Brand and design guidelines

The next time you find yourself walking down the aisles of your local supermarket take time to consider the impact of your surroundings. Thousands of designs, labels, colours and brand names compete for your attention but we generally navigate to those items we know and trust.

Branding signals trust in the product and an expectation of consistency and quality that we have grown to expect from a particular producer. This trust and brand loyalty for one manufacturer renders dozens of other similar alternatives obsolete. Trust in a particular brand will also transfer to other products from the same provider.

Integrating Recycle Now branding

Through continual recognition and reinforcement of a brand we can embellish an organisation with values, aspirational appeal, belief and trust in the services it delivers. This stands true for food companies, local authorities or charities.

Creating a brand

To create this solid and recognisable appeal in your brand requires consistency. A strong set of brand and design guidelines are one of the most important investments any organisation can make. These documents cover everything from colour schemes, through permissible fonts to the design of literature and advertising. Distributed to all relevant members of staff in either digital or printed format, they ensure that every single piece of visual material released through you’re organisation carries the same quality, recognition and attention from your audience. To illustrate this the following information is covered in a typical set of brand and design guidelines.

Typography is explained through a variety of instructions and examples

To start with we can take a look at typography. Type is one of those things that are easy to overlook, concentrating on the content and neglecting its appearance. By choosing a consistent and legible font it becomes unobtrusive and functional. Incoherent font selection only causes confusion and becomes visually detrimental when trying to create brand recognition. This becomes a greater issue when unrelated fonts are haphazardly used on one document, distracting from the written content (with small exceptions in visual accents such as on stickers and badges). A good font selection will carry well in different sizes, formats from print to web, be highly legible and will be available to all users.

Working within regular grids and placement rules maintains strong design

The advantage of working with professional designers is the ability to create a harmonious standard for document layouts. The creation of a grid system, working out sizing and placement of elements relative to the overall document size is part of an essential understanding in the creation of successful visual media. By developing this system to suit each client’s needs it will form a structure to create a consistent appearance.

Guidance on photography

To complement the basic elements constructed through the rules of typography, colour schemes, grids etc., the addition of photography and illustration can complete or ruin a design. Questions to ask include, what mood does the image convey; who does it appeal to; what does this say about the identity of our organisation? As visual creatures we have learnt to denote high-end imagery as a mark of quality. This is often ignored and replaced with a ‘this will do’ attitude which will unfortunately downgrade your brand.

Star guidelines

If you are working in association with another company or organisation it is key that the guidance in these documents works to integrate your branding within their parameters. For example, with local authorities design guidelines and council brand guidelines we usually develop a style which integrates their branding with the RecycleNow Partners brand (otherwise known as RecycleNowPartners or Recycle Now Partners). RecycleNow Partners branding is used by over 90% of local authorities in the UK and is being increasingly used in retail and the wider industry.  Integrating RecycleNow iconography gives more weight to these campaigns as almost 70% of people recognise it as the national brand for recycling. 

From a practical point of view

From a design point of view, having a set of guidelines is invaluable. The designer no longer has to make up the visual appearance for each piece of promotional material; it simply follows through from the guidelines.  This leads to a huge saving of time and effort in the design process; designs take less time and as a result will be cheaper to produce. You are also not tied in to one design agency and can easily provide guidelines to a new agency to follow.

A lot of the guidelines we have produced we do not in fact use because the organisation we have produced them for have their own design section. They continue producing 'on brand' material for which we have developed the visual appearance.

The initial investment in time and money in producing guidelines is not only saved in the long term but gives a consistent appearance and recognition to all promotional material.

Conclusion

These examples are just a few of the elements that lead to a professional appearance. With the experience gained from the many brand guidelines we have developed we recognise the strength this investment makes. The resulting efficiency in developing promotional material, providing services and the respect gained through a professional appearance is impossible to quantify.

A few of the clients we have developed design and brand guidelines for include:

  • arc21 Northern Ireland
  • DoE NI Rethink Waste Campaign
  • Wolverhampton City Council
  • Liverpool City Council
  • Birmingham City Council
  • Shrewsbury and Atcham Borough Council
  • Hull City Council
  • Coventry City Council
  • Solihull MBC
  • Dudley MBC
  • Wigan Council
  • SWaMP Northern Ireland
  • Cannock Chase District Council
  • WRAP - food waste recycling