I want to give some practical tips for how to stick with your company’s brand wherever you are working in your organization and whatever your task is.
Always Return to the Palette
That’s too simple of a tip, you say. But no! It is incredible how often we don’t pay any mind to it. And remember I am talking to everyone in the organization. To you who are putting up a poster in the office with information and you want red text. Why don’t you check in if there is a red represented in your brand palette.
Too much you say? No, I think consistency is healthy. Brand yourself internally as well as externally to create a stronger brand.
Return to the palette!
You are going to commission someone to create graphics for an ad, and need a text that stands out. Pink would be great so you tell the designer to use pink. The only problem is, your current brand colors are on collision course with that pink you desire. Kill that pink and pick the brightest color you have in your brand palette instead.
Be too much.
But What About Creativity?
Why should you always return to your palette (the same goes for your typefaces). Why not be creative?
Letting everybody be creative with your brand spells certain disaster. When you have an original and make a copy, you should not make another copy from the copy, but go back to the original. The reason you do this is that little by little the copies change, until you are far away from the original and nobody knows what happened.
So have brand guidelines and use them. Always go back to your brand palette and fonts. Also make sure to keep an eye on the general style and feel.
Re-use Material
This is an economical advantage. What if, instead of ordering an image for your Facebook marketing, you order a template with certain elements you can use again and again. Like our ad series we just started.
The concept of this ad series is, “We made [name of customer] [name of project]. What can we make for you?” In this way we show our work to potential new customers, as well as giving bonus exposure for those already our customers. So instead of making individual images each time, we made this template.
The “We Made MacLaren Barbers” campaign template.
Here we insert a video into the iMac screen where you get a guided tour of the page we have made, and then we just change the text to fit the relevant project and customer.
You could of course use a more basic template that your in house team easily can utilize just owning a copy of Photoshop, or something similar.
Also. When I started making this. Instead of selecting the correct font style and weight and putting on the right gradient, I simply opened our current Facebook Cover Photo file, and pulled the text from there. Then I rewrote and moved the text about.
Always looking back before you venture onward creates consistency.
Creativity Needs to be Released in the Right Time and Place
There is room for two types of creativity, each at its given place and time. Creativity within constraints, or initiation creativity. The point is, you can be creative with an existing brand, but make sure it is within the constraints of the brand palette. Move forward, but keep looking back.
The initiation creativity that flows wildly from the right side of the brain is suited at the creation of a new brand, or a total rebrand. What if the new project you want to do should be a side project with it’s own entire brand?
