Have you ever encountered inconsistent branding?
Your brand is one of the most important things in your company; it is how the world identifies you. While branding isn’t just about your logo, it still plays a key part in helping people easily recall your brand. You should always be protecting and monitoring the use of your logo and branding elements. It’s when things aren’t unified and consistent that branding efforts can start to fall apart.
Create a Brand Guide with all your identity kits (assets) in a place readily available to any employees that may need it. You’ll need this when you use a marketing agency, designer, or send things to a printer. All the files they will ask for in relation to your brand will be in this folder.
A Usage Guideline
This guideline contains all of the basic information about your branding that you and your employees can keep at their desks as a quick reference guide. More in-depth pieces such as a whole branding/identity manual can be created that covers much more in depth uses. Below is the Vivid Image Guideline Sheet. It gives examples of how the different versions of our logo look as well as states the font name, where to download it, and how to achieve our colors.
Identity Kit
This is a folder located in a central location that contains all of your logo files, font files, and any secondary elements used in your marketing.
1. Your logo and any variations of it that are okay to use.
Make sure to have these in several different high resolution file formats:
- A vector file such as an Illustrator (.AI) or .EPS file.
- These types of files allow graphics to be resized at any scale without losing quality. If you have any design related work sent out, this is the file the vendor will more than likely ask you for.
- Transparent .TIF or .PNG
- These types of files allow an image to be saved with a transparent background allowing you to place it on different backgrounds as needed.
- .JPG
- Versions for both print and web
*Having more than one orientation (horizontal and vertical) is very helpful as a logo will be placed on multiple different platforms. For instance, a logo version in a square format comes in handy when uploading to Facebook or Twitter as a profile picture. This ensures that your logo won’t be cut off anywhere and made unrecognizable.
2. Specific Fonts.
More than likely your logo uses a specific font for the text. Be sure to include the font files so folks aren’t randomly choosing fonts that are close to or completely different from the ones that are supposed to be used.
3. Secondary Elements
Secondary elements you may use consistently while marketing your company could be photos, graphics, patterns, and icons; anything you use to support your brand. Like your logos, make sure to have high resolution files of them on hand in several different file types.
4. Color Palette
Keep a text file that has different color profiles for your company colors. The most common form is the hex number, a combination of numbers and letters that a device converts into a color.
It is important for your brand to be consistent and recognizable. Every business owner wants their product to have a home in today’s ever growing marketplace. Having a solid look and feel can help aid in that. Doing simple things like creating guidelines and identity kits is a great way to start. If you need help with any of this or have questions, please give us a call!
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