Branding Bibles

There’s more to a great brand than a name or logo

By Igor Kovriga
Senior Vice President and Art Director, Willard

Your company or product has a great name – a brand that is memorable and creates an instantly favorable impression.  You may even have a terrific logo – distinctive, eye-catching and visually powerful.  The question is, how do you apply these elements to items from everyday necessities like letterhead and business cards to items as varied as pens, delivery trucks, and directional signs?

Allowing managers to apply an asset as valuable as your brand any way they think looks good can actually defeat the purpose of the brand itself – to create an instant connection between the company or product and the public.

Meet the brand book, or corporate identity manual.  Though it may be a formidable document, it’s here to make using your brand easier.  A well thought-out brand book may not have the answer to every question, but it can point managers in the right direction, providing information that can be extrapolated to sensibly approach any issue. 

A corporate identity is a unique set of graphic, visual, audible and semantic constants that belong to a company or brand, and which distinguish it from other brands at a certain point in time.  Time is an important, but often overlooked, element:  Every brand needs periodic renewal to avoid looking and feeling ‘old-fashioned.’  Brands need to change with the times in order to remain relevant to the public. 

If your company is small, your corporate identity manual or ‘brand book’ may be as simple as a photocopy showing how the letterhead, envelopes and business cards should look.  If those are the only places you brand appears, that’s all that it needed.

But for larger companies – and many small ones – things aren’t that simple.  You have products, invoices, advertising materials...  It’s easy to see how the number of ways your brand is applied could snowball.  That’s when brand books become more important.
The brand book is relied upon by modern art directors, graphic designers, marketing managers and corporate communications departments.

The names may differ – ‘Corporate Identity,’ ‘Visual Graphic Standards’ and ‘Graphic Guidelines’ and’Brand Book’- but the essence is the same. They all contain a set of rules for use of the company’s or brand’s corporate identity application in various cases.

For marketing and advertising people, the brand book is a Bible.  It provides invaluable information on details like the colors and fonts that may be used, as well as issues like placement. The creative director chooses the style and tone of the advertising message. Account managers, production managers, art directors and designers actively refer to the brand book as well.  

Because so many types of people use a company’s brand book, and because these people don’t al have the same degree of technical expertise, it is crucial to the book’s usefulness across disciplines that it be easy to use.  An obtuse, poorly organized or excessively detailed book will gather dust on office bookshelves.

Some brand books, for instance, go into excruciating detail into the design of that most common of items, the business card. Really, how much is there to say about the humble business card?  It should be sufficient to show several directions, to describe the general principle, and to supply a model in Vector graphics?

One brand book I have seen weighed in at 500 to 700 pages.  The level of detail was both good and bad at the same time. On one hand, it contained a large number of examples of corporate identity applications.  That meant there would be fewer questions from the field.  On the other hand, that level of detail in every respect hardly made the book enjoyable reading.

Experience has led me to believe that the best brand book is somewhat more than a few photocopied pages and less than the behemoth just mentioned. It should be developed taking into account the specific character of the designer’s work. It may be light on description but with examples of actual applications – and include finished models in Vector graphics in the appendix.

If the application of a brand is logical and consistent, so much the better:  A great brand book will contain guidance that is easy to remember.   The writing should be crisp, clear and concise – but need not be dry and humorless.  Sometimes, a touch of humor makes material easier to digest as well. 

One often overlooked aspect to a brand book is development of a modular grid. In other words, the presence of a simple rule of calculation that keeps branding elements proportionate to the size of the carrier. Very often, this rule is absent, leading to guesswork and the dreaded inconsistency.  Logos and brands need to be seen, and the brand should generally be the same relative size and position on a matchbook cover as it is on a billboard at a football stadium.

As important as it is to precisely match your logo‘s color, the lack of color (black and white reproduction) can also raise issues.  Turn to the brand book – the answer should be there.

How do you treat your logo when it appears with other brands, as in an advertisement?  The brand nook should cover this possibility as well.  It will most likely give a couple of examples as well, homage to the artist’s adage that showing is more instructive than merely telling.

A bad brand book can be expensive.  Lost hours, poor branding, squandered opportunity and imparting an amateurish impression all have costs.  A well-done book may have a significant up-front cost, but it is an investment in your brand well worth making.