Let's dive into brand guidelines! While they are considered the foundational elements of any company's marketing toolkit, the specific components can vary greatly between firms. In episode 41 of The Shortlist, Becky Ellison and Lauren Jane Peterson, Senior Creative Strategists at Middle of Six, break down the essentials of brand guidelines. They even go beyond the basics and explore the nice-to-have and dreamworld scenarios.
This episode explores everything from defining a brand's personality and voice, how logos should be used, and the need for consistent visual and writing standards across marketing platforms. Becky and Lauren Jane also share tips on how to audit your firm's brand assets, conduct a "search and destroy mission" for non-complaint logos and visuals, and how to rein in a brand without feeling overwhelmed.
CPSM CEU Credits: 0.5 | Domain: 2
Podcast Transcript
Welcome to The Shortlist.
We are exploring all things AEC marketing to help your firm win The Shortlist.
I'm your host, Wendy Simmons, and each episode, I'll be joined by one of my team members from Middle of Six to answer your questions.
Today, we're chatting with two senior creative strategists, Lauren Jane Peterson and Becky Ellison, and I invited them here to discuss what I have named the components of Kick Ass Brand Guidelines.
You guys like that name?
Is that gonna pass?
That flies.
That's a good one.
Yeah.
Very clear.
Well, thank you, Lauren Jane and Becky, for joining us.
And Lauren Jane, this is your first podcast with Middle of Six.
I don't think it's your first podcast ever, right?
It is.
It is.
I'm a brand new newbie.
All right.
Well, a special, extra special welcome.
And I thought, you know, since it's your first time in front of the mic here, maybe you can tell our listeners a little bit about yourself, how you got into AEC marketing.
Just say hello.
Yeah.
Hi.
So glad to be here, Wendy.
Thank you for having me alongside with Becky.
So I started working as a graphic designer, visual designer 10 years ago.
But let's see, five years ago, five years ago, I transitioned into working for an architecture firm.
It was something new that I didn't even know really existed in terms of a job for a graphic designer, a visual designer.
And I had this whole other field industry open up to me is really great.
So I started working for an architecture firm and had a lovely time there and wanted a bit of a change of pace.
And I joined the Middle of 16.
And I'm so glad to be here.
We're so happy to have you here.
It's amazing.
I feel so lucky to have this this group of talented designers with the whole Middle of 16.
But sometimes I feel like it's just around me.
I'm around all these awesome creative visual people.
And that makes me very happy every day.
It's a good crew.
Good crew.
Yes.
And Becky, that's a familiar voice on the podcast now.
Becky's been in several, even interviewed me on one recently.
So, Becky, thanks for joining us again.
Thank you for having me back.
Yeah, always, right?
In this topic, when we were just thinking about it very quickly, we were like, should we talk about brand guidelines?
We get the request from our clients to please review their brand guidelines and make recommendations.
Obviously, creating brand guidelines when we're doing a brand refresh or doing a new brand, and then the gamut from just even seeing lots of brand guidelines or being handed brand guidelines and wondering like, hmm, what about this part?
So I'm guarantee we could talk for three hours on this topic.
We won't do that today.
I thought we'd just start off with an overview of like, why the heck are these important?
Who wants to start?
Well, brand guidelines are important because they are the way that you can establish what is your brand for your company, whether that's a new brand, whether that's an old brand from 100 years ago, wherever your brand is in its life, that guidelines is a set of exactly that, guidelines on how to use your brand, what it looks like, what it doesn't look like, what are your typefaces, your colors, your logo, that sort of thing.
So it's just sort of the Bible of your brand, right?
Every company should have one of any size.
You could be just a one-person startup.
You can absolutely have a brand guidelines.
You could be a massive company worldwide, again, with the 300-year history.
It's useful for every size of company, and everybody can use it.
It's a powerful tool.
It's the face of who you are.
You get to show the world who you are, and you get to identify with your sense of direction and your face, right?
It's who everyone else sees you to be.
Yeah, and the brand guidelines make this great little package that you can share internally, you know, have it for training or on-boarding or any element, you know, just to communicate very clearly internally.
And then if you're using any outside resources, you know, like Middle of Six, we are very grateful to be handed some brand guidelines to follow.
So if it's not on, if you don't have some guidelines, please take note of this episode, jot down the things that are the easy things to do and the things that might be on your wish list and start putting it together because it'll serve you well.
So let's move into the essentials.
What are the essential elements of some good solid brand guidelines?
Well, of course, you definitely want to have your logo as the centerpiece of your brand guidelines because that is the face of your organization.
That's what everybody can see.
So you want to set up, what is the logo for sure?
What are the variations?
Do you have a certain version that's white logo on a dark background?
Is there a horizontal shape versus a square shape, things like that?
And you definitely want to include a section on what not to do with the logo.
Let's say wherever the logo is used, you want to make sure that there's enough white space around it.
You could even spell out how much white space to put around your logo.
One of the great things about brand guidelines document is it's a living thing that you can sort of evolve and change as your brand evolves and changes.
You can be as specific or as vague as you feel is necessary for your company.
And that often will include examples for especially for outside vendors who are working with your logo, printers, that sort of thing.
They need to know what can we do with the logo?
What should we not do?
If you really need to tightly control what people do, you can set very specific rules as to what people are allowed to do, what they're not.
Or you can just kind of say, use your best judgment.
You can spell out within the guidelines.
These things are kind of up for negotiation.
Those things aren't.
But with the logo, that just sort of sets up the kinds of files that you would use in various situations so that somebody can easily look at the book and say, OK, I've got, you know, a dark background, I'm working with apparel, whatever.
And they can go right to, OK, this is exactly which logo I should use and how.
Yeah.
Something I want to add about the logo is to make sure that you think what the logo would look like really, really small and really, really big, right?
What those things would look like at different sizes.
You want your logo to be really clear even at a very small size, right?
Think something that's going to go on the Internet or at the bottom of a footer of a page, right?
How does that logo show up?
Now, in whatever brand guidelines are established for your company, you might have alternates, right?
Like a small symbol that you could use when it's really small, etc.
But it's also okay to just have one logo that you use as long as it's very clear, simple and legible when it's really small.
Along with the simple and legible, you also want to make sure that your main logo that you use is probably a single color, one solid single color, not a pattern, not anything with really tiny little stripes or dots, right?
Because you want it to be simple, legible, and clear.
It almost sounds like we're verging on a little bit of a brand audit.
If you were pulling this together, you might look at, okay, what are all the variations of our logo out there on every type of document?
And how is it showing up?
Are there any that we need to take away that are somehow outdated or poor quality?
Anything like that.
And then define, like, Lauren Jane, what you were saying.
Do we have the right sizes?
Do we have the right color combinations?
Becky, then how is it applied?
You know, reverse out all of that.
And, you know, it seems like a good practice to do every so often, probably not an annual thing.
But, you know, when you have some time to just take stock of all of the visual assets, I'm like, okay, how's this showing up in the guidelines?
Becky, you were mentioning that part about having the ability to have variations.
So here's something that we've run into before, like when you want to design something that technically breaks the guidelines of the logo use.
How do you resolve that?
It sounds like you're cool with that.
Rebellion.
As a graphic designer, I love to break the rules.
I will look for any loophole in the rules, and I will break it.
I think it's important to have some flexibility, depending on who is working with your brand.
If you have capable, talented graphic designers in house, you probably need to spell out less what needs to be done, what shouldn't be done with the logo, which variations, because it's pretty intuitive.
If not, by all means, like, you know, lock it up, tell them exactly what they can do and what they can't.
The flexibility comes in when you have somebody working with the brand and putting together something that isn't maybe an established thing.
Like, we're not talking about letterhead business cards, but maybe collateral, brochures, website even to a degree can require that flexibility so that the designer is able to kind of say, okay, I know generally what we're going for here and which rules really can't be broken, but there are other things that I might be able to do.
Like, let's say you haven't spelled out how to use the logo with transparency and you have a graphic designer that wants to do something cool with like some blend modes and whatever, and just you don't really want to lock up that control too terribly much where you're not having that creative flexibility to try new things and evolve.
But at the same time, you know, you don't want people turning your logo into like leopard print and like pink stripes.
Like, I mean, you want just enough control, that sweet spot.
And that's usually depending on what your resources are in-house.
Also part of brand guidelines, along with logo usage, we're kind of transitioning a little bit, but in an ideal world, you would also have additional guidelines, right, for how to use all of the assets, how to incorporate, interpret, right, the rules.
And Becky was talking about breaking the rules.
But what's really important is to know deeply, know and understand the rules, quote unquote, rules, the guidelines that have been set up for your branding in order to break them.
Right.
You need to know the rules in order to break them or break them well.
You know, essentially, every interpretation or every, quote unquote, breaking of the rules should also really be in line with those decisions that the person that made the brand guidelines set up.
Right.
Oh, I'm going to break the rules, but they actually still kind of within those rules of the bigger picture, the bigger idea of the brand guideline that the designer or whoever laid out for you.
So it's kind of like breaking the rules, but within still that bigger framework.
Speaking of breaking the rules, a good reason to establish brand guidelines if you have not yet done so, is if you work for a company where, let's say, you've got a lot of people who are using 100 different logo files from 100 different years, then, you know, your brand has gone through an evolution, and you've got some people using this one, and trucks have that one, and hard hats have this one, and you just, you gotta get everybody on the same page.
A great thing to do is to just establish that brand guideline, send it out to everybody in the company, and say, okay, whatever you're using, stop, look at the book, and go with this.
Destroy everything else that you've been using.
And it's just a great way to get everybody on the same page.
In case it's not clear for our listeners, when we say break the rules, I would say one rule is that only marketing gets to break the logo rule, by the way.
Let's be clear, because I think that a lot of marketers have felt frustration that they go out on a job site, or they go and go to some intern event and wait a second, what's this version of the logo out on some swag that we did not approve?
So I think the brand guidelines is a great place to introduce like, these are the guidelines, and these are our standards.
If you need any help, marketing is here to help you come to us.
We will create the version for your particular use and we'll make sure that is implemented well.
So that can be an asterisk on some of these guidelines.
What else are some of the essentials that we would put in like the very core elements of Good Brand Guidelines?
Well, I can speak a little bit to typefaces if we want to go there.
You know, having established clear typefaces for your brand is really important.
There's several different things that can go along with that.
You know, if you have one typeface that goes along with the visual branding, the identity that makes sense with your company, one is okay.
Having just one is okay.
If you're going to have one typeface, it needs to probably be really clear.
So in terms of typefaces, you know, the two big categories are serif and sans serif.
There's so many different options out there, but most of the time, if you're going to pick one single typeface, I would probably suggest sans serif.
So a little bit of a simpler, a little more geometric, a straightforward typeface that can read really well, really small and big and any usage that you're going to put that typeface in use.
So you want to pick something that's clear.
Bonus points, if it matches any typography that's in your logo, right?
If it goes along with it, if it's maybe the exact same typeface or one that looks good paired with it.
So if you're going to go to two typefaces, then there's also lots of suggestions there, but a good trick or a good easy rule of them is to pick one sand serif typeface and one serif typeface.
Generally, if they are both pretty simple, the likelihood of them matching is pretty high, and they work with each other instead of against each other.
So especially if you are starting to establish your brand guidelines for the first time, is you want to have in there who are you as a company?
What is your brand?
Who is your brand?
What is your voice?
You want to have your mission, your vision, your values, and that can inform your whole brand, both visually and in terms of the words that you use to describe your company.
So when you start out in that branding process, you kind of take inventory of who are we, what are we, what do we stand for, what does this all mean?
And then you put that in your brand guidelines to establish for people who are writing about your brand, for people who are writing for your company, so that they know a good practice is to say, what are we, what are we not?
And make a list.
These are the words that describe us.
We are fun, forward thinking, positive, optimistic.
We are not preachy.
We are not annoying.
We are not whatever.
And then you can have that sort of set up to inform every other decision you make, because now you're grounded in like, what are we trying to say with all this stuff?
I would even argue that you should be doing that probably before you do anything else.
That's all foundational.
And a really good brand, I would say probably every really good brand out there started with that, right?
And every decision that you make, you come back to, does this align with the values?
Does this align with the voice?
Does this align with who we wanna be and who we want to project ourselves as?
Yeah, if you are creating the brand guidelines for the first time or just evaluating what you have on hand, some of the things that you might just check off the list.
What are our mission, vision, values, and culture represented somehow?
And you may have all of those or just some of those, that's totally acceptable.
And what's your brand voice and what's the personality of the firm?
There's lots of exercises that you can do either as a part of the whole company or as a marketing department to define that.
And so good place to set the stage, right?
Or, Lauren Jane, as you said, it's the foundational elements start there.
And then as you get into the physical components, like the logo, like the typefaces, there's probably some linkage there and even a little bit of the voice and the descriptor of why we have made these choices.
Why are those there?
What about color palettes?
That seems like a pretty straightforward piece.
I would think.
How many colors are too many colors?
This is another good one for the rule followers versus the rule breakers, because a lot of times when you have a strong brand, especially when it's been around for a while, you've got maybe your one strong color and that logo.
We are red, red, red, red, baby.
And then it can be quite difficult to design around that as a designer.
So if you are I feel like I'm doing an ad here, like if you are feeling stuck in a rut as a marketer, break out with color palette, like really you can you can take a look at, OK, here's our primary color.
What colors might maybe go with this to give us some variety?
It will not dilute your brand.
It will only give you more tools to work with.
Sure, you don't want to go crazy with 15,000 different colors and even red, which which I know shows up in a lot of AEC companies.
There are colors, believe it or not, that will jive with red.
If you want to keep that palette to maybe like two or three, maybe four colors, maybe that's that's perfectly adequate.
I would think, as a designer, if you guys have strong feelings on that, chime in.
But you want to set up that primary one or two colors that show up in your logo.
You're going to want Pantone shades for those, obviously, and then you translate into CMYK RGB, whatever.
And then maybe look at what could be another color that might go with this.
And then maybe one more that contrasts, and then throw in whatever you're going to use for your text, which is usually something similar to black.
And that's perfectly fine.
You can add more if you feel comfortable, and your design staff is cracking, but don't be afraid to expand your color palette.
I would say start small.
Start with that one to three to five, and then as you use your items, as you use those different assets, you might find, oh, I really need a couple of extra colors, right?
So start small and expand when you need to.
One way I like to think about color in brand guidelines is just maybe a visual way of showing the primary versus secondary and tertiary is in percentages.
If you were to lay out a document, those primary colors could be 100% of the document or 90% of it, and then going down from there, a secondary.
And this is to be decided by your designers.
I'm not saying literally the secondary color could be like 25%, but you can think about it in that way.
So if you were going to have a sidebar, or it was just going to be another element, a footer element, but kind of big blocks, you know, maybe that is a 20% of your visuals.
And then tertiary could be almost like punctuation marks or thin lines, and they might only get 5% of the space.
And then I feel like you can have more colors without fearing that they're going to be like just wildly put everywhere all over the place.
That's so smart.
That works well for the math people and the art people, as we know, to sort of show that visually, as well as explaining via percentages.
That's a fantastic way to do it.
Another thing that we definitely used for our Middle of Six brand guidelines is fun names for the colors, because you can't just call everything teal or whatever.
If you give them unique names that kind of go with your brand, for example, we are using a sort of teal color that we call Yacht Rock.
You can't confuse that with any other shade.
Everyone knows exactly what that is, because it's got a catchy name that's easy to remember.
So you have this sort of internal shorthand, plus it's just fun.
People remember, they remember the fun names, and you gotta have a little fun every day.
Right, and one of our yellow colors is called Sticky Note.
That makes me happy, right?
That's a marketer's number one tool.
So we've got that in our toolkit as well.
Okay, so what about some nice to have things in your guidelines?
You've got the foundational elements from there.
What else do you want to explore and add and what would be helpful for your team?
The limit is kind of endless there.
Some nice to haves that are a little bit more common could be letterhead, establishing what that's gonna look like every time you use it, business cards.
You know, you could also expand even into templates, right?
So templates for presentation, templates for proposals.
You know, there's kind of boundless, endless extras you can get into, but those are a couple of basics.
Becky, I know that you just did some fun swag stuff for Middle of Six this past year.
What about swag?
Yeah, swag is an excellent thing to have shown in your brand guidelines, how to use your logo on various items, whether you have embroidered apparel versus something that is sort of screen printed.
You can create patterns and textures and gradients that can be used exclusively on swag items.
You can show do's and don'ts when putting together, like if you're making something really small and you want to put your brand on, you know, like a pen or something.
Here's how we're going to show it when it's really small.
If you need a one or two color version, because a lot of times when you're printing something, the cost can vary pretty wildly whether you're doing, you know, one color print versus a full CMYK print.
So you can kind of spell that out in the brand guidelines so that, honestly, a lot of the time the people who are going to need to know this information are going to be those printers, those outside vendors that are working with your brand.
So it's really easy to just say, here's our brand guidelines, go, rather than having to, you know, create every little thing and spell everything out for them.
Can be a good spot to capture some notes.
Like if you did some stitch out samples for baseball caps, it's nice to know like, oh, well, we definitely needed to up the stitch count because our L doesn't show up.
I don't know.
These are weird things that you find out when you're working with your brand over time.
And your brand guidelines can be a nice place to capture some of those details so that you don't have to dig through emails or past invoices to figure out like, what the heck did we do when we did it this way?
I also like having email signatures in there.
You know, Lauren Jane, you mentioned the business cards and letterheads, and those are really nice set standard things.
And there's often, I don't even know, actually are there hard copy versions anymore, but certainly digital versions.
But for employees, it's so nice to know like the parts and pieces of an email signature.
You know, what am I supposed to use?
And how do you actually build that out?
And how do you confirm?
I'm sure for our engineering friends, they would be so happy to have the font size, the right color code, all that stuff.
And, you know, the brand guidelines is a good place for that to live, too.
Bonus points if you can create it and essentially send it out to people just so that they can copy and paste it into their signature and change their details.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
One last thing that I really would put in the nice to haves category is standards and or guidelines for how to use your brand on the web.
So that could be social media or your website, right?
I think website is primary and comes before social media.
You got to get that.
That one aligned first.
But, you know, how does your brand show up online?
Like those things should be included in the brand guideline.
Often you have different colors or different types of color formatting that are used per color, right?
So you would use like maybe a hex code or something for your colors.
So just understanding and knowing how to interpret your brand and your brand guideline on the Internet.
And that can encompass social media as well.
You could spell out, here's how we do our social media profile images, banner images, the posts themselves.
That can all be part of your brand guidelines, because again, you can have as much detail or as little as you need that makes sense for your company.
I feel like thinking about the visuals, online, website, social media, it bleeds right naturally into the photography and video standards that could be part of brand guidelines.
I don't know if either of you have some thoughts on how you establish that, because we get all kinds of photography, right?
Something, a quick cell phone snapshot to really high-end professional photography, and that range, but it seems like an important part of the brand guidelines.
How do you wrangle that?
That can encompass everything from what kind of visual style you want your photographs to have.
Do you want them to be gritty and tough?
Do you want them to be, you know, bright and sort of approachable, fun?
I mean, you can set a tone for the kind of photography that you use.
We actually had a client who spelled out in their brand guidelines that they would like to use more photography with forward-facing people.
They want to see people's faces.
They want to, you know, make sure that every time you're looking at a photo, there's a person smiling at you so that you kind of get this feel that there are people behind this brand.
Other companies have wanted to focus on their equipment.
Like, we got to show those excavators, whatever.
You can set that kind of thing.
You can also specify how you would like your photography to be executed in terms of like framing.
Let's say we want to have, you know, all of our photographs include enough space in them that we can use those for social media applications, things like that, when you want to overlay content over the photos, you can set that up ahead of time and show this to your photographer and give them, you know, your shot list.
This is what we want.
And also, this is how we want you to do it.
And then you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time you hire a new photographer to explain your style.
I would even add editing to that list.
Do we want our photos to be edited really bright or do we want them to be a little bit moody?
Right?
A lot of that happens when you take the photographs, but also in post-processing, you know, that's another big one that affects how the photography comes out.
So just thinking a little bit about what you want it to look like.
A great place to start with that is doing a little bit of an Internet search of like, what other photos do I really like, you know?
And they might not even be photos from other people in your industry, but like things that you are naturally drawn to, like let's say some, I don't know, a big athletic wear company or some other business that you see that you know, maybe they have commercials that you're like, wow, the feel of this commercial is really great, or like this ad is really stellar.
And the vibe, the energy really aligns with what you see for your business, what you see for your company.
That's a great place to start too, right?
And great photographers will see that and say, oh, okay, I get it.
I get your vibe.
I get what you're looking for.
And they can execute that in their work.
Yeah, make a mood board.
That's a great way to show what you want.
How do you start moving that ship in another direction?
Because unless you are working for a new company, there's probably a lot of photography, or hopefully there's a lot of photography available and visual stuff that is older, legacy stuff.
It could be project photos, which maybe you can't go and have reshot, and it could be a lot of team partnering brand photos.
How do you move in the right direction?
You could probably start by establishing standards for usage of what you currently have, and then maybe transition into what do we want the new photography to be.
Like you could set up, let's not use photos that show projects that are XYZ years old.
Standards for quality, you could set standards for resolution of photos to make sure that you're using only good quality images that are big enough to be used.
You might have black and white imagery that you want to stop using or integrate in a different way.
Yeah, I would say incrementally, like start with address what you have, use your resources, don't let anything go to waste, and then sort of build in over time, here's how we want to do it going forward.
Similar to how Becky mentioned going back and making sure that all of your old logo usage was gone, and taking all that out and replacing it with updated stuff, just apply the same thought process to photography.
And again, echoing what Becky said, it doesn't have to be all at once.
You can say, okay, we're going to take our identified lowest 25 percent quality or smallest photos, and we're going to cut that out.
And then you can decide if you have the budget and the resources to allocate to add a little bit, to add 10 percent back in, and slowly chip away from those bottom percentages of quality and keep adding.
Fadi and I were talking on a podcast about photography and how important the quality is.
So really, honestly, he would say, this is Fadi, chime in, like, guys, get rid of that old junky, grainy photography anyway, no matter what, even if you have new images or not, just doesn't represent your brand very well.
So you can feel good about that.
It may be a case for we could have new photography.
Here's what we currently have, see the difference, see what it could look like.
And I mean, honestly, I think if you had a few thousand dollars for some brand photography, you would quickly not need that older stuff anyway.
Can we get into the topic of what is in a dream world, brand guidelines?
What are those things that you don't see all the time, but are really amazing and you would love to see more of?
One thing is writing standards.
You could detail what is the voice of our written work.
When we're writing proposals, when we're writing letters, when we're writing marketing content, how do we want to sound?
What standards of grammar are we using?
Are we using Oxford commas?
Are we, you know, like you can set those kind of things and just kind of establish, is the tone friendly?
Is it intelligent?
Do we want to be very technical?
Do we not?
Those are the things you can kind of spell out with the writing standards.
Words and terminology.
You want to make sure that you're consistent in what you're calling things, especially in proposals.
Is pre-construction hyphenated or not?
These are hot topics that could come to fisticuffs because people are very passionate one way or another.
As long as you're all on the same page, you can do whatever you want.
We at Middle Six are fans of the Oxford comma, in case anyone was wondering.
I know that is one of the hottest issues in writing today.
But yeah, N dashes, M dashes, there's so many things you can set or again, not set if you don't want to fence everyone in too much.
Yeah.
I mean, those writing styles can even be definitions.
I've seen brand guidelines.
If your firm is full of technical experts, they maybe have been advised by legal.
We can say these types of words.
We cannot say these types of words because it is ensuring that we are covering, that whatever we're saying here is actually legally binding.
And so it can get quite technical, but something as simple as those hyphens and dashes and phone numbers or square foot.
How are you saying that?
So I don't know if anyone's curious, but the standard at Middle of Six is we default to AP style, except for the Oxford comma.
That's the one that we throw out when we, or we use that, but we don't fall.
Rule breakers.
I know.
Right.
So you have to pick something.
And I mean, we might be working with 100 clients in a year.
And I think my brain gets just so jumbled on, now, what's the way to do this?
And honestly, consistency is one of the most important things.
So that's our default.
Well, having something written down and established in your brand guidelines, I know we said that this was really great extra thing to have, but having a guideline for writing, especially when you're a pinch, if you're crunching on a proposal or if you need to get something out, can be really nice to just go back and say, okay, what's the voice?
Is this friendly?
Is this really educational?
Is this serious?
What's the tone?
And that can often be just a great starting point when you're having a little bit of a writer's block.
Yeah, you could even set up a cover letter if that's something you struggle with when it comes time, when you're doing a lot of proposals.
You could set up, here's how we format it, date, name, address, subject, line, whatever.
And you could throw in some, here's some starter text.
Here's something that we want to say in all of our cover letters.
Here's what we want to close on.
There's a lot of things that you can actually use as templates in this process as well.
I was recently reviewing some Brad guidelines that I thought were really lovely in the area of writing style because they said, here's an example.
I think it was one sentence of what we would not say.
Here's how we would say it.
And so to read one or two sentences and you could clearly understand like, oh, I see, that one sounds and it wasn't over the top, but you know, yeah, it's got a little more jargon.
It doesn't sound very approachable.
And then when you read the way they would like to be heard, what the voice is, it's very clear.
You're like, great, you know, I can flow with that.
And so that would be something.
It takes a little bit of an effort, right, to show the comparison.
And definitely worth it, especially if you're ever using anyone on the outside or someone to do QC that's not kind of in the marketing team.
That can be helpful.
All right.
Well, ladies, I feel like we've covered a lot of good stuff here.
I don't know if there's more to talk about on any of the topics, like textures and extra baubles and icons and that sort of thing.
If you have strong preferences, I'll open the floor to any final thoughts before maybe just kind of wrap up with our tips and suggestions.
I mean, you absolutely could put icons and unique design elements in your brand guidelines.
Let's say if you have something that's sort of based on the shape of your logo, like we've maybe you have an orange triangle that you want to use in documents.
You could show examples of how that orange triangle is used.
Various icons that match and are minimal and beautiful and go together.
Please, please, please.
You could show exactly which kinds of those to use and where to get them.
You could point people to where the file systems are.
That's another nice thing to have to say.
If you need a logo, here's where you go to get it.
That's great to have.
You can have patterns and textures if you're using those.
We definitely do that at Middle of Six.
We've got some fun patterns that we've created.
So if you just got a big open space, there's an easy way to go grab a file to fill that that matches the brand.
A tip I have for maybe some extras that you wouldn't ordinarily think of is to go back and look at presentations that several different people have made.
So not just you.
What have you made?
What has someone on a different team made?
Think about, maybe somebody in accounting or finance makes presentations a lot.
What do they make?
And look at the elements that they have chosen to include in that presentation or proposal.
And if you see things recurring and maybe people doing them in different manners, that could be a good indicator to you that setting a standard or setting some sort of guideline around what those things look like could be really helpful, right?
You're going through and you're seeing, okay, what do people actually needing?
And then setting up a standard for that.
So that can be another little trick if you're like, oh, what else do we need to make?
That is such a good tip.
I love that.
I would have never thought of it.
I probably do that subconsciously without thinking of it in such a positive way.
I just look at something like, oh my gosh, that looks terrible.
I need to get out some brand guidelines.
But I like your approach to that, Lauren Jane.
That's really good.
All right.
Well, thank you both for coming on the podcast and to talk about brand guidelines.
That was really fun, very lively.
Just a few overarching themes that I heard today because there's a bunch of them.
So we kind of jumped right into the brand guidelines, but it quickly devolved to like, hey, maybe you need to audit your stuff first to understand what should be in there and to do a little cleanup of what shouldn't be in there, that sort of thing, and of the files just to make sure that you're starting with the best of the best and then starting small, building that foundational piece first and then adding to it over time.
So maybe it becomes something that once a quarter or once a year you look at and then you add to it based on what you've built out that's really solid.
Maybe getting a fresh set of eyes, either looking at the brand guidelines to poke holes and ask questions, people who will be using it and then also looking around your own office.
What are the things that you're seeing, the common occurrences that could use some attention?
What else?
I know we covered a lot.
One thing you want to make sure to do is remind and refresh everybody in the company, especially when you get new people and you have people coming and going, you want to make sure that they're all up to date.
And it's just kind of a good way to remind everyone where to go for what they need, you know, come to marketing.
Here's what we're doing, what we're not doing.
Here's where the logo files are.
And make it part of your new hire orientation.
Build in to your onboarding process, branding and what it means.
And here's the brand guidelines, here's who to contact.
It can be very short.
And that's just a great way to make sure everyone is set up to not wonder in the moment, what do I do when they're making something that is branded?
The last thing I would say is, branding can sometimes feel extremely overwhelming.
And if you have the capacity and space to do a brand overhaul, awesome.
And if you don't, even really subtle changes that are manifested throughout your brand can make a really big impact.
So, you know, kind of make an assessment.
We talked about the audit, right?
Like, do also like an internal audit.
What do I have capacity for?
And then decide how you want to move forward.
And, you know, you could even build out a plan.
This year, we're going to do a really small additional colors and a little bit of a refresh.
And then we're going to make a little bit of space next year or the year after that.
And then we're going to do a big overhaul, right?
It's OK to have a plan.
And if you work for a medium to large size company, especially a fun thing that you can do to get everybody involved is what I would call a find and destroy, which is, you know, communicate, here are the brand standards, here's the logo files, all the stuff you need to know.
And also go out into your jobs, into the field, wherever it is that you work and what you work with, and see if there are any old logos being used, any colors that are not current being used.
Take a picture or take the item itself, send it to marketing.
You can even make up like a bounty, a reward for these things to just kind of make it into a fun thing.
And then you can have people sort of engaging in the process and feeling like they know.
It sort of subtly sort of trains them to look for something that is outdated versus something that is current.
So it's just kind of a fun exercise to get everybody into the branding spirit.
I love that.
I love that.
Put a bounty on it, but don't totally destroy everything.
Like I'm going to need that business card from, you know, 19 or 1852 so that I can put it in your historical timeline some day.
But keep one of everything.
Keep one of everything.
File it away.
For some companies, that's a huge basement or a huge storage area with all that stuff.
But it's kind of cool, you know, once enough time passes.
All right.
Well, thank you.
I really appreciate the energy and the ideas.
You gave me some ideas for sure.
I think our listeners hopefully pull out your brand guidelines.
See what we missed.
Let us know what we missed once we post this out there and say, what about this part?
Because we would love to address that in another episode.
All right.
Have a great day, everybody.
The Shortlist is presented by Middle of Six and hosted by me, Wendy Simmons, Principal Marketing Strategist.
Our producer is Kyle Davis, with digital marketing and graphic design by the team at Middle of Six.
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The Shortlist is a podcast that explores all things AEC marketing. Hosted by Middle of Six Principal, Wendy Simmons, each episode features members of the MOS team, where we take a deep dive on a wide range of topics related to AEC marketing including: proposal development, strategy, team building, business development, branding, digital marketing, and more. You can listen to our full archive of episodes here.