It's a good practice to assign a unique name to all your layout elements using ArcMap. This is important in the event that your geoprocessing scripts need to access a particular element to make changes. For example, you might need to update the icon that displays your corporate logo. Rather than making this change manually in all your map document files, you could write a geoprocessing script that updates all your map document files programmatically with the new logo. However, in order for this to be possible, a unique name will need to be assigned to your layout elements. This gives you the ability to access the elements of your layout individually.
As I mentioned in the previous recipe, each layout element will be one of a number of element types and each can be assigned a name. This element name can then be used when you need to reference a particular element in your Python script. You can use ArcMap to assign unique names to each...