Brand Guidelines
Brand guidelines are described as an instruction manual on how to communicate your brand. These can be useful for organisations to explain the nuances and technicalities of the brand’s design to everyone that interacts with the brand and its presentation.
For this week’s task we had to create a brand guideline for our own personal brand. We were given resources to do this and one of them was the website ‘Brandpad’ which helps you create your own brand guidelines using templates and tips within the website.
Before designing my own guidelines I used the other resources provided on blackboard including this article https://medium.com/brandpad/what-makes-a-good-brand-guideline
From this website I created a list of things I definitely needed to include in any brand guideline;
- Logos (explaining its variations, the anatomy of the logo and the do’s and don’ts of how to present the logo)
- Colour palettes (including primary and secondary colour palettes and their hex code, RGB and CMYK numbers)
- Typography (Primary/Secondary fonts including their style and when to use them)
- Other- advertising/ products/ photography
This is the link to my brand guidelines I created [brand guideline]
Second Task
Another task for this week was to create a brand guideline for another brand of our choice. I decided to create a brand guideline for a brand I know has its own brand guidelines and then compare and contrast my own to theirs to show how much I’ve learned from the first task and further learn how brand guidelines work in the professional world.
For the task I chose ‘Netflix’. The first thing I did was conduct my own research of the company. I went to their website to look at their colour and font choices to determine if they had a secondary colour palette and/or typeface. The first thing I noticed was the dark colour scheme and small navigation bar to make room for content. Aside from the wordmark, it looked like there was 2 heading sizes in the colour white. I researched into it and found out that this typeface was called ‘Netflix Sans’ which was created by Netflix’s in-house design team (Dalton Maag and Noah Nathan) whereas the typeface used to make the wordmark is a free font called ‘Bebas Neue’.
I wrote these things down and what I was gonna include in my version of the brand-guidelines in my notebook:
After I had this set out I began creating the brand guidelines, I collected images of netflix’s colour scheme that I could then pick from and collect the colour codes of. I also collected images of netflix’s logo and wordmark to present:
I then copied the link to Netflix’s brand-guidelines to compare:
Compare + Contrast
Both my and Netflix’s brand guidelines contain sections on the logo, symbol and colour. The difference is my guidelines included a typography section whereas the official guidelines did not.
The presentation of the colour palette was different as I had one section containing all colours whereas Netflix had colours sectioned into what’s used for each purpose on the logo or symbol.
Both brand guidelines contained most of the same information, however mine included more writing and explanation whereas the official guidelines was much more minimal and “showed” rather than “told”. My colour code for the dark red was wrong and I didn’t use the names of the colours netflix assigned as I didn’t have access to that information.
One many difference between the two guidelines is that Netflix included a “don’ts” section for their logo and wordmark which presented how not to display the logo and symbol including:
- using the wrong colour for the logo (white logo when not on videos/white logo on contextual background)
- using the ‘n’ from the wordmark for the symbol
- using a white symbol and white symbol on red background
- a rotated version of the logo or symbol
- using logo or symbol on busy background
- logo/symbol displayed in a container or shape
- using the old logo
- using the symbol in space of a letterform
What I learned
I learned that the way I looked at sectioning a brand guideline is not the only way to do it as breaking up the information more, such as Netflix explaining colour for the logo and symbol instead of all colours shown in the same section. This can be far more understandable for people trying to gather information but also allows the brand guidelines to be presented much nicer and simpler.
I didn’t think to put a do’s and don’ts style section which can further explain the brand and allows for a clear demonstration of what the brand consists of and wants to be presented as for increased consistency overall. I also didn’t think to include applications of the brand like packaging, food or games, and which of these applications would be appropriate and how to present them. I think this is a good idea and explains more aspects of the brand that I forgot would be important.
The typography section not being included made me rethink sections that might not be important or completely necessary for the brand-guidelines you are creating at the time. Typography wasn’t necessary for Netflix, it might be for other brands but there are other sections that netflix has (such as the packaging applications) that other brands, that might be solely online, would not need.