Brand Consistency Across Platforms: The Role of Graphic Design
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Greg: Platforms, the role of graphic design specifically. My name is Greg. I'm with original 72 creative and our co [00:01:00] host today.
Rina: Reena little, a little works in the media.
Greg: And I perfected my intro. There we go.
Rina: Yeah, it was so succinct. I didn't even quite know what to do. All right, let's jump into it. Cause we actually have a huge list and we might actually need to turn this into a two part.
Rina: Yeah, exactly. So our topic, as you said, was brand consistency. And if you don't mind, can I just really define brand for people and how we're actually talking about only one brand? Aspect of it. Cause I think it's really important, especially for the business owners to really get a good grasp of what, when someone says you're branding, they actually mean, so typically great.
Rina: Great. So typically we're talking about the graphics today. So that's going to be, and the visuals actually, that's not even true that we're talking about the visual branding and that generally includes typography, logos. Things like that. And [00:02:00] and what branding, I really want everyone to understand is that branding and brand should actually be infused throughout your entire business systems.
Rina: One guy that I used to know used to talk about how it was, what was said about your company when you're not in the room. And it's actually what, when you're not in the room and when you are in the room. It usually filters the voice and all of the scripting and how you say things and what you say.
Rina: All of that, it needs to be infused with your brand. You're, your brand personality and right down to how do people talk to you on the customer service, that's all to do with branding. So if you're hitting all of the points in your visuals, but you're having issues with customer retention, then you, sometimes one of the best places to start to look is how is your brand.
Rina: Being represented in your day to day interactions with those clients and all the touch points that they have there. So it'll be, what is your refund pro policy? [00:03:00] What, how do you deal with conflict? How do you deal with support? All of those things are going to say something about your company to the person who's experiencing your company from that audience.
Rina: Aspect. All right. I think that's covers what I wanted to say. Did you, do you think I caught that Greg, or do you want to add anything to that?
Greg: No, it was good. And again, that was basically just a, like a quick overview of branding. And like you said at the top, you wanted to make that explanation because we're, today's topic is, It's more about the graphic design aspect of your brand, but we wanted to make sure that you got the message out there of, the complete branding aspect and what it entails, even though we're only going through, graphic stuff today.
Greg: But I think one of the things you said leads me into. topic of furthering what is design in branding. And [00:04:00] basically if you think of any graphic material you put out, whether it be your logo or even print material, like brochures, whatever it is, your, even your website, all the, all of these things the, what it looks like is the graphical portion of your brand.
Greg: And the reason why it's so important is because the brand represents your business and you want to have that consistency across anywhere you have touch points, whether it be online, offline, in store. Whatever it is, you want that cohesive look. So you're building a recognizable aspect of what your business represents.
Greg: So when people see things, they're instantly familiar with who you are. Like just by looking at it and it [00:05:00] doesn't even need to say anything. It could just be colors and iconography, anything like that, but anything you build for your business. Consistently using that will eventually build brand recognition to who you are, and then we'll obviously later on probably get into the, how it makes you feel and things like that.
Greg: That's part of branding as well, but I just wanted to get that out there initially as well.
Rina: So one of the things that I think that Greg is getting at, which he didn't actually, speak is that you're right. So he's talking about the visual aspects, icons, graphics, fonts. Colors, all of that stuff, all of the visual stuff.
Rina: And there are rules to how those, what those things are and how those things are used, and that's what your visual brand really is what are the rules that we've created so that things are consistent, but and people [00:06:00] have our evoke, they evoke a certain feeling about you and then they recognize you.
Rina: So what are those rules? And that's really what we need to. Really talk about how do we organize those roles? So what do we have on our first point when we meet our,
Greg: we're going to go over why branding consistency matters. And there's a couple of key points why we would, and I touched on them in my, probably rambling spiel a minute ago, the recognition and recall of your business is why it matters.
Greg: Building trust and credibility. With your consumers is another one. And making sure you have brand loyalty are three high touch points for why it matters to have that brand consistency,
Rina: right? So can you talk a little bit about how you build trust and credibility with your brand? How do you do that?
Rina: Do you know?
Greg: You, it's a lot more than the graphic design aspect. We were, what's that? [00:07:00]
Rina: Yeah, exactly. So I guess that's where it's really actually hard to separate the visual branding from all of the rest of the branding, which is what we're trying to do. In this particular segment.
Rina: So I feel like in some ways the visual is actually the cue of what you can expect from the brand in terms of trust, credibility, and building brand loyalty. And then what happens in the deep layers of your company is how you're actually building that trust and credibility. That's,
Greg: I'm super surface level, obviously on.
Greg: on going over points of the graphic design aspect of building a brand and the consistency on it. But yeah you're obviously in a complete branding process. You're defining You know, everything you can about your customers, about your business and all those things before you even start to think about, okay, what is this?
Greg: What do we [00:08:00] look like knowing all these things?
Rina: So sometimes when you work with a graphic designer who's not Greg or anyone that I work with you might just be asked a couple of simple questions and then you might provide people with ideas and then they might go off and just organize according to that.
Rina: But a true brand experience should really include a lengthy intake process, a conversation about About your entire business, who you serve, what you do, all of that stuff, your why, your mission, all of that stuff. All of that stuff needs to be. Organized before you really can jump into the visual aspects of brand.
Rina: So if you're working with somebody who's not doing that you really want to think about what that, how that, what that is going to how that's going to affect the brand visuals that you end up with, like your logo, for example. And if that's actually going to be doing the thing. The thing that you think it is, if they don't have all the information that's one [00:09:00] of the things.
Rina: And there's nothing wrong with starting off in business with a simple logo that didn't cost you very much. But as soon as you've start to build your clientele up and organize yourself a little bit better financially you really do want to spend the money to do a better job.
Rina: Deep dive on your brand because I guarantee you, you will get to your five between your five and your 10 and you're going to need to do a complete redo. It's just a, your marketing will, I can actually fail if your brand doesn't evoke the right message feelings from the people and deliver the right message to your ideal client.
Rina: You might be attracting the wrong people based on your logo alone. So that's my word of caution.
Greg: I do have to, since we're talking about logo in our next quick segment, we'll talk about the different elements which we've already touched on, but we'll just go over it quickly, but you mentioned logo.
Greg: And I have a story where I saw this branding. A guy's TikTok video about how [00:10:00] he was excited that he had been in business for 15 years and he had and he was going through all the iterations of his own logo for his business and there was like 14 different logos. Over across his 15 years.
Rina: Were they iterated?
Rina: They're totally different.
Greg: That seems like the wrong thing to put as a brand person on your TikTok. That you've gone through 14 logos
Rina: in your
Greg: own business.
Rina: Yeah. And then on the other hand, you can still go through 14 logos in your business if it's done correctly. So the Royal Bank is my favorite example, because we look at that Royal Bank icon, the if you're not in Canada, so Royal Bank of Canada, RBC, you can look it up and it has a lion and then it has, Font with the RBC below it.
Rina: And it's made of royal blue and gold are the colors. And they've actually, and people [00:11:00] like, think of it as a stable logo. And they also like their logo to be stable. They're like, I've done that. I've got my logo and it stays the same forever. However, that's how you date yourself. So even if your logo is the same, you still want to change it up slightly regularly.
Rina: So that people don't notice the changes. So usually what I'm doing when I, with people and they haven't had a logo update in a while, like maybe every few years, we'll do a little update and we'll change that color. Slightly and the font slightly. And we don't have to change a whole lot at that point, but the Royal Bank has done it very well.
Rina: So you can actually go and take a look if you search them. I think it's even on a home a website page where the differences are there, or maybe I'm thinking of my presentation, but you'll be surprised to see how many times they actually did in fact change it slightly. There were two big changes.
Rina: Once right at the beginning when they first took on that lion logo. And and then there was another [00:12:00] big change when they went from the Royal Bank of Canada to RBC. But other than that, it's just been slight shifts of font, color and a little bit of changing on the on the lion's head, how much.
Rina: It was the illustration itself changes, but not enough to
Greg: simplify it or, yeah,
Rina: exactly.
Greg: It's a good example of how recognition works, because if this, if the changes are so subtle and you can still instantly recognize this as Royal Bank which you can, that shows, how powerful that recognition that you build.
Greg: With your branding will work.
Rina: Yeah. So branding remains the same, but the elements within can change slightly and should evolve because the last thing you want, and really, if you're a bank, you're not choosing, usually you're not choosing trendy fonts like the new fonts, you're choosing very, stable, classic fonts.
Rina: But for [00:13:00] example, if you have some new font that's in your logo at the moment, and and then there was that one font that was really tall and looked hand drawn for a while. It came out maybe about 10 years ago and everybody was using it in their marketing. And then all of a sudden it stopped.
Rina: And it's you don't want that kind of font. That's a trend. And you want to update your color. So for example, if we're using I'm just using forest green with the client right now and the forest green that we wanted to pick one that was actually current rather than the 1980s forest green.
Rina: That was really big because that immediately dates people and makes people think about vintage things. You really want to be on top of. Who's choosing your colors? Don't choose the colors for your designer. You can give them color selections of things, of areas that you like, but let them choose the exact color.
Rina: We're actually changing the font the complimentary colors for another Client showed them yesterday and they're [00:14:00] quite different in my, to my eye. And the first thing that she said is, Oh yeah, those are approved. Cause I can't even tell the difference between those colors. And yet to me, there were some drastic, the brightness intensity of one color was quite different.
Rina: And then another color was completely different. And then the black was. The black was more subtle. So it's, it can be that way. Just be open to your design professional.
Greg: It really depends also on how it's presented because it's true that you could have two colors that look quite different when they're next to each other or on the same page.
Greg: But if you look at them separately, one at a time, you almost, you might not even. It's one of those illusion things in graphic design where you could have multiple colors in use, but they look almost the same or one look off because it's next to black or it's on white. It looks completely different from that exact same color.
Greg: on the reverse background, [00:15:00] right? So there's tricks that the eye plays. So I always always present those and I'm sure you will do this all the time is present the colors together so that they, the client can see the differences between them.
Rina: Oh yeah. Except for in this example that I give you the swatchers were right next to each other.
Rina: Said, oh yeah, I don't see a difference. And I'm like, okay, cool. It's approved. Let's move on. ,
Greg: it must have been pretty subtle.
Rina: No. Not to my eye, no. I, if I showed it to you, I think you'll definitely agree with me that it's not subtle.
Greg: They may have been indifferent to it as well. Like they, they'll just be blind to it because they really don't care.
Greg: I,
Rina: yeah, I used to think that, but I actually don't think that anymore. I really do think that people are taught to see differently. So when you go into detail oriented careers I started off in jewelry, so I can actually see things that are really tiny all the time and other people don't see it.
Rina: And even when I used to give [00:16:00] directions to other people, I would actually. Draw the the little holes on the spot and they would put the holes in a completely different spot. They just didn't actually see very well. And when I work with some developers and I present designs and to them and they hand me back the design, the develop, the draft development, and there are differences.
Rina: And I'm like, how did you not, how did you miss that? These are all caps and the design is not like, these are the things that I think people. Some learn to see when they're in particular fields, but not everybody. And you can't really always teach that, but anyways,
Greg: I'm going to get on because I'm going to blow through a couple of sections because I want to get further down to something more media, which I think you'll like more, but I just wanted to reiterate the power of looking at something and not noticing things as it, like other than color.
Greg: The 7 Eleven logo. The N in 7 is lowercase. All [00:17:00] other letters are uppercase, and even I didn't notice this until it was pointed out, like on some Instagram video or something like that, and I was like, oh my god, I never noticed that.
Rina: Yeah, and then I just, I was looking at quotations. Sing, single quotations around a logo the other day, and it didn't look right to me.
Rina: And then finally I figured out that it's not a quotation that they had at the beginning, and it wasn't meant to be a quotation, although sort of it, it is like conceptually, but not clearly. It was actually a comma that they had pushed up to the top. So it was the wrong direction for quotations, and the other one.
Rina: So it was supposed to look like a, it was for indeed. No, it's not for an D. Class door. Class door. It's actually supposed to be a G and a D. The quotations look like a G and a D, and the designer
Greg: no. D, once you know about it, you're like, okay, but [00:18:00] Oh, makes sense, but I still feel, while there is meaning behind It just looks wrong.
Rina: I'm I was asked my opinion and I paused and said, I'll come back to you next week because I wasn't feeling very well that day. And so everything was a little on the negative side. I'm going to look at it again and see how I feel about it next week. So I'll let you know.
Greg: Okay. So let's go quickly through a bunch of stuff here because I don't think we need to talk a lot about it.
Greg: It's just reiterating what? Our core design elements of your brand. It's going to be your logo. It's going to be your colors. It's going to be your typography. And it's going to be any imagery or iconography that you use within your branding. All of these make up. The design elements of your brand.
Greg: So go ahead.
Rina: We want to talk about like the one thing that always confuses my clients is the typography part of it. So that's your fonts in case you don't know. And so they'll tell me that their typography is [00:19:00] organized, but what they mean is that they've got their typography within their logo organized.
Rina: But when I talk about typography, I'm usually talking to also about Accompanying. What do they call that? What's the word I'm looking for? Oh, I can't believe I can't remember the word. So not what's in your logo, but the one that goes with it, that becomes your body content and your title. Yeah.
Rina: What did you say?
Greg: Body text or Body text
Rina: And headline or H tags or title tags that you would use on your website and then they would also use them in other sort of printed material and other types of digital material. I
Greg: don't know if small, medium sized businesses even consider
Rina: the
Greg: typography that's used.
Greg: In documents or on their website separate from the font that's in their logo.
Rina: Yeah, so some of them do. Actually, I'm always interested in those claims that offer up questions about [00:20:00] that. I Love it. When I get documents that are in Google drive and somebody has organized their brand fonts within that space, or the other place is an emails.
Rina: I get a thrill when people actually do that. It's just it's Oh, there's a real attention to detail here. And somebody cares. And it just tells me a lot about the personality of their business when they do that. I don't want to get
Greg: started on email fonts.
Rina: I
Greg: know. It's going to crash out of me when people change it to some weird And use background colors or something.
Greg: Oh my god, it just I don't want to work with those people.
Rina: We have some educating to do that's for sure. So what's our next point?
Greg: Okay. Again, we'll go through this quick because it's basically like where you're going to the, all of the places that you're going to use branding. So your website through your social media in your email marketing.
Greg: Offline materials like print brochures, [00:21:00] posters, anything of those sorts in store signage and merchandising. You're going to, you always want to make sure that's in line with what you've defined as your brand.
Rina: Yes. Presentations contracts. Those are all really good too. And then the oh, am I allowed to move on to another thing?
Greg: I would just say on this point, I would just say that anything you produce, just be on brand, whether it's going to be client facing or just internal. Just get in the habit of having a consistent look, feel, layout that. Is what your business is all about.
Rina: Yeah. And it's actually fairly easy to do if you're working in word or Google drive and other places you adjust this and your website, you adjust your settings at the global.
Rina: And then all, every document that you start after that is, is already set up. And so you can't have anyone coming in and mucking [00:22:00] about the only way that when that doesn't work is when you import a word doc that comes from a client then it shifts the font and things like that.
Greg: Yeah. Okay. So this is the meaty part that I thought you would be more interested in.
Greg: And we got six minutes left in the episode to to go over it. And it's basically like. How we maintain all of this. And I know you're probably going to have a lot to talk about a branding style guide. As would I, because I know it helps me immensely when I work with customers, building a website or doing anything for them is this branding style guide.
Greg: Do you want to Give us a thought of what people should see in a branding style guide.
Rina: So first of all, a branding style guide is something it's actually a document that gets built upon. So when you first hopefully get one, when you do your logo, you'll have somebody add maybe the [00:23:00] complimentary fonts and color palettes to your branding guide when they build your website.
Rina: When you start to work with a social media person, they might, or a communications expert, they might add in the brand voice. And you want to include, basically, it's your bible, your brand bible. And it's where you have all of the rules on how people should be discussing you, how they use the logo all of that stuff.
Rina: So that there is consistency. And the idea is that if you're siloing your marketing, for example, and you're working with me for something and Greg for something else, you're going to hand off that branding guide to each of us when we start our project. So we'll refer to that. And and make sure that we are either a following it be adding to it with approval.
Rina: You always need to approve brand changes and make, making sure that it's updated and I usually review my brand guide annually to make sure that there's, that nothing has changed, for example, with my software company, they have a [00:24:00] whole bunch of software logos that go with theirs and they get obsolete and then the.
Rina: The logo needs to come out of the brand guide. For example there are other things that come up like my international client didn't know at first that a thumbs up sign is actually quite rude in the middle east. So all of a sudden we had to go through the entire website and make sure no blog articles had the thumbs up sign.
Rina: We put it in the style guide. No, no photos with a thumbs up. And so you have everything down in there and it should be super clear. And if you have any questions about your brand guide usually the person to ask is the person who added it. So your designer or professional who added that piece, make sure that you understand everything in your brand guide so that when you're approving things, you're looking at your brand guide too, so that Oh, the body copy is supposed to be this font.
Rina: And sometimes what will happen is if your fonts, complimentary fonts were organized on Adobe, you're not going to get the exact same one [00:25:00] on a Google. So you need to establish the Google font equivalent, and then you need to add that to your brand guide. So there are, it's your rule book. It's your playbook.
Rina: And I refer
Greg: to it as your brand DNA your visual DNA. And it gets so granular. It can get so granular. I've seen simpler ones where it's just this is the logo. These are the colors. This, these are the, hex values of the CMYK values. This is your font name and, suggested sizes you use.
Greg: You could be very simple, but the more detailed you get. The better. And that's where you just get down to the DNA of your brand. And so anybody that has this document will know exactly the rules around how they can either compliment your brand and in their material, or if you're having a designer build you more stuff, they won't have questions for your team about, [00:26:00] oh how, How do you use your logo?
Greg: How do what fonts go together? All of these things. Yeah.
Rina: So that was, that's my brand guide. I'm very passionate about brand guides and I'm very passionate about having that information there. And when we add anything to a client's brand guide, we deliver the brand guide with the client, with the material, the deliverables in the end.
Greg: And then to finalize our topic today with the minute left, there is a digital asset management. There are digital asset management systems that you can use that store all of these assets for your business, your logos and any iconography or images and things like that. So if you are needing something that you We'll share regularly with people.
Greg: You can definitely look into digital asset management system where you would be able to [00:27:00] store, organize all of these assets you have for your business that would make it easy for you to share with vendors or consultants that you work with.
Rina: Right on. Does that allow you to, I guess you're telling me just to get some clarity.
Rina: When you talk about assets, we're talking about files and what we could have other, in addition to all of the various logo files, which you would be having and your brand guide up there, you could put your fonts up there. Cause that's, that would be a great one. I always. And that's the hardest one to get a hold of from the client.
Greg: Yeah, for sure. Any digital asset, that you may need to share that defines your brand. So fonts logos, images, icons, anything that you've accumulated to build your brand. If those digital assets you need to store and give them to Or allow them to download. A lot of people probably just use like Google drive or something because you can easily share things and that's perfectly fine if you don't have a ton of things, but larger businesses may [00:28:00] have.
Greg: More assets and you can actually, there are digital asset management systems out there that you can use to store and organize all of these things for you if you need to share them on a regular basis with people.
Rina: Do you have a name for that?
Greg: Name of a digital asset. Adobe has their own digital asset manager.
Greg: Yeah. And off the top of my head, I can't recall, but my blog, which I'll hopefully release later today or tomorrow, we'll have a couple. Mentioned in it,
Rina: right? Terrific. All right. So what's happening next week? Let me take a look at the calendar.
Greg: Good question. It is going to be leveraging AI in marketing.
Greg: Oh, true.
Rina: All right. So for those of you who are watching this outside of our Facebook group, it is, we are actually in the business marketing mixer, Facebook group. You can join us there or you can simply come back next week at 11. Yeah, [00:29:00] 11 o'clock I got a little blank there and watch us where you found us.
Rina: I'll see you next week. No, we'll see you in two weeks.
