Maintain Your Brand with Strong Standards
What are ‘brand standards’? Brand standards are contained within a manual or handbook in order to provide the information required to ensure that the visual identity of a brand is used consistently and uniformly. In short, a brand standards document provides a ‘how-to’ to implement your brand in communications. It’s how your logo should be used, and if expanded, a guide to how your brand should be used overall. Sometimes called a ‘brand usage guide’, the document becomes a tool for you to share with those who are going to bring your brand to life after it has been created.
Woodward Cider Co’s ‘brand standards’ guide.
The basics of a brand guide covers the brand’s visual identity and logo- how it is to appear, and what sizing and colours apply. Also it is the typography – what font to use and how it should lay out. Other considerations are the visual elements like the imagery, colour palette, and design layouts.
A more comprehensive brand package can be developed to include the corporate mission statement, brand promise and personality. These can set the tone for the pieces that follow about your logo, visual identity, how your logo could be used on branded merchandise, and any other corporate templates as it comes to using your brand. Another important consideration to include is your brand’s editorial voice. This includes examples of the appropriate tone of voice and language to use when talking about your brand.
Like any training manual, the brand standards document is meant to help build your brand in the long run. If you don’t follow it, the brand will become inconsistent and messy. Thus, it’s important to make sure everyone that encounters your brand is aware of its guidelines.
“Consistent branding unites your company, customers, and your entire team, under one voice and mission,” says Andrew von Rosen, senior designer and co-owner of Town Hall Brands. “The key is to be consistent. Once this strategy has been developed, instructed and adopted, building your brand will be easier for all those involved.”
As a full service agency, our company has a design team that creates brands, logos and packaging from scratch. As importantly, our design team is also responsible for taking a brand they didn’t create and making promotional materials from it, including items like a restaurant promotion or an ad. We need to make sure that everything we create is in alignment with the intention of the original team that designed it.
It’s important that when a winery goes through the time and expense to create a brand, they also protect it.
Sometimes a sign maker for example, in the interest of expediency, will take a guess, or make a change that they think would look good, and it doesn’t matter to them if they cannot see the difference in font, colour or how things lay out. “It should be noted as well,” shares von Rosen “that most of the time, graphic designers are not the same, and everyone has a different aesthetic.”
Sometimes a designer will change a wine label to add lines, colours, or a font change. These kinds of changes ‘muddy’ a brand and make it confusing to those who see it. Even if you make one, or a few, slight changes over time that seem like no big deal to you, these changes might be glaring to a consumer. You look at your brand daily and have a chance to get used to it, but they see it less frequently, and changes really stand out. So tread carefully here.
Do not allow a new designer, to change what the original designer did (unless you start over with a rebrand, and that’s a different column). Train all that encounter your brand to adhere to its standards, and watch the integrity of your identity live on.
Leeann Froese, Town Hall Brands co-owner