A colleague passed me the brand guidelines document of a potential new client today. More of a logo usage manual to be honest, a good looking piece of work, certainly well-crafted by an obviously competent design firm and definitely rigid enough to prevent any dilution of their visual identity.

However, like most brand manuals in 2010 it could quite easily have been produced in 2000 given the content and lack of consideration of digital media. I think the goalposts have now well and truly moved to the point where even organisations who have traditionally existed in an offline arena need to make far deeper consideration of their brand in a digital environment. Yes, we still need to know where to put a logo on a letterhead and how many millimetres we should leave as an exclusion zone and so on. But what we really need to know is how the brand is going to live and breathe online.

This is the context in which it will primarily be experienced in the decade to come.

So let’s understand a bit more than the basics of hex colour palettes and where a logo will sit on a web page. I’m thinking about the multitude of online applications. Email footers, ad banners, animated versions, mobile, even those annoyingly sized spaces granted by most web directories or social media sites. And how should we blog? Or tweet for that matter.

Online simply presents more opportunities than ever before to inject personality and build your brand so let’s exploit that carefully. Of course, you could very quickly end up with an exhaustive brand guidelines document that takes some reading. Good. Better that than a new employee deciding he or she knows how your brand should face the world on Facebook. Let’s establish some degree of consistency.

Oh, consistency, there’s that word…overused and overrated in the digital sense in this writer’s opinion. Let’s be clear ‘brand consistency’ is not simply achieved by overkill of a particular colour or typeface. The brand is far deeper than this and I’d like to see greater courage among designers and the like in exploiting digital media to develop some variety to the visual and verbal manifestation of the brand. How else can it become personal to diverse audiences? Google is a prime example of a brand that can evolve it’s identity almost daily without sacrificing anything.

It’s a complicated area and much depends upon audience but there is certainly more scope for adding dimension to identity within the digital environment. Yep, we all witnessed the spinning logos of the late nineties, lovely stuff sure. But what about some fluidity or motion,  animation, even sound. Why can’t any of these add sensory value to a brand identity?

I was asked for comment recently on the 2014 Commonwealth Games logo and though my response was fairly mixed I did point out to the journalist that as an identity it really came to life in the animated version. Now this is a sporting event and clearly TV and the internet will play a huge part, hence the animated version but why aren’t other brands thinking the same way?

So for starters futureproof your brand by investing in a robust set of digital brand guidelines. Long term, let’s merge creative and technology boundaries to work digital media far harder when evolving your brand identity.

Tags: brand, digital brand guidelines, dimension, identity

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 18th, 2010 at 2:47 PM and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.