As part of our deliverable, we have been asked to produce a set of brand guidelines.
Brand guidelines are a document which explain and justify the design of a brand. It almost acts like a rulebook, explaining why designs were chosen and how people should present the brand in future. Having a clear set of brand guidelines allows multiple designers to create consistent work as they can refer to it when making decisions and ensure they follow the brand values, colours and a range of other guidelines that may be included.
Personally, I find my projects have the best outcomes when I conduct in-depth research before beginning. I enjoy it, and feel that I excel at approaching my work this way. At the beginning of this project, we were advised to conduct some short case studies on existing brands, which I found really helpful in driving my project forwards when I was struggling at the beginning. Therefore, I decided to do a few more case studies on different brand guidelines to help me gather inspiration from my own and get the feel for real-life brand guidelines.
I began by looking at Ulster Universities brand guidelines, which felt natural as it’s my place of study! This is a very large guideline document, with a total of 102 pages. Looking at the contents screen, I can see that the information covered is very in depth as there are categories that I hadn’t even considered would have their own section, such as icon editing process. and 12 pages on photography.
One of the first screens I came across stood out to me the most; ‘Why is our brand important?”. The name of this screen was the first thing I found interesting, and why I initially looked at it. Having a screen explaining why a brand is of such importance sells it to the user, without actually saying much. The main thing that stand out here is a simple quote; ‘Our brand is about perception.’ This stands out to people and gives a clear message about what Ulster University want to achieve, establishing their tone as confident and setting people as a value. Furthermore, I like the way there is a clear of text here; The main heading, the body text which is the second to me notices and a small, thin body of text which might even go unnoticed at first glance.
Overall, I found Ulster Universities brand guidelines very interesting to look through. I really liked the way the brands colours were incorporated throughout the entire document, as it creates consistency with the brand and strengthens their sense of brand identity by aligning themselves with the guidelines. I can see myself taking inspiration from the way they incorporate their branding and colour into their guidelines.
I looked at NASA’s brand guidelines next, as upon researching different brand guidelines I came across multiple posts of people noting that their favourite brand guideline is NASA’s. At first, it looks a little blocky and unrefined, however I was shocked when I saw that it was published in 1976! Despite my initial thoughts, I do feel that it has aged very well for something thats half a century old, and understandably looks slightly old. I really like the way they give clear examples of what’s wring and right, rather than simply describing it. This adds more depth and detail, as well as visual examples having less chance of people misinterpreting design styles than a description.
Similarly to Ulster’s guidelines, I can see myself taking aspects of NASA’s guidelines as inspiration for my own. Although I think I'll opt for a landscape format, I really like the way that there is some negative space within pages. This dosen’t leave roti looking bare or unfinished, in fact, I think this prevents it from looking too cluttered and allows people to focus on the important information. Intimately, brand guidelines should focus on guidance and visuals as this is the purpose that they serve, rather than being too text-heavy.
We were provided with a. link to Zapiers’ brand guidelines, which I investigated. The thing that stood out to me right away is that these were created and presented on Figma, so it was very helpful to look at how they had structured their Figma file and presented information. Seeing brand guidelines in this formatting was very useful, as it was easier to look at how it worked as a whole, rather than just individual pages.
From this view, I could see the benefit of having large headings followed by a screen with further details. I was initially considering just having the section heading, sub heading, body text and images on a single screen for each of my sections. However, seeing an example guideline from this perspective further illustrates to me how much more impactful it is to keep screens simple, even if this does mean more screens.
