Logo, stationery, sales kits and letterhead. Websites,
DVDs, motion graphics, video, special events, viral
marketing. E-mail, text messages, PowerPoints,
showrooms, on products, packaging and more.
With all the places a company has to be these days,
how can a designer create communications that are
everywhere at once, stand out from the crowd, say
something unique, and are accurate and effective
ambassadors for the brand? It’s a dizzying task that
requires designers to think strategically, tactically,
pragmatically and technically, all at the same time.
BRAVE NEW BRAND
The spread of new forms of media, and the opportunities
they offer, mean that today’s designers have
to know more—and be more—than designers of
yesterday. “Designers need to be more versatile and
willing to try new things,” says Neil Wright, creative
director at Spiral Design in New York. “You can’t focus on print or web exclusively. If we need to do
it with video or have a complex interface-coding
issue, designers need to be ready to figure it out.”
Fortunately, this brave new world of technology
also creates opportunities for designers they might
not otherwise have had. “Software is making it easy
for people who don’t have a strict background in
something to try it,” Wright explains. “For example,
in music, you may not understand the mechanics
of songwriting, but you can still create something
interesting. It’s about having a creative eye and
mind-set.” Echoes Spiral’s managing partner Robert
Clancy, “It’s not thinking out of the box; it’s about
thinking without the box.”
UNCOVER EVERY TOUCH POINT
Of course, most non-box creative thinking starts
with old-fashioned strategic work. The first step, as
always, is to understand the client, the customers and the media. “When we develop a brand, our
biggest effort is making it authentic,” says Rochelle
Seltzer of Seltzer in Boston. “Of course, we do a lot
of research on the market and the competition, but
we really want to know what will resonate honestly
and truly to the people our client is reaching out
to. And these days, everyone has multiple stakeholders
and audiences. It could be their current
clients, allied professionals who recommend customers,
employees, etc. We also look at the entire
sales process as well, to uncover every potential
touch point.”
CASH IN CREATIVELY
There’s also the budget to consider. Because marketing
monies need to be in so many different places
at one time, designers have to be considerate about
resource allocation. While it’s clear many of the
dollars that a decade ago would have gone to print
are now going to the web, this does not mean print
should be dismissed—it should be reimagined.
Traditional print must-haves are changing their
shape, form and function.
“Just five or 10 years ago, annual reports were
considered an outward-bound piece of marketing,”
says David Albertson of Albertson Design in San
Francisco. “But we just did one for HP that’s only
their 10-K printed on newsprint. They now feel
that annual reports are not marketing materials.”
He also points to the growth of print on demand.
“Companies big and small are doing a lot more
digital transfer of documents. They’re still producing
the collateral, but now a lot of it exists online
for download.”
Conversely, other companies are upping the ante
on their printed materials to make them more precious
and ownable. Michelle Toch of Overit Media
in New York describes a luxury hotel client that turned its brochure into a hardcover book. “The
client wants people to request the brochure from the
website because it’s big and beautiful, like a coffeetable
book, and it communicates so much about the
hotel itself.”
No matter what the budget is, the problem
many brands and their design teams face is, simply,
the need to be in too many places at once. “We’re
seeing more and more clients who want to do all
of it,” says Clancy. However, this usually requires
doing things one at a time. “They may take a phased
approach and pick one or two things to do first, and
then add other things later,” he notes. Which brings
up yet another challenge.
When you’re not starting with a clean slate
and pulling together the website at the same time as
the brochure—both of which reflect the new brand
positioning and logo you’ve just spent a year developing—you end up with a bit of a moving target.
“Small companies may have just enough money to
take care of one thing at a time,” says Albertson.
“And each time they create something, they’re moving
the brand along a little bit more. So over the
course of a year, you can have five or six projects that
are all addressing the brand with slightly different
solutions. Which makes it hard for companies to be
really consistent.”
PROVIDE AN EXPERIENCE TO
REMEMBER
Fortunately, lock-step consistency is no longer considered
a primary goal, or even an effective means to
carry brands forward. Progressive brands don’t expect
the logo to appear in a single form, in a rigid lock-up,
in only one set of colors. “What we do is work from
the same palette, which is more than just the colors,”
says Seltzer. “We do want a customer or potential
customer to get something familiar and consistent. It may not have the same pictures, but it’ll have the
same tone, energy level, voice, look and feel.”
The most important thing about a brand is
not a set of PMS chips or a tagline, but an experience.
“Your brand is an experiential creation that
you should be able to own,” notes Albertson, “so we
look not only at the graphic components like color
and font and corporate mark or logotype, but also
the environment in which you present the brands, a
service model, the way you address your customers,
and the product you put out—whether it’s a computer
or a hamburger. It’s about using all your senses
to deliver tonal cues. For example, Apple stores are
not cookie-cutter, but there’s always lots of glass and
milky plastic and hip staff and someone who greets
you.” As Toch says, “We try to carry the story of that
brand through everything we do.”
In some cases, certain aspects of the story line
will be provided by the client, especially if they are
well-established. But these parameters and givens
are no excuse to limit design creativity. After all,
that’s what the client is coming to you for—to find
new ways to use pre-existing tools. “Multitiered
companies have certain elements that have to be
incorporated, from headers and footers to site width
and time to load,” notes Clancy. “But outside of that,
they’re looking to us to strike a balance—having continuity
without being rigid.”
ENGAGE THE AUDIENCE
Customers who are increasingly asked to participate
in the brands they love—whether that’s creating
YouTube content or designing a Nike shoe—drive
this trend toward less control. It’s also a recognition
that not everything translates from one medium to
the other. “The world of corporate branding where
everything is centralized and locked down has
changed,” says Albertson. “Companies have gotten a lot less dictatorial about it, and they’re willing to
accept variations in execution or in branded products
or collateral.” And it’s important designers do
the same—certain things are sacred, but there’s still
plenty of room to maneuver. “When you’re looking
at print to web, I’ve seen some designers struggle
with this concept of consistency,” says Clancy.
“However, the basic elements of a design hold true
in all formats, whether it’s a billboard, website, brochure
or television ad. If you’re working on Coke,
you may be required to use their red, but there are
still many other elements to play with.”
As you’re looking at the different media and
figuring out what brand elements to take where,
it’s important to learn, understand and play to each
medium’s strengths. “One of the most common
mistakes I see,” says Toch, “is people thinking of the
web as a brochure on the screen. Print doesn’t always
translate to web. The web is not flat; it has motion
and depth that print doesn’t have. If you just put your
brochure online, then you’re really missing the point.”
K.I.S.S. @ ALL TOUCH POINTS
Of course, you also do not want to overdo by
overusing the capabilities of every medium. Few
things are more annoying than a website so full of
complicated movement that it takes 10 minutes to
load—by which time your customer is on to some
other site. It’s no different with print. A brochure
with three kinds of varnish, gold embossing and several
diecuts is not only no fun to read, but communicates
more about the printer’s capabilities than the
client’s business. The point is to make all the media
complement one another.
“You don’t want the website to just mimic the
brochure,” Seltzer says. “You want them to dovetail
with one another. The brochure can have added
intimacy, and the website can have added scope. You want people to feel that it was worth their time to
see both.”
There are lots of ways to get added mileage out
of various brand elements without overusing the
same elements of your design. This not only makes
more out of your message, but also your client’s budget.
“When we produce video or motion graphics,
we will integrate that through everything,” explains
Toch. “And we’ll get it out in different places—for
example, posting a video on YouTube as well as the
website.” Even when you’re considering more traditional
media, there are inventive ways to increase
impact by creating surprise. “People are getting infiltrated
with so much advertising,” Toch observes. “So
instead of sending out standard 5 x 7-inch postcards,
we push our clients to do things differently. Print the
card on cloth or metal instead of paper, or add something
magnetic or textural. Sure it’s more costly, but
it will go farther.”
MORE THAN JUST LIP SERVICE
And this brings up yet one more critical point. In
this day and age of oversaturated media of all forms,
differentiating your client’s brand is what’s most
important, regardless of media. “The classic mistake
is the ‘me too’ position companies take,” Albertson
explains. “They enter a market and don’t want to be
too different. Even if they pay lip service to being unique, they often migrate back to being what
their competition is like.” Seltzer says this copycat
approach often comes from companies thinking
they have to put out the same stuff they’ve received.
“Some people think they need embossed and gold
foil stamps or shiny, glossy paper because that’s the
only thing they’ve seen the competition do,” she
says. “But it’s up to you to educate them that there
are other ways to distinguish themselves.”
Fortunately—or perhaps unfortunately—technology
keeps giving us new media and new ways to
communicate what our brands are all about. “It used
to be about e-mail campaigns,” says Clancy. “But
these are getting blocked or lost in the proliferation
of spam, so now it is about text messaging and other
avenues. It’s about Flash, XML-driven applets, search
engine optimization. Everything from the basic message
to the music you choose needs to be on brand.
You have to stay in tune with various markets and see
how all these things are cross-pollinating.”
Designers need to know which media are most
favored by which audiences. It’s up to designers not
only to understand all the different ways their clients
can communicate, but then encourage them to do so.
“You can’t wait for clients to come to you with a new
idea or project,” Clancy says. “You should go to them
with ideas for how to reach a new audience in a new
way. They will appreciate your being proactive.”
