One talk, plenty of drinks and some great questions
Insight
Last Wednesday we held our first Leeds Digital Festival talk. The aim was to spread our understanding, experience and ideas around ‘digital first branding’.
Being our first event like this, we kept the scale fairly reserved. To our delight tickets for the event were sold out quicker than Donald Trump could say the word ‘amazing’.
The key speakers included me Guy Utley – Creative director, Andrew Beckwith our head of design and head of brand, Lee Thawley from Sorted based over in Manchester.
The impacts faced by businesses continuing to adopt the traditional approach to the brand
Until recently a lot of newly developed brands or brands going through a re-fresh were still adopting the traditional brand thinking and guidelines. These guidelines had the business vision, mission statements and offline comm guidance…. in fact, a lot were JAM PACKED, with over 80 pages, but maybe 3 or 4 pages of those pages would be on digital. These were being supplied to internal teams, freelancers and partners which lead to a lot of pain and inconsistencies.
We discussed the typical landscape a business worked in and how the importance of digital brand would apply to that landscape.
We looked at why brand all of sudden started to take notice of digital branding and how that makes digital creative agencies lives much easier.
Personality example
We also spoke about the importance of digital brand personality and how it affects everything you see, touch, feel and hear through all your digital touchpoints.
We ran through a recent digitisation project that we helped our client, Sorted with. Sorted is a tech company based in Manchester who rebranded only two years ago but we’re still finding problems not having full digital guidelines.
Lee explained the benefits that her company had already started to get from having gone through the digitisation process, from the ease of briefing external agency and partners to the managing growth brand in different countries.
Questions
At the end of the session, we opened to the floor for questions.
The first question was my favourite, so much so it looked like we’d planted it (honest we didn’t).
Q: What format do you see these guidelines being distributed in. Will a PDF still be sufficient?
A: Short answer, NO. You will require an up to date and easy to access digital hub. Here you should be able to access live animation calculations/examples, colour pallets and code snippets anywhere in the world.
If this sounds familiar and you would like to discuss further, please get in touch today.