Business Advice

How Are You Managing Your ‘Digital Brand’?

08/02/10

By Jim Rawson

I've had a few conversations with other designers and clients recently about the differences between traditional offline brand guidelines and online or 'digital' brand guidelines, so I thought I'd share some of my experience of working in this area and hopefully provide some 'food for thought' about what to consider when putting together digital brand guidelines for your own business or organisation.

What are brand guidelines, anyway?

A brand guidelines document is a set of rules and recommendations that organisations, with the help of their design agency, put together to ensure consistency of their marketing and advertising materials. They might...

...typically include information about the colour scheme, logo usage, standard typefaces and photography style, as well as more generic information such as mission statements.

The guidelines are distributed to suppliers such as design agencies, printers and publishers to ensure that all marketing materials produced conform to the overall aim of the organisation, in addition they are a useful timesaver as third parties don't have to request this information from marketing departments.

How online design is different

Many of the design & brand guideline documents I've come across contain very little information regarding web and online design, I'm not sure exactly why this is but in many cases it may be because the agencies that generate brand guidelines often specialise in printed and offline media.
Coming up with effective guidelines for web and interactive media requires a different skillset and knowledge areas than printed and other offline media.

Graphic designers preparing to create printed materials are primarily concerned with the visual design and print specification of a piece, in addition to the type of stock (paper) or media eg magazine, newspaper, that will be used.
Creating consistency on the web is not dissimilar to traditional graphic design in many ways, and web designers may gain... continued on page two >

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