Kuyper’s eight essential qualities for effective brand guidelines…

This post expands on brand identity expert, Jerry Kuyper‘s eight “qualities to achieve in identity standards.” They struck a chord with me, highlighting many issues I’ve run into with corporate identity documents in the past. So, how do the best brand guideline documents exhibit these qualities?

1. strategic

“Focus on why it is important and what the company is trying to achieve, not just how to do it.”

This is great advice and put into practice by the beautiful (but expensive) I Love NY brand guidelines. Down from the logos to the execution of the illustration, every decision has a reason (good or bad – you decide!) behind it that is clearly explained. In many situations the buy-in from implementers is key to the success of brand guidelines.

Explaining what can otherwise look like draconian direction is vital.

2. visual

“Demonstrations are often more effective than lengthy text.”

The guidelines for the venerable University of Cambridge do this well with their imagery section – yes, there’s a clear text description but in this case only one media can effectively communicate the style required: example photos.

3. easy to understand

“Develop content that is engaging and avoid unnecessary jargon.”

Rather than attempt to communicate the linguistic style and how it applies to individual words, the guidelines for the equally venerable Cunard use a simple table of words to make it crystal clear how choice of words applies to the effect of their brand.

Even to a casual observer this is an accessible and interesting list – which means the people who need to be interested are happy to read it.

4. short

“20 pages of useful information may be more effective than 50 pages.”

The brand guidelines for the building initiative Think Brick run to a grand total of 13 pages. Whilst the brand is a simple one, its difficult to find a wasted word across those pages. In fact the grab above is probably the closest example. Even then its a simple representation that branded products should carry the logo and adhere to the guidelines already set out.

Rather than attempt to cover every possible eventuality in your guidelines keep it short and refer enquiries to an expert within the company.

5. respectful

“Understand who will be using the standards and don’t insult their intelligence.”

Lloyd’s put this one into practice. For the most part it’s fair to accept that those reading the finer points of logo usage guidelines are likely to be familiar with the terminology of print design. Pitch it at their level.

Having said that, striking a balance between this and “avoid unnecessary jargon” is a challenge.

6. balanced

“Identify the appropriate balance between structure and flexibility”

Keeping the ‘balance’ of a brand guideline document is very much a case of judging the requirements of the document and the brand in question.

My example is from Channel 4‘s digital TV station, E4 – instead of specifying exactly how the effect of the logo as a sticker is achieved the guidelines simply set out that “it must retain some dimensionality.” This guidance leaves the exact execution in the hands of the designer and allows variety into the brand without losing sight of the purpose and effect.

7. digital

“…pdf files that can viewed online, emailed or downloaded and printed the standards can eventually be established as an online identity resource”

For a behemoth organisation like the UK’s NHS an online version of their brand guidelines is essential – the above is a grab from their branding microsite where they can quickly publish amendments and special guidance for specific audiences.

A printed brand book may look nice on the bookshelf but quickly becomes outdated and hard to come by.

8. scalable

“…can be expanded or revised help to establish that identity management isn’t a static or one time event”

In many ways this is an extension of the above and cements the case for your brand guidelines being a digital document. When a video execution of a brand is required a printed document detailing the page templates and paper choice for letterheads is not appropriate.

Brand guidelines should be ready to be speedily and easily updated for any eventuality – from 3D animation to the introduction of Blade Runner-esque advertising blimps.

In conclusion

Jerry Kuyper‘s eight points are excellent benchmarks against which to measure your own brand guidelines document. Hopefully the examples above have shown how they can be applied and will inspire you to develop more useful and just plain better brand guidelines.

Any thoughts? Post them in the comments down there…

Adhering perfectly to 37 Signals Three State Solution and making me feel better about the fact there’s no juicy data to see yet! No wonder Google liked the look of them all those months ago.

For me, one section jumped out discussing the original Mac team’s approach to design:

“Rather than survey a bunch of users on every decision, the Mac team decided each issue among themselves, invariably going for the option that might amuse a user the most, that would give a user the most pleasure, and therefore imbue the Mac with personality.”

As one who has a love-hate relationship with user workshops and focus groups this is music to my ears – confidence in your own abilities over those of the crowd. Clearly the problem is that those self-sourced decisions have to be resolved correctly. Undoubtedly other companies have taken this auteur approach and failed miserably where Apple have succeeded. Equally companies have released products fully backed by a panel of target audience users that have failed. Apple’s magic-touch is indisputable and ongoing. Surely not, though, impossible to replicate.

“…it’s one thing to be, uh, “creatively inspired” by what other companies are doing, it’s quite another to have a philosophy that enables you to do it first.”

Which leads me to two conclusions:

1. Believe in the vision of your product
   The designers and engineers on Apple products seem to believe completely in the vision of what they’re building. More importantly than that though, that belief runs through the whole company, all the way down from His Jobs himself. That belief has to be above all things – the team will make the right decisions as long as that remains the case.
2. Create a pleasurable experience
   Every product should be fun to use, even if it’s subject matter is far from it. Online banking could, and should, be fun in some small way – it’s never going to beat playing a game or watching a film but a nod towards enjoyment as well as functionality and security can play a massive part in creating a positive feeling around your product and your company.

Now to quit rambling – back to the kitchen, I have sauce to mix.

Nice grass effect, nice button, but I’m not sure that error message and the associated tooltip really give you all the information you need to proceed from here.

The application is immediately very usable and like many of the better-developed iPhone apps, more feature rich then I’d expected. It’s also proving pretty stable – a quality not yet evident in all the apps! Adding that picture up there was very easy – it’d have been even easier with a cut+paste function though :) It works with WordPress.com hosted or self-hosted blogs.

Still, some of my best blog post ideas come to me when i’m away from my computer so hopefully this app might be the tool to at least stop me forgetting them! That might be all though – the iPhone keyboard is good for many things but maybe penning long blog posts won’t prove to be one of them…

Check the WordPress application out in the store or WordPress.org – it’s currently sitting pretty at rank 30 – one below the not-so-criticaly-acclaimed AOL Instant Messenger app. iPhone iChat anyone?

First impressions….not bad but not so good. The colours are nice and the search bar is nice and bold. However, visually I think it would benefit from some tidying. Bevel effects are a rather strange choice on today’s web and the various different uneven glows and strokes around the top bar elements jar a little.

Having said that it has now made all of the categories available from the homepage (ala amazon.com) and reiterated their recognition that (surely?) the majority of people head straight into a keyword search. However, I’m not a fan of the left-nav – a very simple improvement would be to make the main menu elements clickthrough to something. This is a real annoyance for me with these sorts of navigation – particularly evident where you hover over the ‘Books’ item and then have to move right to click…. ‘Books’ to proceed.

Still I guess it’s a tough job redesigning these sorts of elements under the gaze of millions of users and it’s hardly going to stop me buying lots of stuff from Amazon and appreciating all the awesome data widgets.

EDIT: Erm, I’ve been known to be rather slow before, has it been like this ages? Yup, it seems I am just very slow given there are blog posts about this from the beginning of last month.

EDIT 2: Ok, maybe I get it now – a surf around some other blogs and it seems this might be an international redesign also being trialled on Amazon.com that has been showing up intermittently for a while for various people. Which actually makes the issues I’ve mentioned more major if this has been decided upon as the future direction for (presumably) all of Amazon’s regional sites.

Registration & Login @ Flickr

It’s a little bit of a random jaunt around some of the nicer (and not so nice) registration forms that the web has to offer.

My personal favourite has to be the WordPress form – there’s something about some nice big form fields that almost compels you to fill them with your personal details with gay abandon – indeed, I think there might be a whole new angle for phishing sites – big fields = big likelihood of completion = big money. The lack of a captcha is always nice as well, it’s almost like a vision of the internet the way it would be in a perfect world – although maybe that’s a little unambitious.

I’ll update with where we get to with our new registration and login process, it should be far superior to our current one and hopefully approaching the smooth experience that some of the featured sites provide.