Keeping your eyes on (or off) the Brand

Keeping your eyes on (or off) the Brand

Hours of time and precision are spent creating and designing a set of brand guidelines for clients globally in order to protect their brand identity. The brand appearance and tone of voice is of upmost importance to the brand owner and the designer of any brand identity in order for the end consumer to relate to, and put complete trust in, that brand. The very first port of call for the consumer will more often that not be the visual identity of the brand. Therefore, large investments of both time and money are of key importance for brand elements to be produced consistently across all brand collateral making them easily recognisable to the audience in which they are communicating to. 

Today, I find myself sitting at my desk with the task of writing a very valuable set of brand guidelines for a valued client. This brings great excitement to think that my client has put the trust in me to not only create the look and feel of their brand but also design the key visuals for the brand and then communicate them to a wider audience by bringing the brand values to the fore of all their marketing communications. 

When tasked with creating a set of brand guidelines, I do often ask myself why both the designer and the client invest hours of valuable time including details of elements that SHOULDN’T be used or things that SHOULDN’T be done. If this is to be “the brand bible” surely every word written within this brand bible document should be gospel? Why would I need to know what I shouldn’t be creating? Surely I should only be interested in HOW to produce the brand collateral and WHAT the brand values actually are! If I were to follow these instructions like I should be doing, how could I possibly get it wrong? This thought is obviously also working on the assumption that after investing hours of time creating these rather important brand guidelines people will actually read them when producing future collateral for the client. There will undoubtedly be many people out there that would totally disagree with me on this point and say that you need to not only tell people but also show people that it is forbidden to stretch the logo for example and point out that the colour of the logo must not be changed to a ridiculous bright pink with yellow dots on it.

To go back to my point though, the corporate brand logotype exists in a form  in which it was created and designed, with a particular purpose that gives a true representation of the brand, so why would there be a need to suddenly change this when the brand guidelines are instructing us on HOW the brand elements should be used? 

Brand guidelines are of massive benefit to a brand in order to protect the values and visual style and must therefore be taken seriously. Surely the only people that would start editing the colour of the logo are only people that have NOT read the guidelines. 

To put things in perspective if you were tasked with constructing an iconic building such as The Shard and you didn’t refer to the building plans that the architect had spent hours drawing up with exact measurements that give the building its iconic recognisable style, quite simply the end result would look very different to the intended visual design of the building that the architect had been trying to achieve. Architects don’t issue another set of plans that say don’t stretch the top of the building or change the colour of the glass panels to bright pink. These plans are followed and strictly. 

So… what to do? or what not to do?… should all this information be included within brand guidelines is indeed the question I am asking.