Learning from Applying Brand Guidelines
Finishing the intense Design Sprint class in May semester, besides learning a lot of how UX people work, I think the most valued thing for me as a brand designer to learn is applying brand guidelines through our last project. The project was working with Karsh Hagan, an advertising agency, to come up with ideas to help DEN airport concessionaires have more customers spending money and build up a loyalty program. This was actually an UX project, and Karsh Hagan already built the brand for the campaign and had a really professional and detail brand guide for it to process. So, what I could do in the project was creating graphic assets and mockups that supported our team’s UX solutions. Even though that was not really practicing the works that I usually do in brand design process, it was actually a very helpful experience.
First of all, the brand guidelines that Karsh Hagan made was really beautiful and thoughtful. Even though I did make brand guidelines and see a lot online, I didn’t really think brand guidelines would really go this detailed. It described a lot of rules clearly and showing many examples about how to apply them, such as it told you the subtitle font size shouldn’t be larger than 1/4 of the title font size, photo image should always in front of all other shapes that were used with it, etc. I think I learned a lot about what contents should be included in a brand book and how to describe the rules just by reading and understanding the brand guidelines from a professional agency. The brand guideline itself was a really valuable reference source to me.
As a brand design student in this program, we always learn how to make logo, choose color palette and fonts to make a brand, and furthermore set rules for the brand, the brand book. But we have never really learned how to follow the rules set by others, brand guidelines with all the logo, colors, fonts, photo treatments set. Of course we are here to learn and try to be the ones who set the rules for brands, our primary work should be making the brand guidelines but not following them. However, I actually felt confused when I was creating brand guidelines for the brands that I made, I didn't really know what I should set as rules, what people would really need to know to use the brand to maintain the consistent feel of it. I was trying to know the answers to these questions by referencing brand books that I found online, even though they kinda do it in all different ways, I was thinking that I would know why and how one day if I just keep creating brand books. Well, this project finally answered what I was wondering all this time. When I was trying to create the graphic for our team’s work, I was trying to create something that matched the brand that they already had. I had so many detail questions like what is the spaces should be between title, subtitle and body text fonts? Could I use more than two shapes in one poster design? Should there be any weight difference of the fonts to show the text hierarchy or just using different size would be fine? Is there any combination rules for the shapes, can I combine this certain shape with that one? Any text alignment rules? etc. Then I realized all these questions are the brand guidelines should answer and they are what I should set as rule when I would make a brand book. The point is really just standing at the user’s position, the person who is going to use the brand book and create something that matches the brand. For a person doesn’t know much about the brand, the rules are actually the detailed the better. Now, I look back to the brand books that I made, I seem to know what are missing and how to make them better.
