When you’re in the printing business your clients come in many shapes and sizes. So do their projects from flyers for the corner shop to snazzy all-singing, all-dancing corporate brochures. But in the end, they all want professional results, that make them look good in print.
More mature organisations often have a brand guideline that sets out the font styles and sizes, brand colours, logo design – and how it can be used and more. Newer and smaller organisations may not have such a thing, but in order to do a good job, you still need that kind of information, especially if you’re offering an in-house design service.
Having the right information saves time and reduced revisions to documents. For instance:
- Knowing where a logo can – and cannot – be used, ensures that the design doesn’t have to be redone, if the logo must be centred and the design created has resulted in it being moved to the top left.
- Agreement on the preferred fonts means that you won’t have to redraft a document that’s used Times New Roman 12 point instead of Arial 11 point.
- If the client has a custom font, you can ensure you have that available – and build in the cost if it’s one you have to buy and download.
- Having ALL the company colours, and knowing which are primary and which are secondary colours, ensures that documents are created with the appropriate emphasis. It’s also important to know if using a shade or tint of a colour is OK – or not.
If your client doesn’t provide their brand guidelines (and maybe even if they do) it’s worth having a one page information sheet that they complete (or you talk through with them and complete yourself) so you have all the critical details to hand.
This saves so much time in the long run and ensures that your in-house designers don’t invest time in creating layouts that have to be redone, it also saves time and confusion as proofs fly to and from for approval and sign off.
It also avoids problems when some members of larger organisations, who are part of the approval process, aren’t familiar with the details of the brand guidelines.