Written by: Matt Clark and Clyde Sanadi, AdGumbo Creative Shop
Ahhhh “The Brand.” What is a brand and how did the idea originate? Well, nobody knows. I’ve often joked that a lazy art director created the first brand. The reason of course, is that once a strong brand has been built, much of the art director’s future work is already done, but there are three key things that make up a brand: a logo, tagline, and brand guidelines.
The logo. A good logo design begins with font choice and color selection, should project the personality of a company and provide a consistent look and feel that customers will recognize and identify with.
Think about your last road trip. Did you notice that you can see the Golden Arches of McDonald’s, glowing in the sky from a hundred miles away? That’s a glowing example of brand recognition.
Now that you have created your Golden Arches, it’s time for the tagline. A tagline is the first piece of messaging that customers see when they engage with a brand.
My good friend Clyde wrote the most excellent tagline in the history of the world. It’s simply, “We’ll Get You There.” Think about those four words for a moment. You could slap them on a gad-zillion different brands and they would work wonderfully. Any Ad Agency, We’ll Get You There. Any Software Company, We’ll Get You There. Any Financial Institution, We’ll Get You There. Any Healthcare System, We’ll Get You There. Any Airline, We’ll Get You There. You get the idea.
Your tagline should be in your competitive face. In our “We’ll Get You There” example, subliminally, it suggests the other guys “won’t” get you there.
A tagline also needs to bring the customer in. Take the age-old Apple campaign, Think Different. It empowers. It invites. But it also, differentiates.
The tagline is an encapsulation of “positioning.” Being such a competitive exercise, how do we talk ourselves up and at the same time punch the other guy’s lights out, without naming names?
Now that you’ve ripped off We’ll Get You There, it’s time to send your brand out into the wild blue yonder. To do this, you will now need to create Brand Guidelines.
Typically, this consists of twenty-four to thirty-six pages of over-designed blather, conveying the importance of brand consistency and acting as a roadmap to use your Golden Arches, without art director supervision, in at least five hundred different scenarios.
This document should include Brand Colors in CMYK, RGB and WEB. It should include brand fonts, where to get them and identify how to use each font and color properly.
You should also embed the vector logo files converted to outlines, so at least an experienced designer can get started right away and use your Golden Arches properly. There’s nothing more frustrating than the moment you realize the logo in the brand guidelines is a low-res jpg.
You’ll also need to explain the guidelines again, with another five hundred scenarios that could occur when designing a quarter-page ad. Also, mention DON’T SQUISH MY ARCHES!
An experienced designer will flip through your wondrous Brand Guideline document, learn the colors and fonts to use and pray that your Golden Arches are placed in the PDF as an extractable vector file. An inexperienced person will simply delete your brand guidelines email and squish away.
For all our sakes, Brand Guidelines should be concise and to the point.
Now you know three of the most important things about building a brand.
Logo, Tagline and Brand Guidelines.