​INDESIGN: BRANDING STANDARDS MANUAL

BRIEF

How to brands maintain a consistent image to their customers? From color choices, variations of applications, and so on, there's a million places to get it wrong. A Branding Standards Manual helps everyone to stay on the same page.

Today, for businesses to succeed, they need to effectively manage their image. To do this, designers need to provide their clients with a design Guidelines Manual, which communicates to others across the chain and over time some rules, do's and don'ts of usage to maintain and uphold the design language as it gets applied to any number of items the business may eventually need.

Take a close look at your favorite brands, from custom automotive wheel makers like American Racing to athletic companies like Starbucks, Apple Computer, Target, VW, Under Armour, Roxy, Oakley, Fizik, even our university, what you don't see, which ties their branded look together is a Brand Standards Guide. When done well, there are very strict controls and parameters in place. We often directly associate this with corporate logos, but it extends to color specifics, usage, signage applications, and may even go so far as to establish architectural guidelines, especially in highly planned communities such as those by the Irvine Corporation, retail mall developments, and so forth.Depending on the depth and scope of the business entity, some may be as little as 10 pages while others are as massive as 10 volumes.

For this assignment Students will find a small local business to use as a case study to design, create, and establish a Brand Standards Guideline BOOK that will be the thread that unifies the semester's content created in Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign.

Your Brand Standards Guide will include:

• The Book (InDesign and Acrobat)
• Logo (Illustrator)
• Product or Interior Design Orthographics (Illustrator)
• Photoshop Rendering (Photoshop)

Your Book will NOT use any plastic spiral binding. We will be using a saddle-stitched (stapled) method of binding. This method of binding is very economical as it uses just 9 sheets of paper to produce a 36 page layout, and no plastic waste.

We will go through this process using letter (8-1/2"x11") size paper, but you can also do this with tabloid (11x17") paper just as easily for a larger format design, for a dossier style.

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HOMEWORK, FIRST HOMEWORK

Along your daily commute there are likely dozens of small local businesses you pass. They usually have very modest marketing budgets and could greatly benefit from a coordinated design strategy.

Choose a small local business that is not a large regional, national, or international business or franchise to use as your case-study client for the course of the semester.

We will create a very basic Brand Standards Book for the business and learn an introductory-to-intermediate level of Adobe Creative Suite's InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, and Acrobat. Students will take on creating or redesigning their client's logo, apply this to stationery, promo collateral, packaging and/or product design, signage, and more, all along indicating constraints for proper and improper usages, establish typefaces, colors, etc.

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REFERENCES

 

​ReadingTypography Grid Systems. Learn how to use a systematic approach to organize your layouts and keep your elements aligned. BUY THIS BOOK >>
TO LEARN EVEN MORE(OR ANOTHER SIMILAR)

Article

Designers Are Remaking the Portfolio Into a Client Magnet Secret Weapon

Check out the book Portfolios for Interior Designers by Maureen Mitton. The title is misleading as it's a relevant and valuable reference for all designers. The book provides short tutorials in Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign as well as covering resumes, and presentation and portfolio layout.

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VIDEO GUIDES & TUTORIALS

Get familiar with Adobe's Tutorials. They're excellent.

InDesign Help Menu / Tutorials

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Other Resources

Lynda.com is available for free to all students via your Single Sign-on account. Look under the Design menu

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GETTING STARTED

In InDesign, begin by setting up a 36 page book with facing pages. We will revisit and develop this book file regularly throughout the semester.

See this start guide—
SETTING UP A BRAND STANDARDS GUIDELINE BOOK

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DELIVERABLES

First Presentation of Student's client

Digital (PDF) submission due to Dropbox.com prior to start of class.

Submit a PDF of your layout to your folder in the class folder on Dropbox.com (not Beachboard's dropbox).

USE THIS GUIDE TO SET PROPER VIEWING OF YOUR PDF FOR ONLINE DELIVERY FOR YOUR READER

Filenaming. Name your file according to the filenaming standard indicated on the Syllabus, Section 10.5.

You may be asked to submit a printed copy with your presentation, viewed on video display

Verbal Presentation. 2 min presentation, followed by brief, 2 min response per student.

• Identify your client's needs.
• What the business does, range of services, reach of customers, etc. and
• Include company history, color usages, applications to various collateral, etc
• Consider, what are some/all of the elements this business would benefit from design services, such as:
• Product and/or Product Packaging, Retail Displays, etc << PRODUCT
• New signage. << ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGNERS (BAs?)
• New Interior design updates or complete remodel << INTERIORS
• New print collateral, advertising in print, web, bus-backs, metro (bus/rail) stops, << ONLY FOR GRAPHIC DESIGN MAJORS >>
• others?

Your FINAL deliverable will eventually be a hard copy printed saddle-stitch style book, finished. See the instructions for saving your PDF for correct Booklet printing here after your layout is complete.

Your book must contain the following:

• Your Brand Guideline's name,
• Your Name & Contact info on the back cover (how would someone contact you if they wanted to hire you?) YOU MAY USE "DUMMY" CONTACT INFO,
• Table of Contents,
• Automatic Page Numbering, and
• Minimum of three hierarchies of text throughout including:
• titles (largest, graphic in style),
• headings (large, approx. 12pt bold, may be larger),
• body copy descriptions (9 or 10pt type), and
• captions,
• footers, and
• page numbering (7pt).