Elements such as your logo and brand colours represent your brand. The latest versions of these brand assets need to be available to the designer or marketing agency designing your website.
Getting the right brand assets to designers in a good-quality format that they can easily access saves time and avoids expensive mistakes. By doing this, your campaign won’t be designed with the wrong version of your logo or with incorrect brand colours.
Here is a list of brand assets that a designer requires to start working on your project. The quality, format (or file type) and file size are all important considerations.
You need to provide:
• Brand guidelines or style guidein Adobe Reader (PDF) format.
• Logo and other key brand elements.These could be in Illustrator format (ai) or Photoshop format (psd). Best practice is to have your logo designed using vector graphics. If your logo or other brand assets are created in this format, they can be enlarged without losing quality. Other formats
do not allow scaling and if displayed larger than the original designer intended will result in a poor-quality image. If you do not have a vector version of your logo available, then you should make sure that your image is at least 1 000 pixels wide.
• Image libraries. Photographs and images can be hosted online, where the designer can access them with a login. They can also be sent to the designer on a CD. Make sure the images are of sufficient quality. It is best practice to provide images that are 300dpi. This is the measure of
a high-quality image that will retain its quality if resized. Although all images on the web are displayed at 72dpi, a higher quality image will give your designer room to optimise and resize and crop or cut images where needed.
• Fonts folder. You will need to provide both Apple Mac and PC versions of the fonts that are listed in your Style Guide. Many designers work on Macs, which use different font versions from those read by PCs.
• Brand colors need to be given to digital designers in RGB format. RGB stands for red, green and blue and is the standard for colors online.
• Any existing creative assets that have been created for your brand over time such as:
o Print designs
o TV ads
• Website copy should be made available before the final design is required. This prevents delays caused by designers waiting for material.
• Any additional assets your designer may need that can be downloaded or sent, such as your price guides or product descriptions.
Fonts
Copy conveys your brand message to your client or customer and should be easy to read and search engine friendly. The CI is expressed through fonts, also known as typefaces.
Typographic layout can draw attention to the content users should see first. Indicate which pieces of information take precedence. Importance can be signified by text size, colour, weight, capitalisation and italics. Placement also contributes to how important text appears.
Some fonts are common to all computer users. These fonts are known as web-safe fonts. Anyone accessing websites that use these fonts will be able to view them as the designer intended and search engines will be able to search these websites easily. Fonts that are not web safe may appear very differently on some computers. Designers don’t always like to be limited to using only web-safe fonts, and brand guidelines in most instances don’t take web-safe fonts into account. This means that fonts must be embedded by a developer using tools such as Typekit, or alternative fonts need to be selected.
Typographic layout can draw attention to the content users should see first. Indicate which pieces of information take precedence. Importance can be signified by text size, colour, weight, capitalisation and italics. Placement also contributes to how important text appears.
