We, the creative team at Banter, spend a huge amount of time thinking, crafting and refining brands (okay, there’s some stressing involved also) to possess a cohesive and balanced visual language. We also look at a lot of amazing branding work produced by other agencies to push our own creativity. What we often find is that the brand agency has done a beautiful job of creating comprehensive brand guidelines and stunning award-winning portfolio pieces for their own agency website, however when you land on the actual company website the brand was made for, it is often disappointing, not representative of the style of the brand or completely off-brand.
We always ask ourselves - what happened?
Was it a budget breakdown? Was the design of the other marketing materials done by another agency? Was it done in-house by someone who may have misinterpreted the brand guidelines? Were there Bots involved? Or was it created by a designer who had a bad day, spilled their chai latte on their keyboard and finished the design off with a crayon, some Polaroid photos and a few Post-it notes instead?
Who knows! However, the end result is that the finished product does not live up to the brand guide and that’s potentially costing the company new work. Remember, you have 0.3 seconds to give a good first impression of your brand online.
Let’s take a step back for a minute. If we think of a brand guide as a recipe of ingredients from which to build the finished dish (take a look at my blog “A logo is not a brand”) the designer is like a Chef bringing all the ingredients together in a considered and engaging way for each specific application.
Now, full disclosure, if you gave me (a designer) some wild-caught salmon, caviar, asparagus and a recipe, chances are I’m not going to be able to produce the same quality dish as an experienced Chef, who cooks every day, knows what knife to use to skin a tomato and has sleeve tattoos on both arms. Likewise, give me a detailed set of building plans for a house (or even a doghouse) and there’s no chance it's getting built to resemble the concept.
Similarly, it’s one thing to look at a brand guide and say “Oooh, that's nice innit” or build yourself a beautiful collection of Pinterest references that look amazing. However, it’s an entirely different skill to be able to interpret a brand guide and apply all the nuances to a new creative design starting from a blank canvas.
If we focus purely on typography, here’s a basic list of decisions that need to be made by a designer:
- What brand typefaces are used at which weights?
- What point size should each piece of text be to create a clear hierarchy of information?
- How much spacing is there between the letters, text lines and words?
- Should the text be left-aligned or centre-aligned?
- How much spacing is there to the edge of the page/screen?
- How will text be positioned over an image but remain legible?
- What is the smallest text size that will print clearly?
The list goes on…
All of these seemingly micro-decisions combine to produce the final product and one wrong move can spell the end for brand consistency, recognition and trustworthiness. No matter whether you are using Canva or the latest Adobe Creative Suite, the skill and knowledge of the human (AI is another blog topic for later) pushing the pixels into place is the key for the success of brand implementation.
We can safely say the brand guide is only as good as the people implementing it across all the marketing touch points such as a website, social media and printed materials.
It is important to have a strong brand guide, no doubt about it, however as this is generally not a client-facing document, the contents is wasted if not implemented well. All outward-facing collateral marketing materials must present a professional and consistent brand to instil trust and build brand recognition. It’s also worth remembering that a lot of people tend to focus on the one negative interaction they have with a brand, even if the majority is positive, (admit it, you read the negative Google reviews first don’t you?). So if one touchpoint is off-brand or not functioning well for its intended purpose, the whole brand can be tarnished.
For example, bringing a brand to life on digital channels such as a website is crucial. Even a seemingly simple branded website, must project the correct brand values, tone of voice and visual language of the brand. This is achieved through careful and experienced decision-making in applying not only the brand look and feel, but also content hierarchy, nuances in image selection, responsive layout for optimal functionality on small screens, key call-to-action sections, “skimmable” text layouts and effective user experience.
This is where Banter helps businesses. We have a range of branding options to suit all businesses and a team of experienced graphic and animation designers who can implement the brand guidelines we have produced or work from existing brand guidelines. From designing an on-brand responsive website, sourcing or shooting photography, to best practice content creation for social media channels, we can do it all, and all under one roof.
Let's get chatting about your business and your brand and let us make your company look and function the way it should, wherever and everywhere your customers are!
