What if, one day, your agency became unreliable or too expensive? Or what if you acquired the resources to bring branding in-house? Would you be ready to take charge of your firm’s brand? Would you understand it well enough to lead the transition to a new agency? Brand Self-Sufficiency Checklist …
Brand Architecture Is the Job No One Wants
Brand architecture – the high-level structuring of your brand’s offers – is a must if you want to scale your brand without wasting time and money. It affects product naming. It informs advertising. It determines how your corporate trade-mark will appear around other brands in your roster. It can even …
Why Fonts Can Make or Break Your Brand
Type is one of the most viewed elements of your brand. Good brands stick to clean, consistent font systems that allow their marketing copy to set a mood and deliver a message. When looking at your own brand, it’s important to pay attention to your font hierarchy, and know whether …
How Should Your Brand Use Its Colour Palette?
One of the first things you notice about a brand is its colour. Whether it’s leader red, conservative blue or friendly orange, colour makes a vital impression. Not only does it establish a mood, it makes a brand recognizable. Your Colour Palette: What’s the Point? A great visual identity is …
Can People Recognize Your Social Media Icon?
A great brand identity can really drive social media engagement. Sounds obvious, but a lot of companies overlook one critical piece of online infrastructure: the social media icon. The Sad State of Social Media Icons A social media icon is the small square image that acts as a brand’s profile …
Why Your Brand Doesn’t Need a Logo
We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again. A logo can be a waste of space. That’s because most brands benefit from a quality wordmark – not a logo. Wordmark vs. Logo A logo is a symbol that can stand in place of your brand name. The Nike swoosh, …
Is Your Visual Identity Right for Your Company?
From time to time, we like to write about things we’ve learned as branders. We like it so much that we do it in the form of ebooks you can download for free. You may have seen the ads. You may have downloaded or even read the content. Either way, …
Why It’s Not Called the iWatch
In early September, Apple held its annual iPhone event. Since then, new product demos and ads for the iPhone 6s, iPad Pro and Apple Pencil have been widely circulated. Naturally, many editorials followed about this year’s goodies and their features. But we’d like to look at something else. Something more …
Buying Brand Guidelines? Ask Yourself the Following
When your organization goes through a full rebranding, you’re going to need to formalize the rules by which your new brand identity can play. The way to do this is through a brand guidelines document – a near biblical set of standards created by your branding agency. Just short of …
Lean Content Marketing Is a Good Thing
When a company reaches the point at which it is truly a brand, and not simply a business, its leaders have to start thinking about content. The reason is simple. People expect to see content from leading brands. It’s that extra little pinch of value that keeps them interested. A …