created the new brand design for BAD UND HEIZUNG (a plumbing business: bath and heating). Also here, a greatly enlarged part of the logo symbol serves as the secondary style element. The logo symbol shows a water and a heat wave.
The secondary style element is repeated on the letterhead, business cards, car stickers and the website.
TIROL BOX
For Tirol Box's creative logo design, I was inspired by the mountain shape of the Serles mountain and used dark brown charcoal outlines for the logo symbol in order to transport a feeling of nature.
This brand design has several secondary style elements that all come with a charcoal look: different Alpine flowers being printed inside the packaging, the Tirol Box chocolates show the main ingredients, illustrated with a charcoal pen. Image and text buttons on the website feature the natural charcoal look, too. And even stars in customer reviews are illustrated as Edelweiß blossoms with a dark brown charcoal outline. This guarantees a holistic look across all communication channels.
You can also download this article as a free whitepaper.