A Brand Guide for Non-Designers
Brand guides are often beautiful works of art in their own right. And they often deserve to be. It takes a ton of work, thought, and research to commit to all of the decisions necessary to produce one. Each of those decisions — from color palette accessibility considerations to the kerning between characters in a logo — can have huge ripple effects in all the thousands of ways that people can use them.
But sometimes brand guides can end up being intimidating. They are usually created by and for professionals who implement branding — designers and marketers. But for many organizations, it’s not a designer who implements the brand’s rules.
The Problem
That’s the case of the Quest Forward Academies (now called Quest Forward High Schools). The private high schools were founded by Opportunity Education and are led by an exceptional team of educators. As Opportunity Education’s creative director of a small in-house team, it was up to me to not only create all the assets and rules but also create a guidebook for teachers and administrators to follow. My audience had no background in design or marketing but needed to understand and champion the branding guidelines during this crucial start-up period for each school.
The Solution
After conversations with my target audience about what would be genuinely helpful to them, I established my goals for the project:
Overcome objections and explain the “why” in an accessible way
Help school administrators to be unafraid to make something brand-aligned
Inspire the staff to become motivated brand ambassadors
Make the rules simple enough to ensure non-pro visuals would have obvious consistencies
Cover everything from logos to fonts to messaging to writing conventions in one, concise place
Make it easy for everyone to find the guidance they’re looking for in the moment
I created the guide in a friendly, approachable brand voice and used the tools the team already knew well. There was never a need to open up an Adobe design application. I created a ruthlessly organized Google Drive with Google templates that were rigid in important ways and flexible in all other ways.
I loved working on it. Below is a handful of pages from the Omaha, Nebraska school’s brand guide. Would you like to see the entire PDF? Get in touch.
“Jess consistently considered designs and assets through all lenses, maximized resources, and challenged all of us to level up and meet objectives to the highest quality. Her attention to detail and intentional approach are unmatched.”
Discovery Education