Creating brand guidelines for a tech company (my process)

[@johantchassem1553]

The quality of this work leaves me speechless. Kudos to you and David

[@chloeam793]

Such a great video, Charli! I switched from brand design to product design, and designing brand guidelines is actually what I miss most! I really loved thinking about the brand very intentionally and laying everything out so any designer could represent the brand well. It was a fun and interesting problem to me!

[@joshuacrane]

Brand Guidelines are my love language 😂 Something I’ve always struggled with in past client projects is how much of the UI kit (marketing site, product design) makes it into the brand guidelines. A distinction I’ve made with clients is that guidelines are for anyone creating client-facing marketing material for the brand. Anything product related should be documented in a separate design system. But one drawback of that is you now have two places where a single item can live (like a website and product button). It’s almost double the maintenance. It’s why I stress the importance of product and brand (marketing) design having a role to shepherd all of design across these two functions.

[@chelseanick]

Only 30 seconds in, but just wanted to say you are SO not alone in generally disliking the brand design process. As a former manager of brand & creative at a tech company (just got laid off 😵‍💫) this was my least favorite part too! Glad to hear I'm not alone!

[@charlimarieTV]

I’m so sorry to hear you were impacted by layoffs (so much of that happening in tech atm!). Also glad to know I’m not alone in disliking the brand identity design process too 😅

[@chelseanick]

@@charlimarieTV Thank you for the kind words, Charli! I'm actually looking at this bump ion the road as an opportunity though. I've been thinking about pivoting my career towards motion design and animation for awhile, so now's my chance! :)

[@Jasper.B]

Awesome video Charlie! Really cool to see and I always love your attitude of, we know a lot and do our job well, but that doesn't mean there isn't more we can learn from others too. This may just be me (and other OCD designers you know who you are "every pixel must be perfectly mathematically aligned!") but I was thinking if I were a designer using the document I would love an example of the font sizes in numbers like this is size 16 in the header and this is size 10 for the main text. I know font sizes change depending on scale and software used(?) and I can't imagine anyone else working as a designer would be unaware of the basic relations between size and scale. In the video it's easier to see what you guys included as absolutely essential and which parts are more like 'yeah this would be useful info' but just reading the guideline it all could potentially be ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL, DO NOT MESS THIS UP FOR US! so I would be paranoid about getting the font sizes slightly off by eyeballing it without mathematical digits to scale from. I would probably just open up the page in some software and measure out the font sizes and make my own notes to work from. But if you already had some numbers to start with you could just chuck em in and save a bunch of OCD paranoid designers worrying and doing extra work haha! Just an idea though. I love the color page! and plenty of nice examples of usage to work from. This might be a very noob question, but where are the numbers Red 50 - Red 900 coming from? I'm googeling but it's telling me red 500 is a Fiat car and red 900 is a bicycle wheel... I only aware of RGB, CMYK, and hex numbers for colors so I'm super curious. Or are they just internal personal names you have given the colors?

[@karsongrady]

This is great and helpful for you to share. Thank you! I am in the process of finally formalizing our brand guideline as my team grows. Holy moly it is a ton of work...

[@charlimarieTV]

it's SO much more work that you first think, right???

[@ahmed-elmorsy]

seriously that video came in time for as i was struggling researching about brand identity and guidlines and what to include in them and so on. loved to see what a big company's brand guidlines looked like, Thanks.

[@charlimarieTV]

glad it was useful Ahmed!

[@deborabenard528]

The Brand guide we use in the company I work was made by an agency. But as we still do a lot of print work, they focused on this point. So as we plan to make a version for our digital supports your video is full of ideas to that I keep in mind. David and you made a great job. Maybe you could have include more exemple of a basic web page, add… all the main pieces that you usualy use. It can be useful to understand the way you build them, and as you started to do some exemple of thing that are not allowed. Thank you for sharing this project !

[@charlimarieTV]

Right now the agency isn't designing any web pages for us so we haven't included that in the brand guidelines!

[@gibsonedu]

Super helpful Charli as I'm actually going through the interview process with y'all for the social media marketing role and this is really helpful for the work I do in my current company as well!

[@charlimarieTV]

oh hey! Good luck for the interview process :)

[@jillswan9654]

This is amazing! The non profit I work for just created one (focussed on storytelling). It definitely needs more design context. I’m going to share this video with my team!

[@Natushi12]

So nice to know I'm not the only one who isn't a huge fan of doing brand design! Would much rather dig into creating the site and product design 🤓

[@charlimarieTV]

I feel you!!!!

[@rainydays2280]

Love you Marie ♥️

[@charlimarieTV]

My name is Charli!

[@pilipdasamattanawin1058]

Super helpful!

[@charlimarieTV]

Glad it was helpful!

[@techwithulises]

Gran video 👌

[@charlimarieTV]

gracias!

[@gauravbadwar]

Hey I am just going to start freelancing .Can you tell me which skill I want to learn in the face of beginner

[@gauravbadwar]

Hey I can't speak English fluently so please ignore my Grammer and alll

[@gauravbadwar]

And please teach me any skill you are interested in

[@osaroadade]

I'm very interested in product images and the video talking about what David did to help would be very helpful. Thanks for the great and insightful video.

[@charlimarieTV]

I'll ask David if he wants to film a video with me for the next design system update!