I’ve had a few conversations with other designers and clients recently about the differences between traditional offline brand guidelines and online or ‘digital’ brand guidelines, so I thought I’d share some of my experience of working in this area and hopefully provide some ’food for thought’ about what to consider when putting together digital brand guidelines for your own business or organisation.
What are brand guidelines, anyway?
A brand guidelines document is a set of rules and recommendations that organisations, with the help of their design agency, put together to ensure consistency of their marketing and advertising materials. They might typically include information about the colour scheme, logo usage, standard typefaces and photography style, as well as more generic information such as mission statements.
The guidelines are distributed to suppliers such as design agencies, printers and publishers to ensure that all marketing materials produced conform to the overall aim of the organisation, in addition they are a useful timesaver as third parties don’t have to request this information from marketing departments.
How online design is different
Many of the design & brand guideline documents I’ve come across contain very little information regarding web and online design, I’m not sure exactly why this is but in many cases it may be because the agencies that generate brand guidelines often specialise in printed and offline media.
Coming up with effective guidelines for web and interactive media requires a different skillset and knowledge areas than printed and other offline media.
Graphic designers preparing to create printed materials are primarily concerned with the visual design and print specification of a piece, in addition to the type of stock (paper) or media eg magazine, newspaper, that will be used.
Creating consistency on the web is not dissimilar to traditional graphic design in many ways, and web designers may gain short-term benefit from such information as hexadecimal (web) colours, the colours for the various states of a hyperlink eg active, hover, visited, and recommendations about the layout options for websites, systems and advertising banners.
However, a good web designer, while making sure that the visual design of the project adheres to the guidelines at a simple level, will also have a solid understanding of
• Search engine optimisation
• Accessibility
• Usability & navigation models
• How the design affects page weight (and consequently load time)
• Device compatibility and browsers
He should consider many aspects ranging from the resolution of screens and to the readability of text and provision for visually impaired users. He should also know that fonts should be resizable and colour combinations should contrast adequately.
In reality however, many web designers simply do not have this level of knowledge so specifying as much as possible in your brand guidelines can reduce the risk of getting a poor quality product.
I have come across several instances where brand guidelines dictate the use of a colour combination, only to be contradicted in the same document by accessibility requirements under which that colour combination would be of insufficient contrast.
Extending a brand to the digital community
When the military predecessor to the internet, ARPANET, was established in the 1960s, it allowed the US military a way to share research and funding information. Today, the internet’s main selling point - even some 50 years later- is still the sharing and syndication of information albeit at a vastly improved speed and unprecedented quality of presentation.
Social media, community forums and viral marketing, combined with the more traditional methods of brand development such as television, sponsorship and press campaigns, are incredibly powerful ways to build a brand online. Yet as designers and marketers we are only just beginning to realise that consistency and guidance in these areas is pretty important.
Creating, instilling and developing a brand is about triggering an emotional response within your audience, and where better place to create and foster communities of loyal users than the web.
0 comment(s) so far